Interview with Dave Shepherd of Barclays Digital Eagles

Barclays Digital Eagles are employees with a passion for online and social media who volunteer their time to explain technology to their colleagues and to the public.

Barclays Eagle Labs provides maker space facilities, office and desk rental as well as business incubation for start-ups and high growth entrepreneurs. Dave Shepherd looks after 17,000 Digital Eagles in the UK and has operational and implementation responsibility for the delivery of the Barclays Eagles Labs programme nationally.

There are currently 3 Labs situated in Bournemouth, Cambridge and Brighton with Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Oxford and Reading coming in the next few months.

How do you encourage your people to share their knowledge across your organisation?

Sharing together and collaborating together in an environment that is inclusive (and exclusive) is vital. My goal at Barclays when we developed the Digital Eagles to teach each other to “become the most digitally savvy workforce in UK Retail,” was to make it a really exclusive club, that anyone could join.

How does Barclays embrace the use of knowledge sharing technology?

We have a dedicated colleague app. It is a secure container that allows colleagues to use their own phone to receive news updates, app demos, podcasts and video streams.

What would be the one piece of advice you would give to a new leader on sharing knowledge openly?

At Barclays and with our Digital Eagles initiative, in particular, my biggest learning was the “How” you do things is just as important (and some cases more important) than the “What” you do.

Hear more from Dave as he presents on the topic ‘Connecting Culture and Vision Through Creative Thinking’ at BridgeCon 2017 on 31 January.

Interview with Catherine Allen of Ella’s Kitchen

Ella’s Kitchen makes 100% organic baby and toddler food, sold in supermarkets internationally including UK, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Netherlands, Canada and the United States.

Their mission is to improve children’s lives through developing healthy relationships with food. They recently achieved 26th place in the Sunday Times Top 100 Best Places to work (Small Company category).

How do you stay motivated in such a dynamic organisation? 

It’s easy to stay motivated in such a dynamic organisation – I would be bored in a slow paced environment!  The passion, pace and people at Ella’s make this a  really motivating place to be.  ‘We Want to Win’ is one of our values and this really lives and breathes here – in my role I am constantly challenging myself and my team to make Ella’s an even better place to work.  This year we have done lots of new things that have motivated me like launching volunteering days for Ella’s team, introducing a Thinking Differently programme (We Think Differently is another one of our values), getting into the Best Companies best 100 – the list goes on!  The major driver for me is contributing to a Values led, purpose driven organisation that is truly making a difference to developing children’s healthy relationships with food.

What are your challenges in managing people?

I want to carry on improving Ella’s as a place to work. This means I am very ambitious for what myself and my team achieve and I rely on my team to feedback when ideas or timelines are a little too ambitious!

What would be the one piece of advice you would give to a new leader on engaging their employees?

Really get to know your employees as individuals. It’s the only way to find out what motivates them and how to personally engage them.

Catherine will be one of our panellists discussing, ‘Let’s build great places to work’ at BridgeCon2017

An engaged team can achieve great things…

By Catherine Allen, Head of Keeping People Happy, Ella’s Kitchen

Ella’s has delivered double-digit growth every year for the last 10 years, achieves a partners score of over 90% and has the highest consumer loyalty in the category.  Our employee net promoter score is improving with the last survey coming in at 68%.

Last year we entered the Best Companies awards coming 25th and certified as a B Corp.

I am convinced that the happiness of our team influences our commercial success. There’s no magic formula to creating a great place to work. But I do have 3 top tips that have worked well at Ella’s.

  1. Give your team a reason to feel engaged and proud. We keep the team close to our mission to ‘Improve children’s lives through developing healthy relationships with food’. A great example of this is employees helping on Ella’s funded school trips to a local farm and market garden.  We also have clear and simple values which live and breathe in everything we do at Ella’s.
  2. Have great leaders and managers. As all HR professionals know, our efforts are useless if leaders and managers are misaligned with the mission and values, or are poor people managers. ‘My manager’ is the most common reason people leave companies, so we help leaders and managers to role model the values via a bespoke management programme and invite 360 feedback on how well they live and encourage the values.
  3. Treat people as individuals. I know this seems easy in a smaller team like Ella’s, but all companies should beware of broad brush initiatives which assume everyone in a demographic group (eg mothers!) has identical needs. Our 2 surveys a year and our Show and Tell (employee forum) help us in understanding the team better, but last year we were early adopters of the Open Blend Method – a tech based coaching approach focused on open communication with leaders. Through leaders understanding their team members better, we’ve seen a measurable increase in the happiness of individuals.

Creating a happy and healthy workforce

By Charley Maher, Managing Director, Bristol Wessex Billing Services

Charley Maher

I created a vision for ‘Health & Wellbeing’ for my business a year ago and since then, my team have exceeded my expectations in terms of what we have achieved.

