Feaniks has been in the making for many years. Born from a passion to make life better, there have been many iterations and much developing of ideas along this journey. With the co-founders having a combined experience of almost a century in the care sector, it was the obvious place to begin before expanding into other sectors. It’s where we all started, owning and running care homes in the early stages and falling in love with the sector.
Over the years we have connected in different roles, wearing diverse hats in various organisations, and we just kept learning. We have met inspirational people and seen much transformation. Our gift was our ideas and a blank sheet of paper from where we started the design, nothing to adapt and make fit, a free rein in terms of ideation and creation.
As we began to drill down, at times redirecting and going again, we were often frustrated by the amount of time it was taking. But we had to get it right, we had to broaden our perspective and at the same time realise that what we had developed had a very simple drive behind it. It’s just about people – making lives better for people.
Why Feaniks was created
Over the years, we came across the same challenges time and again – organisations struggling with systems that didn’t connect with each other, concerns around training and retention and the formation of micro cultures instead of a wider organisational culture. In the end, a lack of solution of how to deal with this left them with a disengaged and demotivated workforce. We wanted to create a universe that would offer a holistic learning experience through skills-based training modules, frameworks for testing competencies, instructor-led coaching and community forums. We believed all of this would help organisations improve their training and retention and embed their values throughout to help motivate their workforce.
Our approach was to keep the learning and development process simple, yet multi-dimensional. With the care sector as our starting point, we had many discussions about whether we were creating for social care, health care or specialist care and we found ourselves entwined amidst their nuances and differences. Of course, our courses needed to cover the complexities of all these, but as a starting point, the drive was much simpler. We care about people, the people who are cared for and the people who are caring. We care about employers and learners and the impact of what they do is important to us.
What Feaniks offers
Managers and team leaders have an incredible role to play and are pivotal in a learner’s training journey. We understand how much responsibility they have, how much they must do day-in day-out, and that’s why we don’t say things like ‘you need to create a supervision discussion for this’ and instead add the suggested discussion in the resources for them. We provide managers with frameworks to test competencies, gain feedback, assess shortfalls and discuss common issues with their team members, so that training becomes more collaborative and not siloed. We also support managers with coaching webinars to help them become better leaders for their team and their organisation.
Learners themselves are an important part of our universe as we strongly believe that an organisation’s wealth is its workforce. Everything we have designed and created has been made with the customer perspective in mind. We have seen first-hand the shifting demands of people in workplaces and the challenge of achieving an allusive ‘work-life balance’, and we wanted to do our bit to make people’s lives better. This is why the learner perspective was important to us. We never want any sense of superiority to be reflected in our training materials, we want learners to feel valued for the variety of skills they already bring, the emotional intelligence they possess and respect their time and effort by providing them with solutions that make a difference in their work life and beyond.
With people at the centre, learning should not be separate from the culture of the organisation. A learning mindset has much more impact on people than a stand-alone course. At Feaniks, we combine the diversity of what people already know with the opportunities for learning whilst at work, using protocols and agreed ways of working that the organisation has spent time developing. Every interaction and work activity has an element of learning attached to it and learning for us is never only about compliance, it’s about engagement. We can only ever light the fire of inspiration to learn more and do better when all elements work in harmony.
To know more about Feaniks, contact us today.