Frequently Asked Questions
1. How do I know this intervention will work?
99% of engineers who’ve been to our training would recommend The Geek Whisperer® (1% said “maybe”, but not “no”).
Adelina has run similar interventions in other companies and they have all been successful. The reason they are successful is because we engage you and the engineers throughout the process and the articles, webinars, training sessions, talks are all co-designed with the audience. We make no assumption about what you or the engineers want, we ask and co-design everything with our audience’s input and use real work situations. We often ask feedback from the engineers (or the target audience of the article) on the articles we write before we publish them. We also have 300+ testimonials from engineers and leaders on LinkedIn and Google who say how it’s been working with us.
If all else fails, you always have the 100% Money Back Guarantee, whereby if half the way into your project you are not satisfied with the work we have done, we will refund you the fees we charged.
2. What do I do if this doesn’t work out?
Since we started in 2011, we have always offered to our customers 100% Money Back Guarantee and no one has activated this so far. If, however, the intervention is not working for your teams, you have 100% Money Back Guarantee. There is no difficult process to go through, just call us half way through the project, or as soon as you think this is not working out, and we will give you a full refund.
If it didn’t work out, we would then love to understand why this did not work out when all our other projects have worked and, with your permission, we would like to carry out an anonymous survey so people can give us their honest critique so we know how to improve. This however would not be a condition of us refunding you.
3. How do I know engineers will read your articles?
We often receive emails from engineers telling us how the article changed the way they do something at work (here is a real example of an email from an engineer), or they comment or like our articles on LinkedIn and company internal social media (if we do an intervention together where we write articles for you, these are often published on your internal social media, such as Yammer, and engineers like and comment on these on a regular basis), and in Arm, we have been told our articles are some the most read in the newsletter every month.
Our articles are designed by working with leaders and engineers, so the problems and expressions used to describe these are very familiar with engineers. Here are the titles of some of the most popular articles:
● "It won't work!" - How to respond when engineers say it can’t be done
● “When both engineers are right, who is “more” right?”
4. How do I know engineers will voluntarily sign up to your courses?
We always fill the courses and usually we have significant waiting lists to them (on one course alone, we had nearly 200 people on the waiting list). One of the reasons our courses fill up, is because they have very unusual titles (e.g. “How to prove others they are wrong” or “Unappreciated for being honest, how to tell them it won’t work”) and don’t sound like traditional soft skills training (which they are not), so engineers are very interested.
67% of engineers who come to our training have never been to soft skills training before (but they voluntarily signed up to ours), therefore we attract to training the people who usually think soft skills are not something they would attend.
When we design courses for your specific intervention, we speak to engineers first and get into the mind-set of the engineers (or of the leaders, depending on whom we are trying to address). We usually find with engineers there is an initial cohort who signs up on their own, and then, as the word spreads, more and more engineers want to attend the training.
What do we do if they don’t sign up?
If engineers don’t voluntarily sign up, we will always go back to finding out more about the situation so we can suggest a title which will pique their interest.
We had a situation where a customer insisted the training session we were delivering was advertised to engineers as: “How to Influence your Colleagues” and only 29% of engineers signed up to the course voluntarily. The customer wanted to make it compulsory for the others to attend, however we said we would like to change the course name to “How to prove others they are wrong”, because we had done research into the perspective the engineers in that group had and knew this would resonate with them. Once the course was advertised with the new name, 100% of the engineers targeted signed up.
5. What commitment do you need me and my company to make to make this intervention successful?
We need you to give us examples real work situations reasons which have sparked your need for the intervention.
We also need you to tell your teams this is intervention will be happening and why. We will happily help you design the message; however the reasons why we are doing this initiative has to be delivered to the organisation/attendees by you. We’ll take care of the rest.
We understand you have many other things to do, not just this project, so we will try to keep the times we interrupt you to a minimum. Our work is successful because we customise our initiative and contributions (articles, training sessions, webinars, etc) we will sometimes need your input to understand the situation and perspectives of all the people we will need to get involved.
Do you have any other questions or concerns, or would like to discuss a question above in more depth?
Ask us: Adelina@geekwhisperer.co.uk or call 07932 088821.