Few management consultancies take personal pride in their client’s success as does atrain Ltd. GRACE LAU and THOMAS YEUNG share their success secrets.

Grace Lau and Thomas Yeung, Managing Consultant of atrain Ltd.

atrain has evolved from an assessment-focused to an all-rounded management consultancy, says Grace Lau, managing consultant. 

“When we first started in Bamberg, Germany (company’s HQ), atrain stood for “assessment and training”. But because our customers are facing increasingly diverse challenges, and we are all about doing what is needed in the best interest of our customers, we have no choice but to transform ourselves. That’s why nowadays we offer a blended, transformational approach to talent management and organizational change, co-creating what we do with HR and business leaders,” Lau says.

Beyond Delivery

Thomas Yeung, the colleague and fellow management consultant says: “Our co-creation approach also means that our services do not stop at delivery, we continuously check-in and follow-up with customers to make sure the solutions are effectively implemented in the organizations and modified whenever necessary. In addition, most of our staff are organizational psychologists, which means the scientific understanding about human psychology is also central to the work we do.”

He adds: “We helped a Fortune 500 company to lay down a feedback and coaching culture in the Asia Pacific, and we are supporting another leading corporate to promote innovative thinking. We run large-scale Hackathons with our customers to help them drive change and be more agile in today’s VUCA business environment,” says Yeung.  

Custom Solutions

atrain ranks amongst the very few firms in the market that provide full customization on the solutions. 

“Often our clients come to us because they have tried other vendors and are not satisfied with the solutions they provided. At atrain, we ensure the fitness of our solutions to the context of our customers. We involve our customers to co-create the solutions with us – making sure that the objectives, contents, expected outcomes are aligned to justify the investment they put in. We care deeply about the actual impact we make,” Lau explains.

“In the consulting business, talent is really a key to success. If you don’t have a strong team, it is close to impossible to succeed, especially because our approach centers on co-creation with customers rather than selling off-the-shelf products. 

“To win the so-called ‘war on talents’, we offer full flexi work location and time, exciting and meaningful work with autonomy, and a learning budget for every staff. This is something we have been doing since day 1, and is something often commented by others as quite rare in Hong Kong. We pride ourselves on being an employer that unleashes people’s potential. It’s important that we practice what we preach.”

Digitized Customer-Relevance

“We never stop being innovative in our solutions and we care about the fitness of the solutions to our customers – While some firms may keep their solutions unchanged for an annual or re-run initiative, we look for all possible ways to improve the experience and include new, relevant elements to match the current market trend, and make sure customers have the learnings to take away. For example, we have digitized and can run paperless assessment and development centers; we use apps to help customers boost engagement; we run real-time talent analytics and social network analysis to support data-driven talent management approach; we use social media to reinforce post-program learnings.” 

Added Value

Yeung says that the company aims to increase its footprint in Asia. “While we already have business in locations such as Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam, we intend to do more to grow our presence. We believe there is a lot of value we can bring to organizations in these locations. Needless to say, China will remain as a strategic focus. It is a very exciting market as things change rapidly and people are open to new ideas and experimentation.” 

He adds: “In terms of services and products, we believe in this rapidly changing world, collaborative and open innovation is what is needed in order to bring value in a timely manner. We will continue to work extensively with a diverse range of service and product providers, so that we can create innovative and useful solutions for our customers quickly.” 

For additional information, please visit www.atrain-apac.com

Hong Kong’s Business Leaders share market and interest intelligence in the pages of HKMVC 2019

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