At the start of UK lockdown 1.0, Cutover’s CEO Ky Nichol and VP People, Alex Duell, got together to answer the question “How do we get ahead of this thing?”.
They called us in and there began a fantastic relationship where we’ve helped Cutover’s talented team to grow, as they rapidly grow their business.
We've embedded a very present, holistic service at Cutover - we run group workshops, provide 1:1 sessions, train staff on crisis response and prevention, and we're even integrated directly into their Slack.
Fundamentally, the leadership team at Cutover understand the power of psychology to help their teams towards optimum performance.
They know that staff turnover is the single largest expense to employers. They understand that our personal psychology and team harmony underpins employee retention and KPIs (source: People Management). They saw both the obvious need for individual wellbeing, and the business opportunity in supporting our journeys to self-actualisation. So they were ready to embrace us.
Cutover took a proactive approach and signed up to our “gold” service. This means we:-
Assigned them a dedicated self-development guide
Created and run an ongoing self-development channel for all within their Slack space
Delivered our Mental Wellbeing 101 for the whole company
Assigned a therapist available for their staff to DM, and
Offered unlimited online therapy for all, whenever anyone wanted.
Read that last line again. Free therapy for all, whenever anyone wants it. No limits.
And it’s paying dividends…
It's all helping Cutover create the strong supportive culture they aspire to. As Alex says,
“We performed tremendously well throughout the pandemic, successfully raising our Series B funding. More importantly, we’ve seen employee engagement stay consistently high and not encountered significant staff attrition. While we can’t attribute all of this to our People Programs, I’m certain that the strong foundations we’ve put in place have helped massively.”
One of their employees, Jack, valued our partnership so much he's been blogging about The Circle Line:
“My work life was interrupting my other life. It was to the detriment of my mental health, and I kinda needed to solve this. You may have heard me grass myself up for having a therapist at work. I do. And so what, you should too. Get one.”
Our group workshops can be either structured "teaching" workshops or more akin to therapy sessions – an incredibly bonding experience for teams. Cutover left it to their people to decide; they “didn’t want to choreograph”.
And that's probably why we get on so well. Free thinkers, encouraging their teams into the space of freedom that is Flow. They certainly seem to be finding theirs.
For our training and e-learning we use a school of modern psychology called Transactional Analysis (TA). TA provides a shared model and language to explore key topics that impact work and life, such as personality, conflict and communication. We really like it. Jack does too:
“Once I'd been made aware that TA existed it was one of those lightbulb moments you have in the shower and then some… Life, if you distill it down, is just a series of transactions.”
As Jack writes, discussing the psychology he learnt about through therapy, “If you accidentally invoke your parent state, or child state, in the wrong setting this can lead to internal or external conflict… These seem to be happening with more regularity now the lines between work and play dilute and formal hierarchical power structures at work dissolve into more inclusive arenas. But I may just be reading into things too deeply.”
No Jack, you’re not. You and the rest of the pioneers at Cutover are ahead of the curve, and boy are we enjoying the ride with you. Here’s a closing line just for you.
"I'm ok, you're ok."
If anyone else is curious about what this means… give us a shout.