Category Archives: Insights

It is the Wimbledon final this coming Sunday and it will be the players mind set that will be the differencing factor which will determine who wins and who loses. Getting in a winning mind set is what the 1% of the world’s population who optimise their potential have learned to do. These are the ones, wherever they come from be it sport, business, government or whatever, who learn to manage their mind state so they stay in a mentally […]

Following on from our amazing client survey results I wanted to share with you a few secrets to our customer service success. The following four points are my top tips:

1. Recruit the right people who live your company values

Experience in the role is obviously important but values cannot be developed, so invest wisely at the recruitment stage. Your staff are your shop window and if you wish to portray a company with specific values then install these into your staff. […]

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

-Albert Einstein

During a recent workshop with a group of delegates it was interesting to note how they coped (or didn’t cope) when being exposed to the Polestar Business Simulation. It is important to state that the participants were totally uninformed and unprepared for the exposure and were expected to fail abysmally, which they did!

This failure was […]

Inspiring confidence, meeting objectives, excellent service and thought provoking are just some of the words used to describe the solutions developed and delivered in partnership with our clients over the past twelve months. It’s our team of consultants both in the UK and internationally who consistently deliver to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations and enable us to be recognised as the most valued development partner. I’m extremely proud to work in this team and want to give you an […]

At the turn of the year, we embarked on our customary OnTrack survey of our clients to check that we are achieving our target of being the Most Valued Development Partner. All measurements aside though, the unprompted open comments we receive from the survey every year provide us with the true story of the learning & development industry and of course, our clients.

It certainly feels like the learning and development world is very buoyant presently. There is a revitalised confidence […]

From meeting to meeting, from flight to taxi, from train to tube, from emails to conference call. With our all engulfing business lives it is no wonder that we have lost the energy and appetite, let alone the time to imagine. The reality is unless we create something successfully in our minds first, it is nigh on impossible to achieve it in reality. That’s why the most high-performing athletes have imagined every element of their chosen discipline prior to competing at […]

“Right now some of you already see yourselves as leaders, and some don’t. By the end of today most of you will know yourself to be leaders, and love it.”

We say this to the business volunteers in the morning briefing of the SportInspired Games multi-sport festival, where it is up to the 100 or so volunteers and secondary school Young Leaders they work with to help inspire local kids to try new sports. However, some volunteers really do arrive not […]

Solve IT slashes the time it takes users to frame, address and solve service desk problems and incidents!

Thinking Dimensions Global (TDG) has announced the launch of Solve IT, an exciting new Incident and Problem application available exclusively through the ServiceNow Store.

The Solve IT app is designed to address the needs of incident managers, problem managers, and service desk personnel, and gives them an exciting new approach for solving incidents quickly, accurately and permanently.

Matt Fourie, Chairman of Thinking Dimensions Global commented, […]

“Coming together is the Beginning, Keeping together is Progress, Working together is Success” – Henry Ford

There is a need to create a positive touch point on every interaction with a customer. This is not as simple as it sounds, for in the ever expanding technology of today the majority of interactions with customers tend to be on-line or remote connections. We are getting fewer and fewer opportunities to have a positive interaction, which means the opportunities that we have, must […]

Organisations with highly engaged employees were 26% more productive and 13% more profitable over the last five years (Watson Wyatt Survey 2008/9)

There have been many studies and surveys done on the subject of productivity and most conclude it’s about good people practices.

Our research shows that employees have seven key needs:

1. I want to like my organisation – I need to know where it’s going and how it’s going to get there.

2. I want to like my boss – I need […]

Does employee volunteering really make a difference, or is it mainly a way for companies to appear to care and have a ‘purpose beyond profit’? I believe it definitely does make a difference, but how much depends on whether or not volunteers actually enjoy it. This brings the importance of the much discussed ‘skills-based volunteering’ centre-stage.

Employee volunteering has been a critical part of SportInspired since the start. Over 8 years we have had over 13,000 employee volunteers involved in helping […]

I was recently coaching a female senior leader who confided in me that when she was asked what has helped to make her so successful and break through the ‘glass ceiling’ she replied with – ‘Smile very little and never wear a cardigan!’ Interesting advice; I generally agree about the cardigan, but I don’t agree about the smile. I often work with senior leaders of both sexes, who seem to believe that smiling indicates a sign of weakness or insignificance. In […]

How do we ensure we get the best information at all times, especially if our company is located over different time zones?

Global organisations find it increasingly more difficult to deal with decisions and investigations effectively, especially if some of the stakeholders and information sources are not in the same location. What do you do if you need to make a decision and one of your most important stakeholders is on the other side of the world?
Using a common approach and […]

In an incident situation we are always looking for that “Silver Bullet” question – the one question that would bring some insight to the incident being experienced. The good news is that there is such a question; in fact there are a few of these questions that could provide you with that insight needed. We call that the “but not” question.

