case study | COLLABORATIVE & MATRIXED ORGANISATIONS
answering to the switch
There’s no doubt that being a leader today is a lot harder than it was when my career began 20-plus years ago. Organisations are flatter and employees rightly have a voice to be heard. Back in the day, employees were told what to do, but it’s more complex and nuanced now.
igital may be appearing to take over the role of HR, but the truth is, people still want that facetime and to know that you’ll follow-up on their concerns and suggestions. The culture of working and the expectation of leaders is very different. This is particularly pertinent in the constant face of disruption. Disruption, as we know, can be a
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now have a role reversal going on with people coming into firms with lots of data, connections, and insight and views. If you cannot offer a platform for them to thrive on, they will go somewhere else. They don’t envisage their career being at just one organisation - we all know that.
ARTICLE BY NICK ULYCZ
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER DOMESTIC & GENERAL
Domestic & General’s cultural journey has reached a new and exciting next stage, demonstrating a clear
corporate culture, in order to foster a positive working environment for all employees.
We needed to be better organised and well equipped internally - both in terms of the quality of conversations
that were taking place and for the potential disruption of digitisation
positive energy and is often a catalyst for change, and if you compare the immediacy of our communication today to the way we communicated in the past - senior leaders dictating the route forward with powerpoint presentation - you can see how far we’ve come and why change in general is accelerating from this collaborative crucible of ideas and opinions. I don’t think there has been a time before where young people can enter the workforce, and their more experienced colleagues take heed of their opinions and capabilities. You
Domestic & General’s cultural journey has reached a new and exciting next stage. With over 2,000 employees and offices throughout the country, it has been essential for us to demonstrate a clear corporate culture, in order to foster a positive working environment for all our employees, particularly within call centres in Nottingham and Brighton, which represent the epicentre of D&G’s customer service. Conscious of the huge responsibility to effectively service 16 million customers, we realised that we needed to ensure that our corporate strategy was suitably effective. Acknowledging that the old strategy used to focus on a ‘revenue based’ approach, the company as a whole decided that this had a negative effect on employee and customer loyalty. Additionally, we identified that we had to ensure that all employees, from the CEO to the most recent recruit, understand - and crucially - act on a new corporate philosophy. This was in response to our employee survey in 2018, that tellingly found that just 20 percent of employees said they felt engaged. Clearly, this was cause for concern and we needed to address this quickly.
Employee engagement can sometimes be trivialised, with company bosses favouring more ‘immediate’ issues related to the bottom line. However, this fails to appreciate that employees are the essential lifeblood of a company and their satisfaction and engagement is inherently linked to the productivity and the success of a business. It is also the right thing to do. It’s imperative that organisations really do believe
42 | thehrdirector | DECEMBER 2019
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