Morning
Walk through the doors around 7(ish), coat off and turn on my iMac and make my way to the kitchen for a much-needed coffee (I’ll perk up properly after my first sip). I commute into the office twice a week so I arrive early to (try to) beat the morning traffic.
Usually I’m the only one mad enough to be here so early, but Gillian (Chief Psychologist) tends to follow not long after me. We’ll have a chat that can range from our favourite contestants on The Great British Bake off to a rather more business-focused discussion of, for example, how Gillian’s presentation to The Psychometrics Forum was received. It’s usually a good opportunity to catch up around some of the client opportunities we’ve both been working on over the last few days, especially as I’m remote working most of the time.
Coffee’s steaming on my desk, my iMac is waking up and loading my emails in the background. I check our company calendar (sip of coffee) to see if there’s anything on that I need to be aware of.
– Client presentation of the Profile:Match2 tool at 2pm on Wednesday
– Risk Landscape meeting with some PCL staff at 10am on Thursday
The client presentation I’ve already prepped for (another sip) and our front office staff have prepared the materials I need for it. They’ve also got some sugary goodies for our clients at the meeting, that I’m hoping to steal a mouthful or two of. I’ll be introducing our Profile:Match2 tool to them (4 people, I believe) and discussing the 360 features, applications and reports.
With the launch of our Risk Landscape tool approaching, we will be discussing everything we need to get finalised for it. That includes discussions about the software and how it all works (led by Alex, our developer of the Risk Landscape), pricing, marketing (strategised by Liane and Preeya, our Mighty Marketers), the training packages we will publish online and what the consultants at PCL will be communicating to clients and interested parties about it.
I’ve got twelve unread emails in my inbox (big gulp of coffee) and I go about actioning them:
– 6 are clients with product queries that I reply to;
– 2 are internal PCL emails that are notifying me of i) updates to a Hogan tool and ii) extra information about the Risk Landscape;
– 1 I forward to Louisa (Training Coordinator) in the front office to ask if the client has ordered Risk Type Compass Team reports before;
– 2 I will have a chat with my fellow consultant Bianka about; and
– 1 I add to my Junk box (sorry I will not be attending your event in New Zealand next month).
By the time I’m done with those emails I’m ready to switch to a tea and review the proposal I’m working on for bespoke in-house Risk Type Compass training. I discuss the proposal with Bianka, talking about cost and time implications of the clients’ request and decide to propose the use of a trio of tools to better meet their needs: the HDS, EQi 2.0 and Risk Type Compass. The ‘triad’ is something we’ve been researching for a while, so it will be great to put it into practice.
A call comes through from Louisa – a client we regularly work with has a question about the features of the Emotionally Effective Leader workshop offered by MHS (the publishers of the EQi 2.0 & EQ 360 tool) and I discuss this with her for around ten minutes.
I spend the rest of the morning dipping in and out of the proposal, in between taking calls from clients and answering emails, and sipping tea, of course. There’s also one follow up email I send to a potential client I spoke to last Monday regarding High Potential Talent reports from Hogan Assessments. On my way out of the office for lunch I stop by Amanda’s office (Finance Manager) to answer her query about recent in-house training workshop expenses.
Lunchtime
If I can, I’ll hit the gym for a 30-minute spin class but otherwise, I’ll grab food with a colleague from Pret and take a walk through town, do some shopping or find a bench and call a friend for a catch up, if the Tunbridge Wells weather is playing ball.
When I’m back in the office I’ll have a natter with the front office staff and catch up with what’s been going on in the office. I miss some of the day-to-day goings-on in the office when I’m working from home, so catching up with Melissa (Office Manager) and Louisa is the best way to stay in the know. Today’s updates: Liane (Marketing Manager) is filming a piece for our YouTube channel on the Risk Landscape with Geoff (CEO) in the filming room ahead of its launch; Lee (Programmer) is going on holiday for two weeks in Mexico; and Melissa’s trying to find a photographer to do our staff photos for the website and building a new desk for the office.
Afternoon
I venture into the boardroom and load up my slides for the client presentation on my iPad – only 30 minutes until the clients arrive. The slides are now displaying on our Apple TV and we’ve got refreshments waiting for them. The meeting kicks off…
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I finish the meeting with a handshake to all four members of the meeting, happy with the outcome, and head back to my desk, writing down additional notes into our CRM and setting a reminder to email across a sample report to one of the delegates. I debrief Bianka about the meeting and we discuss our next steps. She mentions a consultancy project we are carrying out for a client (providing 1-hour personality feedback sessions to 30 candidates using the Hogan Personality Inventory, Hogan Development Survey and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory) and we discuss our respective schedules and when we can get the sessions booked in between us and our associates.
More email queries come through: information about norm groups for the Hogan assessments, vague questions about what psychometric(s) would be best for a potential client’s team of execs and one asking about the EQi 2.0 & EQ 360 training workshop we are holding next month. I’ve also got a notification of a research piece that was just published on the Knowledge Bank by Liane that I’ll read tomorrow so I add it to my bookmarks, next to the piece we recently published by one of our SSP students on resistance to organisational change.
It’s coming towards the end of the day so I pop down to the front office and double-check the Hogan Certification Workshop training materials that Louisa has prepared for the client workshop next Thursday. After I give her the go-ahead she arranges for the materials to be couriered to the training venue and we chat about the client meeting I had earlier.
Home Time
It’s 17.15pm – I pack up my things, quit my apps on the iMac and turn it off. Wash up my mug and leave for the day with a much perkier ‘bye!’ to Simon (Research Consultant) than my morning salute would have been.
Head home, pleased with how the day went and looking forward to another tomorrow.