Asking someone what the “fault could be” under the same circumstances “but is not” is normally met with a blank […]

Nerves are an essential part of our armoury as a speaker. Try to see these nerves as a positive rather than a negative force. Instead of thinking of feeling ‘nervous’ think of feeling ‘excited’…an emotion which has much more positive overtones to it. Here’s how to do it:

Appreciate that nerves are normal and most people will feel them to a greater or lesser extent. The feeling is produced by adrenalin flooding the system helping it to cope with an unknown or […]

It’s fantastic news for International Women’s Day this Sunday that the Intelligence & Security Committee (ISC) want to increase the number of female spies from the current level of 37% to achieve parity with the number of men. They declared in the press this week that they see the online collaboration tool Mumsnet as the perfect place to recruit. What ISC are particularly looking for are women in their ‘middle age’ and mothers……..a pool of untapped talent according to them.

How […]

Boost employee morale and engagement, develop leadership within your organisation and enhance internal relationships – all through supporting high-impact sports programmes within communities across the U.K. We want our valued clients to get involved with SportInspired, a fantastic initiative which uses sport to help disadvantaged children develop skills and build relationships.

So who are SportInspired?

SportInspired was founded in 2008 when an experiment between two University friends on Hackney Marshes bloomed into an organisation which uses sport to unite communities, delivering 40+ […]

Here at OnTrack International we pride ourselves on our exceptional training and the service we give to each and every client. However, in order to fulfil one of our core values of ‘better and better all the time’, we ask our clients for feedback on how we’ve been doing, in the format of our OnTrack Survey.

Our last survey (which you can take a look at the infographic here) provided us with a lot of valuable information – such as, 98% […]

How do you deliver a key message, which could be perceived as formal, corporate and perhaps even alien to employees on the ‘shop-floor’? How do you turn it into an interesting and engaging message – a message which is not only one-way from employer to employee, but also received by the employee and acted upon and resulting in a desired change in behaviour?

In the past 12 months, we have seen an increasing interest from clients seeking our help in making […]

‘And the Winner of the Award for the most flexible, female-focused and forward thinking company goes to……….’

How would your organization fare if a ‘Business Oscars’ existed? Would you be a contender, on the short list or maybe you might even win? The Hollywood Oscars have been in the news recently with the usual dramatic and sometimes emotional accompanying acceptance speeches.

One of the most talked about, was the speech by Patricia Arquette who as best supporting actress winner used her acceptance […]

In the right environment, a team that is diverse in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, work experience, location, mentality and any other ‘diverse’ aspect can outperform a more homogenous likeminded one. In the wrong environment, it can be the converse. Harnessing the best performance requires each team member to connect despite these differences rather than disconnect because of them.

In our experience, leaders who optimise their effectiveness with others, foster team cohesion and create a positive interpersonal environment. Organisations that […]

Everyone at OnTrack International would like to give a huge thank you to every client that took the time to complete our OnTrack Survey 2014! We value every piece of feedback we receive and will be taking on board your comments in order to continue improving the service we provide to our clients.

Looking at the responses, it is fantastic to see that we are living up to one of our core values of “Better and better all the time”. Not […]

Having been part of the learning technology industry in various guises over the past few years I have come to excitedly look forward to this time of the year – Learning Technologies at Olympia time!

My journey of working with learning technology started back in the late noughties, representing a global training organisation who were amongst the first to embark and embrace the technology of truly virtual classrooms. Bringing it to a mass-market and offering what felt like the closest to […]

Joint alliance with US-based Bloomfire will boost UK cloud-based knowledge management

OnTrack International, today announced a global partnership with Bloomfire, a Texas-based company specializing in innovative cloud-based knowledge-sharing and management systems. The strategic alliance reflects OnTrack’s long-standing commitment to help organizations transform the way employees learn, think and behave to deliver optimum business value. The global learning consultancy is also the only UK company on the 2015 Leadership Training Companies Watch List.

Headquarted in the UK, OnTrack International works with many of […]

Although we are now a couple of weeks into the New Year, it isn’t too late to decide on how you can improve yourself this year, both in a professional and personal sense. We don’t recommend you rely on “New Year’s Resolutions”, but instead have put together 5 points to focus on during 2015:

1. Set Goals: Take time to think and dream. The clearer you can see what you want in your mind, the more engaged you will be to […]

On the surface this could seem like a pretty dangerous resolution. Could it be at best, upsetting to other people to say what we think and at worst, career limiting?

Definitely – if done in the wrong way but with the right approach it could be the path to a happier and more contented time at work. Stress is one of the major causes of workplace dissatisfaction. One of the key causes of stress is keeping things under wraps, not saying […]