12-months since speaking at our HR Breakfast we catch up with Steve Whitehead, Director of People and Equality at Citizens Advice. Last November Citizens Advice began a bold, hands-on approach to transform how they recruit, manage, develop and support their people, with particular emphasis on creating a culture that supports positive transformational change. A tall order for any organisation, but somewhat ambitious for one with over 6,500 staff, 3,300 offices and 22,000 volunteers. 12-months on we interviewed Steve Whitehead to see whether their unique approach is paying dividends and learn about the journey so far.
Q1. Faced with such a momentous task and equally ambitious goals, exactly where did you start and what were the challenges of implementing the framework?
We started by having a conversation across the organisation’s leadership, and we tried to identify how we had behaved when we had achieved our best outcomes. Looking at the key behaviours we’d exhibited when we achieved organisational successes, we found that this had been when we demonstrated an instinct that was Inventive, but also when we’d behaved in a Responsible way, in that we always remember why we are here, and when we acted in a way through our charitable work that was Generous – and we wanted of course to capture the generosity that we see across our whole service, and best exemplified by our 22,000 volunteers. We then had further conversations across the leadership team and developed a behaviours framework to better explain what the words mean. This was critical in terms of developing a common understanding of what it means to be inventive, responsible and generous. The framework was then rolled out across the whole organisation.
This next step involved having structured conversations across each team in the national charity, discussing what the words mean, and some assessment as to how well each team was doing against each of the behaviours – an honest assessment, from not even being close to being all the way there. It was important that the behaviours didn’t remain words on a page so we asked each team to develop 3 actions based around the words that would be implemented over the next 6 months.
The next, and very real challenge has been to weave the culture piece through all people management and development practice.. We are in the process of transforming this practice, and we’ve starting with performance management (in a positive sense!) as this provides the foundation for pretty much everything else. The appraisal-based methodologies weren’t working and we looked at doing something really inventive and different.
What I found in our performance development review scheme was exactly what you would expect to see in an organisation like ours – one that encouraged a performance assessment and development discussion but twice a year – so at the annual and the mid-year review, and a scheme that was sort of rooted in the past tense, in that there was a tendency to look at the past, but also looked too far to the future in that objectives were set for the following year. There was little consideration of the here and now, and little recognition that circumstances and priorities change, and that in this changing landscape, development and learning needs equally change.
So in May 2014 we introduced Talent Talk. The connotation of the term ‘performance’ can be a negative one, and we were keen to change the language and understanding of what the new approach was intended to achieve – so we landed on Talent Talk. It is a series of conversations that happen with far greater frequency than had been the case with our previous appraisal scheme – so monthly – and it supports our people to give of their best and demonstrate what their unique contribution to the organisation is. It also enables very regular assessment of priorities in a changing and dynamic world. People can have a retrospective of how things have been going, and what success looked like, and also determine what they need to stop doing or change, what they need to continue doing, and what new activity needs to start that will enable them to deliver their goals. Equally important is the assessment of how people are delivering their goals – are they doing so in an inventive, responsible, and generous way? And this approach means that we can much more regularly identify learning and development needs – the challenge there is having the infrastructure in place to respond to these in a dynamic way. What I also wanted to do was put the individual in the driving seat of the process. Performance reviews that spoon feed development interventions do not result encourage empowerment, responsibility or investment from an individual in the way we want to see.
Q2. Having looked at the 3 behaviours you identified as being the cornerstone to your existing success (I love the idea that one of them is ‘generosity’ as it’s a value so often overlooked); did you get buy-in from staff from the ‘off’, or did it take time for them to embody the new framework and put these behaviours into practice?
We were very encouraged to see that it was not received with much cynicism at all. Everyone recognised it was going to be a long-term process so it doesn’t feel ‘Faddist’. That said, we still need to maintain momentum and keep moving forward.
With Talent Talk, for example, we implemented it in the way we thought most people would find comfortable. We didn’t wait until we had a perfect model and have been seeking ongoing feedback from surveys and sampling to refine the process and have already learnt how we can improve. We’ve tried to be inventive and responsible in its implementation – and we are being generous in terms of welcoming feedback and responding to user needs in a really agile way. Talent is about identifying what a person’s individual and unique contribution to the organisation is, and supporting that. We work on the basis that everyone has talent and a unique contribution to bring. Through talent talk we want to take this to the next level, and help people to realise their full potential.
