When talking to clients or prospects it’s easy for organizations to refer to technical capability, intellectual property, market positioning and competitive pricing as the main UVP for their clients. Whilst all those things are incredibly important (and we definitely have them at Quick Release!) for us the most important aspect of our UVP is our people. Over the two decades that QR has been working with clients to improve their product data management and address PLM challenges, clients have almost universally fed back on how good our people are and the value that they bring.
There are a number of reason’s for the strength of our people, though they can generally be broken down into three main categories: recruitment, development and culture. Overall this can be referred to as QR’s talent philosophy.
Bringing the right people into the organization is the first element of success. Quick Release have built a robust and challenging recruitment process that identifies talented and high potential individuals who align with both our company values and the unique blend of a person that we feel is the differential for our people versus the people of our competitors. A QR person must be “impact-motivated” – focused on delivering tangible outcomes; they must be “data-driven” – being able to analyse data and communicate effectively with all stakeholders on what action is needed as a result of the data; and they must be “collaboratively competitive” – focused on group success and excited by team wins over individual gain. Many people have one or two of those aspects, but we hire people who are strong in each of those areas.
Bringing people into an organization is an expensive and time-consuming task, particularly when you are as selective as we are about talent. Therefore, investing in their development in a structured way so as they stay and grow in the organization is essential. Our approach is to evolve development from being very guided in a person’s early career – with a three week onboarding program that covers technical and stakeholder management, through a six month mentoring program that supports with building up skills on the job, to a suite of development pathways that employees can choose how to engage in. All of our development pathways are focused on building skills that will serve an employee’s whole career as opposed to just the work in front of them at that moment, and very little of it is mandatory. Adults learn best when they have choice over the direction of their learning, so once we are confident that an employee has the core skills to deliver effectively in their role, we’ll switch to giving them lots of tools, options, possible career progression routes and learning programs that they can engage with, but will allow them to choose how far and in what direction they take their career.
The final aspect of our talent philosophy is to have a culture where all employees can thrive and feel supported. Organizations often confuse having a positive culture with having lots of events or doing fun stuff during work time. At QR we have thought about culture in terms of how people experience work every day – yes we do lots of fun things, but our events are about building relationships and networks, we celebrate the positive collaborations people have, and we make sure that people can bring their culture and passions to work. We focus our early career training on the skills and value of collaboration just as much as technical learning. We have built systems and processes around the idea of collaboration and having access to a hive mind of skills and people with a desire to share. The idea of being “collaboratively competitive” is part of that unique type of person we look to hire into the organization – we strive for a culture where people are enjoying their work and the company of their peers every day, and where they can be their authentic self.
Whilst all of the above sounds really positive for individuals, fundamentally the organization benefits more so from a positive talent philosophy and focus on People as it’s primary UVP. QR do relatively little external sales prospecting, have a stable client base, secure work through industry mobility and people who’ve worked with us elsewhere, and our business continues to grow. Client feedback on working with our people is almost exclusively very positive, and we have low staff turnover volume. Money, time and effort that elsewhere is spent on constantly trying to win new work, fix errors in project delivery and recruiting/training new people is not so necessary in QR because we are so focused on bringing the right people into the business and giving them a positive experience in their career; day-to-day our people are positive ambassadors for the company with our clients and with each other.
At QR we are proud of our team and of the efforts we continue to make to ensure that this is a positive place to work, where people who are aligned with our values and philosophy can truly thrive. As People Director I’m in the privileged position to have worked directly with many of our talented team, and to have been an active part in seeing them realise their potential and achieve incredible impacts for our clients and high levels of responsibility early in their careers. I’m excited to see what else they can achieve and am hopeful that many more clients can experience the refreshing and positive experience of working with QR team members on their product data challenges.