BeeZee Bodies

Who We Are

My name is Stu King and I am the CEO and Head of Distraction at BeeZee Bodies in the UK. We are a small behavior change company focusing primarily on weight management. We provide services to hard-to-reach groups on behalf of Public Health departments within the Health and Social Care system.

Observation

Why Menlo? We pride ourselves on being innovative in our ways of thinking and ideas about how to change peoples’ behavior but wanted to be more innovative about the way we build systems. After reading Joy, Inc. I wanted to see if three Menlo ways of working could help solve a number of problems (primarily: accountability, training, timekeeping, resilience, and planning ahead). 

Experiment

In December last year (2017) my co-director, Helen and I, were lucky enough to have spent a week at Menlo Innovations taking part in the Deep Dive course into all things Menlo. 

The processes we implemented with our twenty staff after returning were:

• Pairing

• The Planning Game (and Estimation)

• FOOBB (We call it EWOC – Evidence We’re On Course – definitely didn't come up with the acronym first) 

Results

We have started slow as system change doesn't happen over-night and we didn't want to overwhelm staff with all three changes at once. So we are getting to grips with the planning game, effective estimation and how to reconcile these against the actuals. Early indications are that people are more productive whilst using the planning game, but it has taken some getting used to. We had a follow-up Skype call the day before the training to steel ourselves and check that we knew what we were talking about... we didn't, not really! But the call really helped and the training went fantastically well, a tribute to Helen's organizational skills (we ran the holiday game that we did in the training at Menlo). We are still learning and at very early stages of running these experiments, however, there are a couple of clear indications that this is going to work:

1. The staff enjoys the clarity it brings and most are embracing this new way of working.

2. When we ran the Actuals it started to highlight to people just where they were (or more importantly, were not) spending their time. We don't bill by the hour, per se (at all!), but it is interesting to see people being more intentional about how they spend their time.

Conclusion

So we haven’t got it all sorted just yet, but we are optimistic about our current and upcoming experiments and are incredibly grateful to Menlo for the help and support they gave us both during the week we were in Ann Arbor and since. We have stayed in touch and will continue to do so.

Stuart King