BWBSL is jointly owned by Wessex Water and Bristol Water and are responsible for the customer journey for their 1.5 m customers across the South West. Their customers rely on BWBSL to provide them with an efficient and helpful service.

I knew that people were core to the success of the business and wanted to ensure that my team of 380 people were not only focused on providing an excellent service experience to customers but I also wanted to create initiatives to support a healthy and happy team to enable brilliant employee engagement.

Our health and wellbeing initiatives over the last year have touched everyone across the business.  Each month is themed and a key objective for the H&W charter is to ensure that my entire team are happy and healthy at work. Mental health is high on my agenda too.  Interestingly, I was really pleased to read that ‘Mental Health Awareness Week’ in 2016 focused on highlighting the impact of relationships on our mental health. The charity has asked people to commit to maintaining good relationships with friends, family and colleagues, which they believe is fundamental to our health and happiness.

We took this objective to a different level at BWBSL and set about creating stronger relationships in the workplace both within teams and cross-functionally.  New working groups and project teams were set up to pilot and launch the monthly health and wellbeing initiatives and in our recent employee engagement survey, there was overwhelming feedback from team members talking about improved relationships at work and how well team members support and help each other more than ever.  I also asked my learning and development team to design and launch a mental health awareness training programme, making it available to all team members.  This has received great feedback and increased levels of empathy demonstrated across the business.

The last year has been full of great achievements, in 2015 the business won ‘Best Place to Work’ at the UK Customer Experience Awards and earlier this year we were recognised with a total of four awards at the UK Employee Experience Awards, however, a happy and healthy, engaged team is by far the best achievement of all.

It’s a Wonderful Leader

By David D’Souza, Head of Engagement, London, CIPD

David D'Souza

If you were unlucky enough to have my company over a drink in the run up to Christmas you would be assailed/assaulted by my views on why ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ is one of the greatest films ever. More specifically you would have had to put up with me talking about the character of George Bailey and how perfectly he is played by Jimmy Stewart.

Jimmy Stewart had an incredible career that included a number of exceptional films including Rope, Rear Window and Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Throughout them he embodies a charisma, charm and vulnerability that draws audiences and people to him. The character of George Bailey sees Stewart embody a sense of goodness, purpose, ethical commitment and humanity that is a lesson to any aspiring leader.

In a couple of interviews from 1973 Stewart talked about acting in a way that that I think applies wonderfully well to leadership.

Stewart described the art of acting as ‘the opportunity to create moments’ that had real resonance. Moments that stick with people for years and have a profound positive impact. He talked about the fact that people didn’t necessarily recall the titles of his films or the plots, but would often tell him that they had seen a film years ago and one scene had remained with them. His duty and role was simply to ‘prepare yourself as best as you can to make these moments happen’. They didn’t always happen, but when they did they mattered.

‘To think that I had been part of creating a moment that this man had liked and had remembered for 20 years, that was very special to me’. The role of a visionary leader is to draw people to them through engaging their heads and hearts. The very best leaders create environments that are memorable for the strength of culture and sense of purpose. They paint a possible future that people want to step towards and they understand that isn’t just a process, but an involving journey.

Stewart described a director asking for the same scene to be reshot 30 times. The actors eventually asked the director what was wrong. The director replied ‘You are perfect, but I’m just waiting for something to happen.’. It’s the same with leadership, it isn’t about the process – it is about the impact. The deep impact that you can have on another person, the kind of thing that resonates through the years. They don’t happen all the time and you need to respect and understand that. Good leaders just make these moments happen more often – and part of that is by embodying a movement towards a compelling vision.

When asked why characters he played were so timeless Stewart gave a lovely summary of what we might now term ‘authentic leadership’.

‘I’m a pretty good example of human frailty, I don’t really have all the answers, I have very few of the answers, but for some reason I make it. We get across that river’. Whatever the vision is, the best leaders help their people get across that river.

A final thought:

When Stewart started his career employees really were treated as assets. He was traded by his studio to another for 7 stunt horses.

Here is Stewart leading the way…

Transforming a 5-star into a Stand Out

The count down is definitely on to BridgeCon2015 and the preparations for a great few days are well underway. If you have yet to book your ticket, I encourage you to do so as it helps the Bridge Team to ensure that all arrangements are fine-tuned to each delegate’s requirements.

Each week I have put the spotlight on various speakers presenting throughout Day One and today it is my absolute pleasure to focus on Simon Lewis and the Eau-mazing case study that he will bring to life at the conference. As our final keynote speaker of the day, Simon will take delegates across the Atlantic (though not literally!) and share the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa brand, people and culture journey.

Having been personally involved in this transformation project, and having spent a great deal of time both at the hotel and amongst what I consider to be some of the best hoteliers in the industry, I know that this talk is one not to miss. Simon is a true visionary and I feel honoured that he has taken time from his incredibly busy schedule to come share this story with BridgeCon delegates.

