We place managers in key areas of our business to ensure that it is well-run on a daily basis but are you getting the right information fed back from your managers? Do you really know what’s going on in your company at ground-level?

It may sound obvious to state but ground-level is often where you will find both the strengths and weaknesses in your business. As the saying goes, the ‘devil is in the detail’ but if your workforce is too afraid to speak up when things are going wrong or if they have a great idea that could help but don’t feel your managers will listen, are you really getting the most out of your employees?

Sergio Marchionne, the head of F1 driving team Ferrari faced the same issue when, in 2016, he couldn’t understand why his team had stopped being the best so he did something unusual in today’s fast-paced business world; he sat down with his employees on an individual basis and asked them where the company was going wrong and how they could improve. He didn’t just listen to his managers but his workforce and then restructured the hierarchy accordingly.

The outcome? He identified “high-potential individuals” to encourage and promote and reorganised meeting formats to enable people to speak up when they had ideas, without the fear of being blamed for potential failures; this is the same holistic, ‘grass roots’ process that Informed Alliance promotes.

It is often difficult to get your workforce to speak openly about weaknesses and problems within a company particularly when, even managers can often be determined to wear rose-tinted glasses. So how can Informed Alliance help?

The process we use breaks down the business into modules to enable you to analyse the business from your own perspective and that of the feedback from your workforce.

Instead of viewing the business as a whole wondering where it’s going wrong and how you could improve, Informed Alliance works with you to find the ‘needle in the haystack’ that could mean the difference between losing or making a profit.

To learn more, please contact a member of the Informed Alliance team on 01392 210700 or by email informed.alliance@stephens-scown.co.uk