Unlike most consultancies, we recognize the complexity that increasingly defines peoples' working lives. We aim to provide fresh, creative and sustainable approaches to the issues and challenges of this very different world.

What does this mean in practice? In general, our work is wide-ranging and, for the most part, driven by the challenges facing our clients. The common theme throughout our engagements involves enabling choice over when, where and how people work and how organizations turn it to their competitive advantage.

In particular we focus on making the workspace work. By promising the double win of reducing cost and enabling choice, working in a virtual setting has become increasingly popular. Handing your people laptops and telling them to operate remotely is a recipe for failure. liberare offers a series of practical workshops for remote groups, their co-workers and managers that equip the participants with the tools necessary to make the workspace a success. This replicates a productive workplace in a virtual setting. In so doing, organisations gain far greater certainty on the delivery of cost savings as well as the ability to plan their future space needs on a more realistic and economical basis.

What follows is a very brief overview of the variety and scope of our work. We would like the opportunity to discuss in greater detail what we do and how we do it. Drop us a line at info@liberare.com or call us directly on any of the following numbers.

Barry Rogers +44 (0) 20 8876 5975
Lynn Shepherd +44 (0) 1189 844 794
Jerry Brown +44 (0) 20 7565 2844


Emerging Practices | Diversity | Workspace Strategy | M&A Career Transition | The Free Agency Landscape


Emerging Practices

A global financial services client constantly monitored its overall employee proposition. As part of this process, it became concerned that the traditional approach to benchmarking 'best' people practices was lacking since, in most cases, these were past practices and unsuitable to a rapidly changing world. It needed a more dynamic benchmark.

Our brief was to determine the key emerging practices across a broad spectrum of the client’s competition for top talent. Not to focus on what was safe, conservative, tried and tested but to define the outer limits where organizations were engaging with emerging trends.

The output from this worked at two levels. It allowed our client to make a number of simple, yet highly effective, interventions that capitalized on the reality of changing career patterns. One such success came in the form of an alumni network which provides a vital link with former employees who are themselves a future pool of talent and source of highly valuable referrals. In general, it also provided the client with significant creative perspective in terms of potential solutions that fall outside the usual best practices remit. In this case, that involved creative career breaks and developing a hub and spoke approach to remote shared workspaces.

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Diversity

One of our multinational media clients wanted to instigate a formal global diversity program. It recognized, however, that unless its approach to the matter addressed the richness of diversity as a right - as opposed to a gift - the program would not move beyond the realm of rhetoric and was, most likely, destined to fail.

We developed a three-stage program elaborating on this fundamental notion of diversity as a right and placing it within the wider context of emerging employee choice.

Central to our approach was defining the essential business logic of diversity. This client understood this only too clearly – as a creative business, they recognized that the only way forward (ultimately a matter of survival) was to engage with those who see the world in many different ways. Communicating a clear, compelling business case was also essential from a successful implementation perspective.

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Workspace Strategy

The facilities manager of a top tier investment bank was worried that crudely planning her physical space requirements on the basis of future headcount needs overlooked many of the more fundamental lessons of the ‘war for talent’. She asked us to investigate the subtle connections between talent and space.

Given the changes in how, when, where and why people work, we recommended that the company needed a workspace, as opposed to workplace, strategy. We worked intimately with existing (and prospective) employees to paint a picture of their changing requirements and aspirations towards their work and life.

As with the emerging practices case above, the output here worked at a number of levels and over different timeframes. It was immediately clear from our investigation that a cocktail of issues, from mice infestation to a chronic lack of social space, fueled deep employee discontent with their working environment. Significantly, this was also having a major impact on prospective hires (graduate and experienced) who were turning down offers because of the negative reputation of a substandard workplace. We delivered a range of solutions designed to have high short-term impact on the working environment but which were also consistent with a vision of future workspace needs.

Our input to the architectural design brief developed this latter point. Here, we enabled our client to turn the working environment to its competitive advantage by creatively exploiting the workspace needs of tomorrow’s talent. In this case, recognizing the changing nature of when, where and how knowledge workers operate was key. It was crucial for the design brief to incorporate both the workspace requirements of mobility as well as the workplace requirements of community and a common identity. This has allowed the client to use workspace as a strategic tool to attract and engage top talent.

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M&A Career Transition

A merger between two financial powerhouses displayed all the classic problems. Despite a wealth of communication from senior management, uncertainty reigned and transitionary arrangements were bringing day-to-day business to a halt. Most worrying was the sense of paralysis among existing employees who seemed unable to focus on the career decisions and choices open to them at this hugely important juncture.

The solution was simple and effective. We ran a series of short workshops throughout the business aimed at giving people some perspective on how to approach the career choices and decisions facing them. This was not a forum for glorified job descriptions. We introduced a simple framework aimed at enabling people to think about what was important to them in their work (and non work) lives and how they could relate this to the opportunities facing them at this uncertain time.

The intervention worked well on all sides. Employees gained valuable perspective in how to tackle difficult questions at a decisive time. They could now approach the idea of transition with a much clearer understanding of what they wanted from a position inside (or outside) the new entity. The process began to flow more smoothly and the paralysis was significantly eased. Management in turn benefited from clear, timely, thought-through decisions by employees about the options facing them.

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The Free Agency Landscape

liberare is a thought leader on complex careers. As such, we have recently undertaken a major research project that aims to move beyond the rhetoric of free agency and to compile a realistic assessment of what this new breed of worker looks like. We are working closely with a leading UK academic institution as part of the project.

This is a fascinating but challenging brief. Knowing the macro data concerning this group to be incomplete and unreliable our approach has involved a detailed micro investigation among an active cluster of free agents in a suburban setting. As such, the project is providing a rich insight into the architecture of an emerging workforce that rivals the promises and processes of traditional organizations.

In understanding the day-to-day dynamics of free agency, we are addressing the practical questions that will face all knowledge organizations sooner rather than later. How do you tap the potential of this new breed of worker? What do the new participation structures look like? What are the job descriptions for the new free agent 'minders' within HR? We are developing practical and workable answers to these questions.