Wheatley have worked with alitus for over 5 years already and are our first port of call for personal and interpersonal development ideas. We use alitus to provide regular 1:1 coaching for individuals and whole company training to improve communication and ensure our staff work effectively together.
Wheatley Solutions is a small, specialist company that provides metering software to the UK energy and water utilities industries, serving customers who are often many times our size. Strong leadership and good team work are critical to ensuring industry regulation is met and that our customers can keep supply flowing through their customers’ meters.
alitus started working with Wheatley by helping us better understand our employees, so we could help them understand each other better and identify ways in which we could build strong and cohesive teams. Everyone took part in completing the StrengthFinders tool, which gave us a really good insight into what was personally important to each employee and what would help them gain satisfaction from their work. StrengthsFinders also helped identify why there might be certain tensions in teams and address this in a positive way, enabling colleagues to support each other to get the job done.
Software development can be an introverted occupation, but the success of a company depends on the interaction of the people within it, so alitus designed and delivered communication training that helped us address just this. This was taken a stage further at management level, with training to ensure that managers were empowered to constructively challenge each other and make decisions, without feeling fear of speaking out. The training has had a lasting impact and alitus were excellent in understanding our brief and company culture, so that the employees enjoyed the training and were able to make meaningful changes in how they work together.
The Wheatley senior management team also regularly use alitus for 1:1 coaching and this has been extended to others looking to strengthen their management skills too. alitus are very careful to match the coach to the individual, so that the coaching room is a safe place to discuss a whole range of subjects and work on ways that relationships, working practices and strategy within Wheatley can be improved. Coaching has had a measurable impact on the confidence of the senior team, both individually and how they work together, and the regular sessions contribute towards how the company moves forward and grows.
We recently offered all staff the opportunity to attend the alitus Reboot programme, to help employees come to terms with the impact of a global pandemic and find ways that they can maintain a balance and continue to plan for the future in their lives. Take up amongst staff has been really high and feedback from the first session run was extremely positive – with staff recognising, perhaps for the first time, what it has really meant to be suddenly working from home full time. As a consequence we have put a number of initiatives in place to give staff more opportunity to catch up with their colleagues and to maintain the social aspect of work that helps people’s well-being and peace of mind. Being brave, delivering excellence, no surprises and embracing progress: alitus live up to and reinforce all our Wheatley values!