Workstyle Freestyle - 'Futureproofing'

Welcome to #WorkstyleFreestyle with me, Alex, and with me, Lizzie and today we've got a special guest with us continuing our Managing Director series Hello! So can you tell us who you are, and why you joined Hoxby? I'm Ben Foulkes, I am a bit of a heretic a bit of a sceptic I like to challenge things like living in the city and having a corporate career so I wanted to move down to Cornwall I'm a very keen surfer and Hoxby just felt like a really perfect fit to allow me to do that and to work with some passionate people about changing the way that we live and the way that we work. Brilliant! I mean who wouldn't want to work around their surfing hobby? Why shouldn't everyone? So you run a business unit tell us a bit about it what's it called, what does it do? So Hoxby Futureproofing just helps organisations rethink and challenge the orthodoxies they have about the way they do things. So just one example is the culture that companies have perhaps around meetings all day or working and employing people 9 to 5 we help them rethink that and whether that's particularly necessary and particularly productive to be perfectly honest. So we challenge those beliefs. Inspiring stuff. We love it. And can you give us some of the clients that you've worked with in the Futureproofing business unit? So we've worked with a number of big organisations who have a massive impact in the world Unilever, Merck, Anglian Water a range of things really about challenging their industrial beliefs. Brilliant. Fantastic forward-thinking companies and of the projects that we've done what would you say is your favourite? I think the one that we've been focusing on at the moment is so relevant with Coronavirus is virtual leadership and so many companies now looking at how they manage and lead remote teams we've codified a lot of that how we've dealt with it in Hoxby the lessons we've learnt and what makes great virtual leadership vs just great leadership and we're working with Merck at the moment on some of those skills some of those tools that make that really effective. Fantastic. Brilliant. And for all the people who are watching this and feeling inspired what's the one thing you would say to them to do? I think really just challenge yourself challenge people you work with or challenge a client on what's an industrial era belief that you think is holding people back from doing their best work share in the thread let's start a conversation about it let's put Hoxby's hive mind of collective intelligence to work at how we can get around that sort of challenge. Brilliant. Inspiring stuff. Share it in the comments below. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you all for tuning in we've been #WorkstyleFreestyle we'll see you next time. Bye for now!