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We can now offer, to our clients, a broader opportunity...
It's great. It's the first one of these I've been to.
The location's fantastic and there's an excellent group of people here.
The key differential between success and failure in business is your people.
Over a bacon sandwich it's amazing what you can find out.
I think an early start is great for most people.
Everyone wants to know about interim these days.
Whether you're wanting to be an interim yourself or hire interim talent.
One of the main strands for marketing within BIE is to hold events, branded BIE,
where we get interesting speakers to come along.
And it's not about us, it's about the event and what the attendees can get from it.
But from our point of view, it is to engage more with our clients and potential clients,
because obviously it's not just about recruiting them,
it's how you engage with them and then, of course, it's retention.
The people we've got along today, we've got a mix.
So we're going to get the perspective of a
chief exec, an HR Director and a Finance Director.
I hope that the guests will take away some soundbytes
of creating a culture within their organisations
which will enable them to not only retain talent within their organisation,
but also create a pull into their business
which will enable them to hire stronger individuals from their competitors.
With Archer Mathieson, functionally focussed
within both search and interim, on HR, Finance and Supply Chain & Procurement,
whereas BIE is multi-functional and multi-specialist.
As you can imagine, this has led to a number of common clients.
For both candidates and clients, I think the question has been,
"Are these businesses complementary or are they in competition?"
For candidates, whereas previously you might have registered with both businesses,
we can now give you a joined up experience
and discuss a broader range of opportunities.
I hope that you find this morning productive
and certainly any constructive feedback will be gratefully received.
Jonathan, can I hand over to you, please?
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and first of all let me just add to Rob's thanks to
welcome you all here.
I hope you've had a lovely breakfast so far. To pick up on the title of today's events:
"Attracting and Engaging Talent", that's what you saw on the invitations.
We've established three leading members of commerce
who will be answering questions over the next hour.
On the panel, we have Leo McKee who's the CEO of BrightHouse,
we have Carol Frost, who's the HR Director of Centrica Energy,
and Richard Roberts, the Director of Finance at UK Power Networks.
A quick round of applause to our three.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome on stage, Leo McKee.
We are a company, creating 100 managers a year.
And there are certain companies in the UK
that we target, to be honest,
because of their culture, and there are others that we'd be less likely to take people from.
One of the reasons I enjoy working with BIE
is that the key players in BIE understand our business and what we're about
so it saves a lot of time
because the very important thing is that they understand our people and what we're about.
I think when you do that, so for example,
when I was recruiting an HR Director,
the headhunter said to me, "How many people do you want to look at?"
I said, "One. On the basis that you know the business,
by all means put up a strong man or woman, but one."
It's interesting you talk about that because,
just looking at the things you've achieved in your career,
it does appear within there, that there are
opportunities for financial reward or financial incentives, so it does play a part.
Absolutely. Totally. A number of years ago
when I worked for Levi Strauss, we targeted Marks & Spencer.
I remember we sought to recruit a buyer from Marks & Spencer.
We offered the individual a pay increase of about 50% and to my amazement, he didn't come.
The reason he didn't come is because he said,
"I like the people I work with."
I think a CEO has to put the development and retention of talent at the top of his agenda,
at the very top of his agenda and has to make people feel that they're part of the company.
A number of factors play a part there.
We've said remuneration, it is important, but I think that communication is very important.
If the people in my business can feel engaged and respected
I'm likely to hold them longer and they're likely to be more productive.
The most important is that people feel part of something.
That they're proud to be associated with the team.
If you think about it, my aspiration is that
being at my company passes the "cocktail party test".
I can remember, many years ago,
I've got a brother who's got a flat in Chelsea, he's a bit of a poser.
- And you're not? - I'm not, no. Hopefully not, anyway.
Put it this way, he wears bangles and baubles and I don't.
I was at Tom's party and somebody came up to me and said,
"You're Tom's older brother, aren't you?"
I said yes. And he said, "What do you do?"
And I said, "I work with Levi Strauss."
He said, "Levi Strauss? Wow!" Right?
And when I went to Woolworth's and people said to me,
"What do you do?", I said, "I'm an accountant."
Which of course, was a lie.
I was in HR.
So it's really, if people can identify with
the brand and be proud of the brand.
So therefore, the companies which are best at retention in the UK...
I can think of a business whose remuneration policy is to pay upper decile plus 15%.
They don't necessarily have the best retention.
People have to feel that they are treated fairly and competitively and so on,
but I think it's a mistake to assume that it's the only or indeed the primary factor.
Ladies and gentlemen, Carol Frost.
Carol, let's talk about the specifics of Centrica
and how you attract and engage talent
and how you feel that that is unique to your company.
What we've done is develop something very simple.
Other companies, our hypothesis was you have a shopping list of values.
The "CE Way" is high performance, pioneering spirit and safety.
It's really embedded in everything we do.
So Centrica Energy we think is quite special from that perspective.
We're not talking generally about people doing amazing, world-shattering things.
We're talking about asking people whether they can do things better,
whether they can do things differently, and whether they can do things more safely.
So, actually, that's pretty simple, which was the idea to start with.
It's quite difficult to be cynical in the face of those really simple concepts.
Role models are really, really important.
And we've had a process where we've been encouraging
people to give one another feedback and talk about,
"When you did that, this is the impact you had on me."
Some people find that a little bit American, but other people quite like that.
And what we've found is that almost there's a peer pressure.
We have three different parts of our business.
We have Oil & Gas, Power Generation and Trading.
Actually, the "CE Way" is slightly different
in each one of those businesses because that's appropriate.
So in the Trading business, they're not in a high-hazard environment
so safety for them means trading safely:
making sure there aren't breaches of process.
