Meet Barry McNeill and Mark Green, Co-Founders at Organisational Change Consultancy: Semco Style Institute UK (SSI UK)

At Semco Style Institute UK (SSI UK) we want to build a community for change across the UK to help redesign how people experience their working lives because we believe that the world of work, as it is now, is largely broken.

Look at the evidence. Employee engagement in the UK is at an all-time low at just 9% according to Gallup – compared with a global average of 21%. For many people, work is a thankless experience, a transactional exchange of time for insufficient money to meet an escalating cost of living.

We support leaders and teams to bring about change in their organisations and create an alternative reality. Using the innovative and globally recognised Semco Style framework and underpinning methodologies, we help organisations and leaders to develop highly participative work environments, where work is designed to be fulfilling and people own how they do it.

Our recently launched development programmes and services here in the UK are delivered by a team of experienced leadership and organisational design specialists and offer immersive learning for HR teams, entrepreneurs and business leaders, helping them to create cultures and environments where people can make decisions autonomously and self-manage to deliver their best work.
 
 

 

What do you think makes this company unique?

 
The Semco Style approach is truly ground-breaking and is part of a global organisational change movement that began over 40 years ago with the pioneering work of Ricardo Semler in Brazil.

By democratising his company and flipping the traditional hierarchy on its head, he demonstrated that autonomous, self-managed teams succeed because they have a greater sense of ownership and accountability. This approach to management has gained international recognition and is now practiced in many countries around the world.

Whether you want to be more innovative, experiment with a four-day week or rethink hybrid, we work with businesses and leaders to question the conventional wisdom of outdated ways of working, enabling them to find a way forward where power and decisions are distributed far more equally and fairly throughout the organisation.
 

What can we hope to see from SSI UK in the future?

 
We currently have a small team of certified Semco Style Practitioners in the UK, which we aim to build and grow to help support broader change around work expectations and outcomes. Together, we want to enable more and more organisations across the UK to experiment with alternative ways of working, adopting more flexible and adaptive work practices that meet the needs of our evolving society.

Whether you are sitting in a corporate function, such as Digital Transformation, HR and Learning, or Change, or you are running a small business offering clients advice on how to grow, we aim to equip leaders and change consultants with tangible skills and practices to support more people-centric change. Our mission is to help current and emerging business leaders rip up the old rulebook and design their own style of working where people want to work.