Overview

Mayday Healthcare provides last minute healthcare recruitment services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The company has bucked the market over the last few years and seen rapid growth. They reached number 20 in this year’s Fast track 100, making them the fastest growing nursing agency in the UK.

The Need

One of the key issues facing a rapidly growing organisation is creating a solid infrastructure to ensure the growth is sustainable. A key consideration for Charles Safapour, Director of Mayday, was to build a strong management team to lead and manage the growth.

The company had promoted a raft of new managers over the last few months who had had little or no experience of managing teams, so we worked with Saf to identify the key skills needed to be successful in a growing recruitment company, such as Mayday and designed a two day programme to give them the essential tools to manage performance and support growth.

The Solution

We took a very practical approach to the two day workshops, firstly  talking to the managers beforehand to identify the issues they were facing and areas they wanted to tackle. Typical concerns were juggling the dual priorities of managing and billing and motivating teams to cope with a heavy workload and pressing client demands.

The workshops were highly participative, giving the managers the chance to talk through real scenarios they were facing and gain practical ways to tackle them. Each manger drew up a clear action plan to implement in between the sessions and we kicked off the second session with a review of progress against those actions. This created a way to share experience, ideas and good practice amongst the group.

We also asked each manager to complete pre course work before each module in order to focus them on the key areas and maximise the time in the sessions.

Follow up has been vital to ensure the managers persist with their actions. We have fed their key actions back to their line managers with pointers for further development to ensure there is support internally and have emailed the group 2 months after the sessions to remind each manager what they said they were going to do and keep the momentum going.

Saf comments “We have worked with Focal Point on a number of occasions to train our consultants, as well as our managers. It is important that a training company understands our business and the way we work and Focal Point have put much time in to making sure that this is the case. Our managers have therefore found the training highly relevant and easy to apply. It has noticeably increased their confidence and given them all a more structured way to manage their teams.”