Q3. From a logistics perspective, you have thousands of staff and offices, and even more volunteers; how did you a) Make this happen and b) Build momentum c) Find out it was happening?
We have concentrated primarily on the national charity in the first instance. The initial stages took a significant amount of resource to deliver. We had all of our managers with line responsibility benefit from a development intervention that centred on giving feedback and having challenging – and inspirational conversations. Changing culture is not easy or a ‘soft’ HR thing. It’s incredibly hard to do and can deliver hard results in terms of performance and organisational improvement. Otherwise, we have tried to weave it through things that we would have been doing anyway, but doing those things better and incorporating the behaviours as we go. So with Talent Talk we have essentially coupled regular 121 meetings with what were the appraisal meetings, and at the same time put the individual member of staff in control of the process – owning it – so in fact if anything managers find the process easier to resource. The key is not necessarily to change our business as usual activities, but to look at how to deliver this in a different way, adding value to the ‘what’ through the ‘how. Asking how is the key and more importantly, how can we do this more Inventively, Responsibly and Generously?
We have measured progress through people surveys focusing questions on culture and behaviours. We really have to keep on top of this, checking it’s happening by measuring regularly and consistently seeking feedback about how it feels to work here.
We have taken the culture piece out across the broader service through a number of engagement events that we regularly hold with our bureaux network, and we have just concluded a consultation exercise with our network of 319 individual charities upon our one service strategy, and we’ve introduced the culture piece more explicitly than previously through this consultation. Early adopters have heard me speak at various events and have enthusiastically taken the ‘words’ back to their organisations very quickly, but I’m equally happy for our bureaux to go through a similar process to the one we have, and have their own conversations and develop their own values and desired behaviours Some aren’t quite as engaged yet but our success will be built on people adopting at their own speed. We want the bureaux to engage in a lot more peer to peer learning. This will help with the momentum you mentioned. We are also doing it in a more structured way through the development of our new volunteer strategy and weaving the behaviours through that will encourage engagement and buy in at an individual level.
This is an on-going process of change, and it’s great that people tell us how it is going – good or bad. We are very open and need to know how people feel so we can make it better.
Q4. Having successfully positioned your People Strategy at the very core of Citizens Advice, what effect (tangible and intangible) is at having with regards to achieving your organisational goals?
There has to be the belief that what we are doing is good, but the important test and question is what is the impact on the service to our clients? We are only part way through the journey so it will take some time to answer that question. It’s really difficult to put metrics around it and easier to rely on anecdotes at the moment. What I can say is that our services are growing and we continue to be well regarded, delivering more diverse services to our communities, both as the national charity and through the bureaux network at the front-line. It’s difficult to make a direct correlation, but what we do see is an organisation that is truly thriving. That’s the next challenge – putting the metrics around this piece, so we demonstrate very clearly the value-add.
It is on the agenda to better measure client experience and the positive impact our services have on our clients. At the end of the day, our clients are at the heart of everything we do. So we are developing better mechanisms for capturing their experiences and their outcomes through a new advice framework and through a new performance quality framework, including a new leadership assessment tool for our bureaux.
Q5. It’s a little over 12-months since you began this journey, which aspects have been the most rewarding, and the most surprising?
The most rewarding (and also surprising in some respects, given my direct or indirect experience of other organisations) has been the appetite for this and the real freedom to make the change; the leadership team in particular have taken this forward very positively and we readily see the real benefits.
That’s a really important point, actually. We have invested in leadership development in a really meaningful way. The first stage was to use the Myers Briggs Type Indicator to understand ourselves better and to do team-scaping; and more recently we have delivered a 360 degree feedback intervention across the leadership team. We also have the divisional outcomes of our people survey. So our leaders know a great deal about themselves, and are seriously developing action plans against all of this data. Our 360, developed with Shine, was framed through the culture piece, with feedback sought specifically on our core values – Inventive, Responsible and Generous.
Thanks Steve, I have found your journey inspiring. I also love the notion that the model you have created has empowerment at its core and manages to embed everything in just three key words.
