Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-05-13 07:13:41 - Graham Ellis
Following on from yesterday's comments about long questionnaires, I've been writing a Mission Statement and Policy summaries. Stripped of examples, they look pretty bald - but then I could fill a month of blogs with examples, reasonings, conundrums and solutions that have lead us to where we are, and this highly distilled set of summaries.
Mission Statement
We aim to provide a high quality product to our customers - one step beyond what they might reasonably expect. That way, our customers become our ambassadors; we have a saying "come as a student, leave as a friend".
We aim to provide a high quality work environment for our team - making our work safe, fun and rewarding for ourselves, our customers, our suppliers, and others with whom we come into contact.
Health and Safety Policy
We follow full health and safety laws and guidelines, and indeed go well beyond minimum standards. Risk assessments, both formal and informal, lie at the heart of what we do so that we have the safest and healthiest practical environment for our customers and ourselves.
Environmental policy
We look to minimize use of resources of all types throughout the business, while at the same time not compromising the business or the effectiveness of the product we provide by so doing.
Equal opportunities Policy
Employment within a role, and treatment of delegates on courses, is solely based on the suitability of the candidate / delegate for the position - how well they'll be able to fill the role, whether they can grow with the role, and whether they'll be happy, reliable and motivated in so doing.
We're a training company, and as such we train and develop our own team as well as the delegates who attend our courses. So we encourage team members who have joined at the most basic of levels to take additional responsibilities and roles; being a small company, we don't automatically have posts at higher levels becoming vacant all the time, so this is very much a development which means that we grow the company and the company's roles with the growth in the individual team members.
It's necessary within a group as small as we are to have at least two people capable of undertaking any task (otherwise we risk breaks of service) and we take that a step further in that we set out to have all four of us as widely cross-trained as possible - and have all of us actually undertaking a very wide range of tasks.
Want to know more?
You'll find these policies / directions and this mission seeping through the whole of our work philosophy and ethic - not necessarily stated with examples section by section, but pervading the whole of the business operation.
Basically - we love what we do, we want to make it fun, safe and useful for ourselves and our customers and contacts whoever we are and whoever they might be. And we want to do it is such a way that we're not wasteful of our resources, or of the planet's!
The law actually provides a lot more protection for employees than it does for adult delegates who attend training courses such as those that we run. I am more than happy for us to provide a quality of care for our customers that matches and surpasses what's required for staff. I'm not saying we treat customers better than staff - as we aim also to provide a quality of care for staff that surpasses legal requirements!