"The inextricable link we draw between wellbeing and productivity is the essential piece to what we do and why it works"
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips Tweet
Well & Truly are specialists in work productivity and wellness brought to you by sisters Sarah & Kathryn Phillips. Launched in 2019, but 7-years in the making, Well & Truly is a company inspired by their own health setbacks and family grief. Both sisters have trained and worked with some of the world’s leading businesses which include Hermes to Jamie Oliver Group, with experience of working in Paris to New York to London.
Today Well & Truly helps ethical organizations all over the world from Zoopla to Gravis offering workshops to one-off training sessions to transform team productivity and wellbeing in the workplace. Based in London – Well & Truly are rapidly becoming known as the leading experts in adaptability and resilience in the workplace.
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Table of Contents
We’re grateful for your time today, thank you for joining us! Share your story with us.
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips: We’re Sarah and Kathryn, sisters, co-founders of Well & Truly Workshops and best friends. Our story is quite unique and, we hope, inspiring. At the ages of 16 and 19 we lost our Mum to cancer after a four year battle. We grew up quickly during that time, learning a huge amount about resilience and gaining a perspective of what really matters in life: your health and time with the people you love.
Kathryn, an Oxford grad, was a highly successful creative strategist working in the New York advertising world. Dealing with successive health issues meant it was essential for her to become a productivity and efficiency expert, because she simply had to get her work done faster. Sarah, a King’s College London graduate, trained as a natural foods chef, became certified in holistic nutrition and as a yoga, breathwork and meditation teacher, driven by the desire to help people live healthier and more fulfilling lives.
Together, we’ve created Well & Truly, a company specialising in productivity and wellbeing. The company allows the two of us to be closer than ever and to have the work/life balance and health we value so much. But more importantly, we teach people the tools to feel healthier and happier and to work more effectively so they too can have that precious work/life balance.
Some say leadership is innate, others would argue against it. Would you say you were born a leader or did you have to become a leader? Explain your experience and viewpoint.
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips: We’re definitely both still becoming leaders. There are undoubtedly some traits or beliefs that are instilled at a young age, usually by our parents and the environment we’re brought up in, which can help us step into the leader role young. For example, our father is a successful barrister and a very strong personality; he definitely influenced us to be outspoken and to have the confidence to lead in social and professional situations from a young age. However, we believe the keys to good leadership can and must be learned and hone.
We’ve both experienced the importance of getting out of our comfort zones for developing the ability to lead. Sarah especially used to be petrified of speaking in public or being seen in any way, but she pushed through that fear, first through performing music and then through teaching cookery and yoga and now of course leading our training sessions.
We also really believe that practising compassion and vulnerability are key to becoming a leader that inspires people not only to follow but to grow. Being comfortable with our imperfection and letting that be seen, while continuing to strive for our goals is such an important practice for a leader, and we believe anyone can practice that. Kathryn is the first born and has a lot of the ‘typical elder sibling traits’ which could be seen to be ideal for a leader. However, she’s become such a better and more compassionate leader for unlearning some of the more perfectionist traits that come with being the elder sibling and allowing more softness with herself and others.
So as you can hopefully see, we all come to leadership with our own strengths and our own areas to learn from.
Tell us about your company/Organization. What are some of the most exciting projects that you’re working on and how does your organization distinguish itself from the rest?
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips: Well & Truly brings wellness and productivity into the world of work through workshop facilitation and training. We have two core beliefs that are at the heart of everything we do:
Firstly, meeting effectively is key to moving business forward. Secondly, when you’re given the tools to feel well, you work well.
The inextricable link we draw between wellbeing and productivity is the essential piece to what we do and why it works. We bring the key elements of humanness and health to a corporate culture that often overlooks these.
We’ve recently launched a six month remote wellbeing and productivity program for companies wanting to create lasting changes in physical and emotional wellbeing, as well and individual productivity and group collaboration.
Our workshops are more tailored to address challenges around company vision, values and communication.
Throughout your career, have you been a team player or a lone wolf? How did that benefit or handicap you throughout the years?
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips: We’ve had such different careers leading up to Well & Truly. Kathryn has been part of several different fantastic teams throughout her career and as she progressed to her role as Strategy Director, absolutely loved the mentoring and training side of her role. Sarah has, until Well & Truly, mostly been a lone wolf by virtue of having a solo business for a few years before we teamed up.
