Case study

I’m the Managing Director of Barefoot Coaching. Although we’ve only been working with Halborns for a few months, like any coaching business we play close attention to the types of relationships and types of people we choose to partner with.

So the first thing I wanted to say about our very initial relationship with Halborns was this sense of real, personal care. It felt like there was warmth to an organisation that, largely, was going to be used by us to look at all issues of ER (employee relations) but actually it was really nice meeting Jess, meeting Charlie and getting a feel for the organisation. It really felt like this was a group of individuals that we were going to look forward to work with.

That’s really how it’s played out in the time that we’ve had together. Some of the words that I was thinking about that describe the relationship, what we’ve experienced of Halborns are: informative; factual; knowledgeable.

They use straight-forward language, which for us really matters. We describe ourselves as an organisation as ‘distillers of knowledge’, so we like to simplify the complex. So I really love the way that Halborns – and Jess in particular – does that time and time again.

They’re really supportive and always find the time, most often on the same day, to answer any queries we have. Often in what we do, the questions, the challenges, the issues that we have, they’re pretty immediate so it’s great to know that we can pick up the phone or drop an email and get a quick response.

I’ve really valued the access to a whole range of resources. Frankly, without Halborns, we wouldn’t have that and I’ve found it very helpful. That includes all the templates, which helps us move very quickly so we don’t have to reproduce certain letters or approaches or processes, and has been fantastic.

The stand-out for me has been beyond their day-to-day ER advice that we’ve had – it’s the proactive approach that Halborns has had when we’ve been trying to develop our colleague handbook.

Developing a colleague handbook is a bit like a labour of love, it seems to never end. But thanks to Halborns, very quickly and in a proactive way, they were able to execute on what we wanted, particularly they were able to use language that felt like our language and kept to timescales that we wanted to move quickly on. So I’m really grateful to Halborns for that.

So overall, really great experience, really glad that we’re working together and I definitely can’t recommend this partnership strongly enough.