Today we’d like to introduce you to Andrew Sykes.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Andrew. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I was living in South Africa, running a large health insurance consulting company. Twelve years in, I asked my board this question: “We’ve done great work for employers for so long, managing their health insurance costs, and we’ve been really successful doing so. But we don’t have any measures of success when it comes to the health of the people that they employ. Isn’t it time we focused on this?” I got blank stares and disinterest. Within a year, I left, moved to Dallas Texas and had started a wellness consulting company to address exactly that question.
But what I didn’t know then, was that America was not the best place to learn how to be successful in wellness. In many ways, at that time, it was the place to learn why wellness was failing. Some hard lessons in reality in Dallas inspired me to set up a research lab, BRATLAB, to really understand which habits make a difference to human health and to human performance overall, in life and at work. And to study the more interesting question: how do we design the world of work to ensure that people can perform at their best AND leave work each day healthy, happy and financially secure.
In 2008, we moved the business to Chicago and we’ve been in River North, but serving clients around the country and internationally ever since. Today, we help employers to understand or design the habits of employees that not only serve the goals of those employees, but that help them to become resilient and prepared for the future. And when employees are adaptable, agile and resilient, and themselves know how to change and create new habits, the business becomes future-proof.
We spread our message through professional speaking and workshops for the managers and leaders of leading employers. But we also support behavior change, wellness, performance management and similar businesses that offer services to employers without research.
Our guiding beliefs are:
1. It’s not your people that are your most important asset, it’s your people’s HABITS
2. Habits determine who we are, and who we become, as people and as companies. Habits ARE your destiny.
3. The reason why changing habits is so hard for most humans is because we blame ourselves when we fail for a lack of willpower of motivation. In reality, it is the conditions that surround us that almost entirely determine if we will fail or succeed. Given this, the design of a business (the built environment, culture, systems and employee mindsets) can be configured to make practicing high performance habits easy and natural for employees, AT WORK.
4. To succeed in future, companies need to learn the craft of creating new habits for employees that allow them to not only cope with, but to ride the waves of change that continue to come at us.
Has it been a smooth road?
In the early days in Dallas, I realized that, at that time, most employers didn’t really care about the health of their employees, just their health insurance costs. Few employees were ready for a serious discussion about, let alone an investment in, the wellness of their employees. Today, thankfully, things have changed, although the wellness industry continues to fail employers in many ways.
Starting a business in Dallas, as a foreigner, and the moving that business to Chicago, meant having to find clients from scratch, without a natural network of friends or colleagues that one gains from growing up and going to college in a country. Just getting to meet, know and take the time to build trust with clients was, and to some extent remains, a struggle. Thankfully today we’re well established in Chicago and have a network of supporters, friends and supporting businesses.
A second struggle is that we like to push the frontiers of innovation. Our message is about reinventing the world of work as a place through which employees are able to perform at their best AND have an awesome life. For many employers, it remains more about the bottom line, even if that’s at the expense of the stress, health failures and disengagement of their employees. The evidence? For all the talk about improving employee engagement, the research shows that this problem continues largely unchanged for the last few decades.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
We’re known for our ability to design and create high performance habits in the employees of leading companies.
We specialize in helping companies to design their culture (which after all is really just the sum of the habits that employees practice in a company). Many companies have an accidental culture, and often a poor one, characterized by employees that are stressed out, exhausted and sacrificing their lives and their health at the altar of their clients and company. We help leaders see that this is destructive for their brand, their client’s experience, their operating costs and, most importantly, the lives of their employees.
We then help them to be deliberate about designing their culture, and embedded not only high performance habits into their business, but ensuring that employees invest in the habits that prepare them to perform and that improve their health, happiness and financial security. These foundational or pivotal habits don’t just serve employees, but generate significantly improved productivity for the forward thinking employer.
What sets us apart is our ten years of research in our lab, BRATLAB, and our approach to working with our clients. Unlike traditional consultants that like to keep their clients’ dependent on them over time, we believe in building the skills and capacity inside of our clients. We are very much a training and coaching company in that way, and we believe that all employees, and certainly all leaders and managers, should have habit change skills as part of their basic toolkit. After all, as Durant says (paraphrasing Aristotle) “…we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act but a habit.”
I’m most proud of our small, international team. We have people from London, China, the US, and South Africa on our team. We’re fiercely in support of women leading businesses (we’re 2/3rds female), and we have a very unique culture and office space in Chicago. We love showing clients and visitors our non-traditional space, and what’s possible when you image an office as a place that should first support employees in having an awesome life and then support them in doing their best work. Our dream is that other company’s take the same approach to office design, and indeed to business design overall.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Chicago is a great place for us to be located. We’re centrally located for our national clients, but there is also a strong and growing sentiment among the leaders of Chicago businesses that we have a choice. That choice is between running a business in a way that either “uses up” or “fills up” employees, in the service of making money and delighting customers. More and more Chicago leaders are choosing the second option, and we love being a part of the movement to making business not only a vehicle for shareholder returns, but a tool for improving the lives of employees as well as customers.
Chicago has a rich talent pool, is a great supporter of start-ups, not only in technology but in services and other fields too. I often recommend Chicago as a place to start a business, for locals as well as immigrants, because in this town, you can find everything you need to survive and thrive. It is a city that is very supportive of young companies.
Pricing:
- We offer private and public workshops in the art of creating high performance habits and future proofing businesses. Workshops cost around $3,000 for two days for public events. Private workshops are priced specifically for the needs of each client.
Contact Info:
- Address: 61 West Hubbard, Suite 300
Chicago
Illinois
60654 - Website: www.habitsatwork.com
- Phone: 3128903323
- Email: andrew@habitsatwork.com
- Twitter: @sykesandrew and @habitsatwork
- Other: andrewsykes.com and bratlab.com
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