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we operate. The best way to do this? By talking to them face-to-face - all 1,500 of them! Our CEO, Richard, has an exceptional level of commercial expertise, and perhaps unusually for a numbers man, he is very people-focused - so we developed a bold plan for him and the leadership team to spend four months on the road meeting our colleagues. We embarked on a tour of our 62 sites across the UK, holding full-day sessions where we shared our vision for the business and invited honest feedback. We deliberately chose informal, interactive group settings to encourage conversations and avoid lectures. The key to success for these sessions was complete openness. Colleagues may feel uncomfortable giving feedback in front of their local managers and in turn those managers may feel defensive. To alleviate this, we created ‘safe spaces’ by holding separate sessions for managers first, where we listened to their challenges and reassured them that colleague challenges wouldn’t reflect negatively on them. At every session we began by being frank about the challenges the business faced and the mistakes we had made in the past. This helped break down the ‘us and them’ barriers, and explained we were drawing a line under the historically siloed mentality and the ‘command and control’ approach. These sessions provided us with an unprecedented level of detail on what our teams think, and how they interact with us, each other and the customer. The feedback was constructive, eye-opening and invaluable - and could never have been garnered through an engagement survey or similar. We experienced so much from being there in person, and our teams welcomed the direct communication. We quickly discovered there was a perception among colleagues that leadership teams did not always deliver on their promises, and there wasn’t real belief in the company’s five core values: work together, be better, be innovative, do the right thing, trust each other. From the feedback we created a list of more than 600 action points from the different events and categorised them under each of the core values - demonstrating how they can be brought to life and act as an operational framework.
This is an ongoing process, sponsored and overseen by individual executive team members, and we regularly update our colleagues on progress. They range from completely reviewing our reward strategy through to installing microwaves and fridges
in vehicle cabs, fixing property issues at depots and one of the most popular - introducing Bibby Distribution-branded reusable water bottles to reduce waste. It’s an easy ‘do the right thing’ task that has had an overwhelmingly positive response from across the business. Sometimes it’s the simple things that have the greatest impact. Other actions validated existing decisions. For example, we had recruited a new Head of Talent to lead on professional development. They ensure there are clear routes for internal progression and promotion for existing staff, and that we give new colleagues the best possible start with an outstanding induction.
which for an industry that is 98 percent male and has little diversity was a fantastic result. The plan now is to roll this out at pace to develop our own drivers of the future. It’s helping us tackle the driver shortage challenge. It’s also part of our wider roadmap developed by executive team member, and Inclusion and Diversity Champion, Elspeth Doyle, to enable us to more effectively reflect the society in which we operate.
We were ready to begin
‘flipping the pyramid’. This meant fully understanding the
challenges that we and our colleagues really faced so we could act. At the same time, we needed to prove to our colleagues we would significantly improve how we operate
Having flipped the pyramid, it was vital that we equipped our supervisory and management teams with the skills to support and enable their teams, and lead in a way that will deliver our vision for the business. As a result, we have already launched two apprenticeship programmes built around our values to do this. The company has always encouraged fundraising for charity, with the parent Group matching funding. It’s a popular initiative that has raised over £10 million for good causes since 2007. To support this, we created a charity committee to support teams at a local level who are building strong links with nearby charities and not-for-profit organisations. This encourages volunteering and fundraising. In a geographically diverse, multi-site business where the majority of our colleagues are ‘non-desk’ based, communication is a major challenge. Most of our employees do not have work email addresses - they are remote workers, who are usually on the road. Clearly, we needed to engage effectively with them, share our vision, values, common purpose is paramount. Drivers told us that they like their independence, but they want to know that they are part of something and have the respect and support of the wider business.
Since the roadshows at the end of last year, we have further simplified our operational structure to more effectively encourage collaboration and accountability. Significantly, especially in terms of the national driver shortage, we created a cross-departmental working group that has developed our Apprenticeship Scheme, partially funded through the Apprenticeship Levy. The 13- month scheme sees students achieve specialist driving licences initially, and then join the business as drivers to complete the remainder of the programme. Our first cohort started training in Milton Keynes in March 2019 with nine trainees with a diverse range of ages and backgrounds - both gender and ethnicity -
We are just over a year into our three-year journey of change, but the positive impact on productivity, employee engagement and team spirit are evident already in the improvements across our KPI measures on our balanced scorecard. Driver turnover has already decreased by ten percent and vacancies have reduced by 75 percent. Colleague feedback overall is that it’s a completely different working atmosphere. We’re communicating more and we continue to actively listen. The journey to being the employer of choice continues.
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FOR FURTHER INFO
www.bibbydist.co.uk
DECEMBER 2019 | thehrdirector | 41
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