Today we’re switching things up a bit with an interview with one of our great clients, Kid Sense Child Development, on what it’s been like working with BespokeHR.

Who:

Conor McKenna, Owner and Managing Director, Kid Sense Child Development

What:

Founded in 1998 in Adelaide by Joanna Buttfield, Kid Sense is a leading private provider of paediatric occupational therapy and speech pathology services to children and their families. Kid Sense employs 18 staff and is planning to grow and expand nationally.

Introduction:

Kid Sense’s Vision is simple yet compelling: to create the most trusted brand in child development. Key to this is to be the Employer of Choice in paediatric allied healthcare through industry leadership. The only way our business can achieve its Vision is to have a highly-engaged team of outstanding practitioners and operational staff that together deliver the highest quality paediatric care.

Paulette: What made you think about using BespokeHR?

Conor: The management team at Kid Sense has clinical expertise in occupational therapy and speech pathology, as well as business strategy and operations. What we are not expert in is the management of millennial staff in a high-growth environment. It was therefore important to bring in a professional who could provide us with the framework, tools and knowledge in the area of Human Resources, for everything from recruitment to the management and retention of staff.

Paulette: What were the 3 biggest impacts of hiring BespokeHR to help Kid Sense?

Conor: Clarity, Focus and the power to act.

Internal: Understanding the human side of our staff, not just as clinicians but as people. Most of our clinicians tend to be younger, recent graduates, and they come from a different generation than I do. So I needed to understand the drivers of performance and satisfaction for them as people so we can treat them as they would like to be treated. That was the biggest learning curve for our management team, and I think we’ve performed very well and continue to get better at accomplishing that goal.

External: Translates directly into client satisfaction. The client is typically the mother of a child who is about 3-7 years old with disabilities and/or developmental challenges. We get overwhelmingly positive feedback both online at Google and Facebook reviews, as well as at the counter delivered personally to operations staff and myself. Parents regularly comment on how satisfied they are with our clinicians. All of whom, by the way, are currently female and the majority are under the age of 26. The level of satisfaction that parents express to us is unprecedented and something that we are very proud of.

Paulette: What factors were important to you when selecting an external person to work on your HR needs? Did you have any reservations?

Conor: Proven expertise and experience were the most important things to me. But since human resource management was not a core strength for us—at least back then before we worked with BespokeHR—the uncertainty and doubt of engaging with an unknown quantity in an area we’re not very comfortable with was hard. But now we trust our HR support in the hands of BespokeHR, and Paulette in particular (as well as the internal resources that she has also helped us build which have been critical to our team’s development). The result is a winning combination of high-performing clinical staff which BespokeHR have assisted with and establishment of our management team, who have the ability to grow and develop under the Kid Sense structure guided by BespokeHR.

Paulette: Would you recommend BespokeHR and why?

Conor: BespokeHR is my go-to business for anyone that might seek my advice on HR, people performance or a recruitment consultant. Paulette gets the big picture, the strategy, the operations and the needs and wants of the team at an individual level, as well as translating that into corporate results.