Simon leads the charge for employee engagement and building a culture that truly reflects the brand values and ultimately creates a customer experience that leaves hotel guest with Goosebumps. This is a good thing as ‘Goosebumps’ just happens to be one of the Eau values. Not only did he and his team transform a hotel, they shaped an industry by setting the creativity benchmark that many only aspire to.

What is the BridgeCon hackathon?

Over the past weeks I have been individually highlighting the amazing line up of speakers at this year’s BridgeCon. Hence, in the Scoop this week I wanted to take a different direction and put the spotlight on the Day Two: Hackathon, which I am really excited to be a part of. For those that are asking ‘what is a Hackathon?’ I want to share with you both the concept and the desired output. Let’s first start with the ‘what’.

A Hackathon (also known as a hack day, or hackfest) is an event in which a group of creative minds and others involved in idea development and innovation collaborate intensively on a given project. A Hackathon can typically last between a day, and in some cases even run for a week if the puzzle is complex enough. Some Hackathons are intended simply for educational or social purposes, although in many cases, the goal is to create new ways of working.

Traditionally, this method was seen as being used in software development in which computer programmers and designers could focus on hacking away until they created something that had not yet been developed. One of the Bridge values is Innovation, so we thought, ‘How amazing would it be to get a group of leaders from various organisations together and apply this creative power to developing the next best strategy in creating happiness in the workplace?’

On the day we will form four working groups and participants will share ideas and put in place their desired strategy. Throughout the day, each team will have the opportunity to spend some time with our carefully chosen panel of experts on Creativity and Behaviour, Strategy and Campaign, Cost and Budget, and Purpose and Reason. With each visit, the team will gain insight that they will need to carefully hack through, and apply this thinking to their strategy. The day will end with each group presenting their ideas to all hackers, and as one team we will close the Hackathon with the best of the best.

This is a day not to be missed and I am pleased to say that with the number of participants growing fast, the diversity of thinking is proving to be exciting.

Talent management and mindfulness

Momentum is building as BridgeCon 2015 comes one week closer to realisation. Last night Bridge hosted another BridgeTalks event, and the topic of ‘Mindfulness’ gave me some interesting perspective on the Talent Management stream during the afternoon of October 14th. I found myself delving deeper into the true importance of the role of mindful leaders in the development and motivation of talent within organisations.

Talent is something that often needs to be nurtured, and the placement of the right people in the correct roles requires careful consideration. Whether it be a new starter or an existing member of the senior leadership team, people need to feel supported and connected to their environment. As a more mindful leader, it is within our power to focus more on the detail required to ignite the true potential that exists within our employees.

The learning and growth environment that we create forms the building blocks to true innovation, empowerment, empathy and all the required values that ensure internal and external customers are experiencing service excellence at every turn. Nurture or nature – talent needs focus if it is to be fully realised and utilised as a key function of the employer brand. It needs to be marketed to and given a clear personality and direction.

What I love about all three case studies in this stream is just how they communicate the true vision of the business and the importance that they (the employees) play in its success. Talent must be held in the highest regard as from this pool we should develop our next leaders. It may take many forms and come in the most unlikely of places, and hence the role of a mindful leader needs to be creative in their approach to discover it.

As I mentioned in the last Scoop, the real challenge of the day will be just choosing which of the two streams you attend. As far as challenges go it is a good one to have. I look forward to meeting you there.

Customer experience = engagement + employee

As BridgeCon2015 fast approaches, my attention has been turned once again to our fantastic line up of speakers. This is also where delegates will have the opportunity to make some interesting decisions, as on offer are two outstanding streams of speakers and presentations. I know that some days I wish I could clone myself, and the afternoon of October 14th I am sure this will be the feeling for most delegates.

This week employee engagement is on the top of my mind as I am sure it is on most of yours. The connection that we as Living Brand leaders have with our own organisations often reflects the drive that we have to put in place an environment which allows not only our employees to grow but the culture to reflect the personality of our customer promise.

These are two of the most powerful words in driving an amazing customer experience: ‘engagement’ and ’employee’. When flipped and combined they can create magic both for the individual and the business. However this does not happen without careful consideration and best practice on what is required to ignite and engage people in the workplace.

This stream is one not to be missed (hence having to make interesting decisions on the day – with both Employee Engagement and Talent Management equally as strong in terms of speaker expertise from big name companies). Tiffany, Jamie and Niall all bring with them a wealth of experience and practical insight into what works and also the challenges to ensure that your focus stays on track. Any successful engagement programme needs to truly bring to life the company promise and culture and be the foundation of your employer brand in the future.

Two powerful words create one more powerful combination and seriously one of the most rewarding journeys that I believe a leader can take in their career. I have had the pleasure to see truly empowering transformation projects with some amazing and inspiring people at the helm. That is why I am so excited by this conference as within this stream and throughout the day we all have the chance to learn and grow by sharing ideas with others.

It may all start with an idea but it is truly about how we take that idea and turn it into a successful solution.

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