How Owlstone’s HR rolled out an award-winning suite of enterprise skills on Cambridge Science Park
Lizzy Burke is VP of HR at Owlstone Medical, which won the Enterprise Skills Award – sponsored by the Entrepreneurship Centre at Cambridge Judge Business School – in the 2022
The award reflects the depth of Owlstone’s commitment to good practice. Lizzy kindly agreed to answer some questions on how staff care protocols are evolving at Owlstone.
The Owlstone Medical Learning and Development programme started in 2021. How’s it going?
The Owlstone L&D Programme started in 2021 and we had participation by 89 per cent of our employees in the programme that year.
We have found that employees are very engaged with 60 sessions offered centrally and a large proportion of employees recognising that the L&D programme has positively contributed to their performance.
The programme is going well and in 2022 we have had our first two cohorts complete the Management Development Scheme, which has been co-designed and run by Jacqui Kemp – from Your People Potential, who is fantastic. We have just started our third cohort of managers who are already benefitting from the scheme. We have also run our mentoring and graduate schemes in 2022, alongside additional customer communication training for a lot of our scientists, which has proved very popular and valuable.
We have wellbeing sessions once per quarter as well to ensure that we are always looking out for our employee’s welfare, alongside the other tools like the EAP scheme that we have in place.
How many are currently in hybrid mode, or is it largely a return to a full week on the Park?
We are currently operating in a hybrid fashion for a lot of our roles at Owlstone.
Some of our roles are based solely on site and others are mostly remote; we have been managing this based upon the demands of the role, business and also the needs of the individual where the role allows for it.
The Owlstone Management Scheme is a 12-month programme which started relatively recently. Has it been popular?
The Owlstone Management Scheme has successfully completed for our first two cohorts and our third cohort has just started the scheme.
The programme centres around the themes of coaching and emotional intelligence and helps to ensure that participants are well-rounded effective managers. We feel that it is important to invest in our people and by creating this scheme we are ensuring that our managers are appropriately trained to be effective in their roles.
The Management Core Skills Scheme to support those newer to management sounds really helpful. Is this more for those already in management roles, or more aspirational for those who may be interested in manager-style positions?
This scheme was designed for those who are new to management and may have a team of one or two employees. We are yet to do a programme for aspiring managers but hope to add this in the future.
The Mentoring Scheme expanded in 2020: what can you tell us about the members of staff receiving mentoring, who from, and what skills they are learning?
We have expanded our mentoring scheme into 2022 offering more training for mentors at more frequent touch points throughout the year – we currently have nine people on our mentoring scheme.
A large proportion of our mentees who took part in the scheme have been promoted. In fact, one of our external mentors, a CEO at another Cambridge company, said they were ‘grateful to be a part of this scheme and it’s inspiring to see how [Owlstone] invest in the development of [their] team’.
Tell us about the Management Seminar Series.
The Management Seminar Series kicked off last month for those who have attended the management scheme.
We hope to expand the reach of participants over time. It picks up on key topics such as communication, conflict, ED&I, mental health awareness, and stakeholder management.
What can you tell us about the graduate team, and the learning and development programme?
Our learning & development programme is in place to ensure that we support employees’ personal and professional development.
All employees who have been with the company for over six months have a personal development plan and are given the training and development that they need to do their role. We are trying to solve fantastically difficult problems and we feel that our people are key to our success, they are our most important asset. Our learning and development programme is in place to help support them as they progress their careers at Owlstone.
We also give our employees a great deal of responsibility and autonomy which in turn is also key to our business succeeding, and to their own personal success.
Our graduate programme has been in place for three years now and has had more participants year on year who have been progressing within Owlstone.
One manager noted that one of our graduates had ‘become more confident asking others for input, interrogating stakeholder needs and making use of colleague’s skills’.
Is it a huge challenge in HR terms to deliver on this very comprehensive range of skills and tuition?
Thank you. We don’t believe this to be a huge challenge; there has been a lot of work up front from the team to deliver this programme in 2021 and 2022. Now that the scheme is up and running we will continue it into 2023 and beyond, and continue to invest in our employees.