We have both naturally tended towards a lone wolf working style, dating back to our respective time in education, which has its benefits; you don’t ever get into the habit of expecting someone else to do your work for you. However, we both massively prefer working as a team now and really look forward to growing and nurturing the Well & Truly team in the years to come.
What leadership qualities do you possess that, in your opinion, inspire your employees to work harder and be more productive?
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips: We’re a little way off of hiring our own employees. However, we’ve seen many different examples of leaders in the clients we work with in our trainings and workshops. One of the biggest differentiators we’ve seen that makes someone in a leadership role really stick it, is the willingness to not only direct but to fully engage and lead by example. When the CEO of a company comes onto one of our Wellbeing & Productivity trainings and enthusiastically participates in a breath work exercise, the effect on the team’s engagement and what they take away from the training is massive. This is the case with any of the tools we share around team work and productivity; if the team leader is willing to try something new and admit fallibility, the team are so much more inspired to try it themselves.
We’ve also seen how important it is to bring employees fully into the vision and mission of a company. Communicating clearly and regularly where a company is, what the tangible results of employees’ hard work has been, and where the company is now going is key to getting the best our of employees.
A national survey from the University of Phoenix has found that 95 percent of employees who have functioned as part of a team think that teams are an important workplace function but less than 25 percent prefer working in teams. Individual and teamwork both have their advantages and disadvantages. What work model have you adopted and how has it benefited your organization?
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips: We teach intentional, facilitated team work through purposeful meetings and workshops. All too often, meetings are scheduled indiscriminately and run aimlessly, meaning people go away unsure of the outcome or action points. We teach businesses to be more effective in how they meet so individuals have more time and clarity for their own tasks.
Many businesses today are being overwhelmed with all kinds of data which impacts productivity. How do you ensure that you and your employees are focusing on the right metrics?
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips: It’s important to have an array of relevant KPIs and to make sure focus on productivity comes down to outcome over availability.
According to PwC, nearly 60% of survey respondents reported that they would like feedback on a daily or weekly basis. Which employee feedback system does your business use to boost productivity?
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips: We feel it’s very important to have a great flow of communication and feedback between team members and managers/employees. If the style of feedback is part of a supportive and open culture, it’s likely that this will fall into place without needing overly rigid systems.
If you had an unlimited budget and resources to spend on increasing productivity, what is the first thing that you would change?
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips: Well, we’d definitely recommend investing in team wellbeing to start with, because if you’re not feeling well, you won’t be thinking or working well. It’s less about getting more and more out of people but rather about stripping aways the barriers to productivity and making sure people are supported enough not to burnout.
According to Gusto, 54% of employees say a strong sense of community (great coworkers, celebrating milestones, a common mission) kept them at a company longer than was in their best interest. How do you improve the way teams work together? How do you build a sense of community?
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips: We help companies do this in a few ways:
- Make sure everyone is brought along with and feels part of the company’s vision and understands the broader goals behind their day to day work
- Fine tune meeting culture and communication practices to reduce frustration and friction
- Encourage open and vulnerable communication from all levels in the company
- Educate all employees on how to spot and address mental health issues in themselves and others around them so there’s a great sense of support and safety
- Team away days
- Team breath work practices
This has been very insightful and I’m sure other entrepreneurs can learn from the knowledge you have provided. As for your company’s future, what big changes are coming down the pipe in the next 6 months that might increase productivity?
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips: We’ve launched an amazing 6 month wellbeing and productivity program for businesses which we’re so excited to start rolling out.
Productivity is important but as is an employee’s wellbeing. What are you currently doing to prevent employees from burning out?
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips: Wellbeing is the precursor to productivity. Invest in wellbeing and productivity will follow much more easily.
Thank you so much for your time but before we finish things off, we do have one more question. We will select these answers for our ValiantCEO Award 2021 edition. The best answers will be selected to challenge the award.
Share with us one of the most difficult decisions you had to make, this past year 2021, for your company that benefited your employees or customers. What made this decision so difficult and what were the positive impacts?
Sarah & Kathryn Phillips: We decided to completely restructure our offers as we came to the end of the endless pivots during covid. We had to let an initial aim fall away to bring our services into more coherent alignment. It felt right but was also difficult to release something we had really wanted to do that just didn’t make sense anymore.
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Sarah & Kathryn Phillips for taking the time to do this interview and share their knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Sarah & Kathryn Phillips or their company, you can do it through their – Linkedin Page
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