International SOS Assistance UK Ltd Case Study
/The Organisation:
International SOS is the world’s leading international healthcare, medical and security assistance, and concierge services company. With headquarters in both London and Singapore, International SOS operates has a global team of over 8000 employees, including 970 physicians and 200 security specialists. International SOS serves over 66% of the Fortune Global 500 companies, and operates in 70 countries, with 500 remote medical project sites, 25 global alarm centres and 32 clinics. Over 100 languages and dialects are spoken by their diverse international team.
The Context:
The highly entrepreneurial and evolutionary company was seeking to release significant business potential in the insurance portfolio, to create direct customers from the current end users. The business needed to create a complimentary working model, which ensured the current insurance clients were kept on side, while relationships with the end users were developed to create new business opportunities.
The Development Need:
International SOS needed to create a new international team who had the capability for delivering challenging global business development targets for the new fiscal year starting 1 July 2010. The team needed to be formed quickly and effectively so they could start the new ways of working as soon as the new fiscal year started. A new mindset needed to be created within this team, to ensure they achieved not only on a multi-regional basis but also across-borders with a strong emphasis on collaborative working. This new team needed to operate as a cohesive and cooperative team from 1 July 2010, and in order to do so, needed to agree new ways of working and challenging budgetary targets.
Working with Positive Change Partners:
International SOS identified the need to work with independent, neutral facilitators and engaged Positive Change Partners to design a 3 day team development event, which created a strong team, who embraced the new ways of working and were able to go back to the regions to deliver the corporate objectives.
Positive Change Partners provided skillful facilitation which in 3 days took a diverse, international team, who had never met as a team before, to a point where they were able to agree a set of common, and compelling, objectives, and agree the actions needed to achieve them.
Adam Thomson, Group General Manager, International SOS describes the facilitation as “hugely helpful and well regarded” and “the facilitators became the voice of reason, took the emotion out of the situation and achieved group buy-in”.
The Results:
During and after the event, International SOS benefited from significant improvements in international collaboration, ideas generation and sharing of information. More significantly the business has achieved and exceeded their financial targets for 2010/2011.
In May 2011, Adam Thomson, Group General Manager reports that:
“The facilitation by Positive Change Partners, was absolutely seminal to being able to hit the new financial year running, and I am delighted to report that we are on track to hit, and exceed our multimillion dollar budget, this has been a terrific success. “
In a business climate where we did not have the luxury of any discretionary spend; we had to demonstrate real and tangible value in bringing Positive Change Partners in to work with us. Their focus never deviated from the results orientated goals we set and it is not difficult to evidence the clear impact they had on our ability to deliver against budget. It was a job extremely well done.
Positive Change Partners work with organisations to embed the positive behaviours that impact the bottom line through training workshops, coaching, strategic planning and consultancy. We are based in Surrey, England and have a prestigious client base in London and throughout the UK and Europe. We also work internationally with global organisations.
If you would like to speak with us please call 01342 837660 or email info@positivechangepartners.com
