Getting the work/life balance right at Teneo

Created by VERCIDA for Teneo

Jenny Brand, Senior Director at Teneo Management Consulting, talks about the new Strategy Implementation team, career opportunities and why it’s important to give employees flexibility and autonomy.

Teneo is a global CEO advisory firm that works with household names, providing high-value services at a very senior level. When I came back from a career break, I was given the remit to launch the Strategy Implementation (SI) team. It is something our clients need and we have been keen to provide this specific service for a long time.

On a day-to-day basis, the new team gets involved with projects where big companies need to implement strategies - as the name suggests - or programme manage the execution of a major strategic change. It might be a plan to help a company achieve a strategic goal, it might be the integration of two businesses, it might be helping an organisation that is changing its business model or its structure, or it might be implementing a new revenue growth or pricing strategy, to name a few examples of the different types of work we do. 

Everyone in the team rolls their sleeves up and gets involved in the projects, actively pushing towards the outcomes on the programme timeline, thinking through ways to solve problems and answer questions, and doing live analysis along the way to check if the anticipated results are being achieved.

We hope to recruit more people into the SI team very soon. Most of our roles are at the Senior Consultant level, where we generally recruit people with four to eight years of experience. We are interested in people from a broad range of backgrounds, such as those with experience in strategy consulting, programme management and change management. Really anyone who is interested in working really closely with businesses to achieve their goals.

Making sure employees achieve a good work/life balance is really important at Teneo. Within the Strategy Implementation team we take a pragmatic approach to working hours and workloads. Our team have a lot of autonomy around balancing their own workload. Weekly hours are monitored to make sure people aren’t working really long hours for extended periods of time, rather than checking whether people are working enough hours, which can be the case with other employers. Employees with young children or other personal responsibilities can balance their commitments when they have the flexibility that Teneo offers.

As well as making sure people don’t work excessive hours, it’s so important that everyone takes daylight breaks away from their desks. We need people’s brains to be in good order – after all, we employ people for their brains. While consultancy work isn’t always a 40-hour week, equally, it’s a false economy to make people work 70 hours a week. It affects your ability to sleep, it affects your intellectual capacity. It is important to make sure everyone rests appropriately and can therefore do their jobs to the best of their ability.

For me, I might do a work call on a Sunday but, equally, if I need to do something outside of work on a Tuesday afternoon, I can do it. This works extremely well for me and for other people with a variety of commitments. It is so important that employers trust their employees – it’s a far more productive way to run things, to treat people like adults.

Looking ahead, we have quite ambitious growth plans for the next few years. We’re a small team now, but we can see a path towards being three, four or five times the size in a couple of years. There will be a lot of opportunities to refine and shape our offerings for clients, and so the team will have a very entrepreneurial focus. We have been very heavily focused on Europe so far, but there are massive market opportunities in the US and around the world, so there will be travel opportunities for the team too. It’s a really exciting time for Teneo and our SI team.

To learn more about the inclusive culture at Teneo and see a full list of vacances please click here.