Whereas as you can imagine, in the power business, safety is entirely different.
So it's not one size fits all. It does flex, if you like,
dependent on the business and the context.
That's what makes it live and makes it real for people.
Psychometric testing: good, bad or indifferent?
Well, I think it depends how you use it.
So, the way that I've described it, we have a psychometric that helps us
understand people's attitudes to our "CE Way" elements.
We're not using it as a cutoff. You know, "Safety, you didn't reach a 5, so you can't...
But we're using it as an indicator so that
we can test at interview whether actually what came out in the psychometric is right.
So, what is your attitude to safety? Is it a strength?
Is it something that you don't think is important?
Or is it something that you haven't really thought about before?
And so, through the interview process, we can test.
Psychometrics help us to understand people better.
What we want to do is we want to build our culture.
We want to bring people into the organisation
who are going to reinforce our culture not dilute it.
So we would almost be foolish not to take notice of that.
Carol Frost, thank you very much.
Please welcome on stage, Richard Roberts.
Thank you very much indeed.
We'll get to how you best feel talent can be engaged and addressed as well.
But you're the one who has to control the expectations of not only the shareholders,
but also the workers, the employees, as well.
We always want to make sure we've aligned the interests of the owners
with the interests of the managers and the staff.
So we spent a lot of time at the beginning of 2011,
reviewing and re-implementing our incentive mechanism
to make sure that it was going to generate performance
in the areas where we needed performance to improve.
And the great thing is that, on the back of introducing a new framework
with more powerful payments that were available for really stretched performance,
through the year we were able to see performance turn around very significantly.
Probably, by far and away, the biggest annual level of improvement that I've seen
in all the time I've been in the business.
Very much a case of spending money to save money?
Absolutely. I obviously do control the purse strings
and our HR Director is a frequent visitor into my office.
We're a business that has a £6bn asset base:
substations, overhead lines, underground cables.
Actually the most important asset that we've got
in the business are the people that work for us.
So we've actually got a people asset management plan
as well as a network asset management plan.
I'm in regular dialogue with the HR Director
to make sure that the things we want to do to improve the workforce,
to improve engagement levels, to train them better,
that there is the funding and the budget.
So this year's an interesting example.
We've been cutting the costs quite significantly in the business.
But for training and development, we actually found another £1m to put into the budget.
And we've been out and about communicating
that and making that really visible to staff
to demonstrate that although we're always
looking to be more efficient, in the areas where we should be investing, we are.
And finally, from the point of view purely of the FD now,
perhaps you can give us three examples from small, middle and large-scale business,
what is your recipe for success in each of those?
Actually, I think there are common themes there.
OK, small businesses, they have to tailor their approaches,
but things like engaged employees, strong teams,
are as important, if not maybe more important for a small business
where you can't afford to carry any passengers
than they maybe are for a big business like ours
where with 5,000 employees you can carry a few passengers.
So I think those things are as relevant
for the small businesses as they are for the large one.
On the medium businesses, you've obviously got
a bit more budget to spend on these training and development areas.
And for the larger businesses, I think again
it's making sure that you're investing that money in a sensible way
because with large workforces there are
many different requirements that those workforces have got,
lots of different skill sets that need to be
brought along, developed, trained and everything.
So it's having a properly joined-up approach
to make sure you're getting the best *** for your buck.
Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Roberts!
There's a lot of talk at the moment around
the huge levels of change impacting on all organisations -
social, technological, economic -
I'm interested in what do you think will be the biggest influences
on your people strategies over the next 3-5 years?
We have a growth agenda, we have a very aggressive growth agenda,
which requires people with particular skill sets
and very niche skill sets in some instances.
Our biggest challenge is around getting the right people, the best people and enough people.
To get managers to think beyond technical skills; to think about culture.
Just building on that, our demographic challenges in the energy industry are fairly significant
and most of you will have heard of those.
We have a significant number of people retiring and not that many coming through.
So we're grappling with, how do we bring those people through quickly?
To get away from the mindset that you have to have done this for 5 years
and that for 10 years before you can take on the next job.
How can we take much bigger bets on people and move people through their careers,
but still have the governance in place
in a high-risk industry that we don't get ourselves
and the people that we are moving through their careers into any difficulty?
And there are quite a lot of tensions in those challenges that we're just working through.
In terms of engaging and particularly retaining talent,
do you make any special efforts to identify those with potential and career-path them?
So actively looking to career-path people
to give them the experiences they need for other roles?
I think it's absolutely vital that communication is continuous.
The leadership group have to be behavioural role models.
And therefore those who emulate the desired behaviours,
in terms of listening, energy, customer focus and so on, we seek to identify.
So your point about constantly on the quest for internal talent and how you nurture it
is very important, because it's too easy to go outside and bring people in.
If you're looking to evolve the culture of a business
from an entrepreneur-led business to a business that is growing up and has governance,
what advice could you provide me?
It's really important that as the business grows
that you start introducing different frameworks to support that
and to put better governance arrangements in place.
I started out working in a small business of less than 100 people and there was really
no formal governance, no formal reporting of performance or anything.
As you grow and become bigger, then making sure
that you've got more formal frameworks of developing and training staff,
engaging them in the performance that you're looking for from the business,
I think those are the sorts of things you should be focussing on.
Leo, Carol and Richard, on behalf of us all,
thank you very much indeed for your time this morning.
It was very interesting. Even though it was three different functional areas,
they all came out with very similar views,
that it's about culture, attitude, developing our people.
As a hard-nosed, commercial Finance Director, what I want to know is
what's the bottom line impact
in terms of the policies and seeing that through to fruition?
It's been a very useful event, particularly for someone in finance in a small company,
looking to glean insights into talent management, so it's been very helpful.