Meet the Speaker

Helen Watson is a Senior Strategist for Ogilvy Healthworld, and specialist in customer experience and learning. She will be joining us in chairing a segment on wellness & performance at our conference on October 16th, “Building the Business Case for Culture”. In preparation for our conference, we have asked Helen for a bit of insight into Ogilvy Healthworld, the usefulness of journey mapping, and the importance of wellness programs.

You have mentioned that customer journey-mapping has become a very important tool in your line of work. Can this work be translated into an employee journey-map, and if so, what insights can you share with companies to benefit their employees?

As a customer experience expert, I have many tools available to help me understand what customers are going through, and their needs, challenges, goals and barriers. These help me design services and communications tailored to meet their needs and the needs of the business. Often these tools are used purely for marketing or sales to a specific customer base. This doesn’t mean that companies can’t turn the tables and use the same tools and skills on their internal audience.

Creating empathy with your employees and seeing the world through their eyes enables you to create and build initiatives that are truly valuable and will actually deliver a return on investment.

The employee journey within an organisation starts before recruitment, and even up to and beyond an employee’s last days of employment with the organisation. It’s quite a long journey to map out in its entirety.

At Ogilvy Healthworld we take a goal-driven approach to our customer journeys as we do with our personas. This chunks up larger journeys and helps us focus on the ‘Moments of Truth’ where employees are engaging with the brand or services. Here we can identify what is happening and if there is an opportunity for the brand to improve that experience. It also helps the brand to understand if the processes and procedures that they have in place as an organisation are effective. Everything Ogilvy does is data driven not opinion based. This helps us ground our journeys in what is actually happening, rather than what a brand or business thinks.

An example of a goal could be a new employee’s first week at work. What is the actual experience they go through? You map the stages of that process out and work out what the employee is ‘Thinking, Feeling and Doing’ at those stages, and does that reflect the values of your brand.

For example, if on day one the new employee arrives keen and eager to start work, but their new laptop hasn’t arrived and no one in the team knows they are starting, then this could create a negative experience and impression of the brand for that employee. However, if this same employee had the experience of being provided with a working laptop and taken through an onboarding process, they are likely to be left with a much more positive impression of the brand.

For customer journey maps to be successful and create positive change, they have to be data-driven and reflect what is actually happening. If not, they are just the ‘program du jour’ and will be abandoned as quickly as they are created.

I have heard Ogilvy have relocated offices. We were wondering, in the new space, what has been implemented and dedicated to employee wellness?

Yes, Ogilvy Healthworld has relocated to The City/Shoreditch borders, a move away from our previous home on the South Bank in Sea Containers, but it is a move to be with our WPP Health & Wellness colleagues, GHG and Sudler & Hennessey.

Being in the hustle and bustle of the City is obviously a completely different environment compared to the relative calm of the South Bank and our new office environment is definitely a calming antidote to that.

The first thing that hits you is how natural the space is. The WPP Health & Wellness logo, along with our ethos, “Be Well, Do Well”, are mounted on a living moss wall in the reception area. It was this ethos and company culture that has shaped David Davenport-Firth’s (Managing Partner of Brain Sciences at Ogilvy Healthworld and engineer of the new office space) vision. In his words, ‘we should really practice what we preach to our clients.’

The theme of nature runs through everything within the shared space and nothing has been left to chance. Every decision from soft furnishing to the colour of the paint is evidence-based design and reflects the natural environment as many hours, weeks and months of research have gone into the thinking behind all the different elements.

David uses language such as ‘visual pace’ and ‘in harmony with all the different elements’ when talking about the space, and when you see it all in action you immediately understand what he has achieved. Just to give you some idea, he spent nine hours with the lighting company to programme the lights across the two floors, making sure it’s exactly right to create this ‘visual pace’.

From the purely functional and practical perspective, we have two clear zones: one for work and one for play. The home spaces for each agency are clearly workspaces with desks, monitors and break out meeting spaces etc. However, wherever you sit you can still see plants!

Then there is ‘The Den’. This is a large break out area where you can escape, eat your lunch, have a meeting, socialise, work, or whatever you want to do. Even the main reception area is designed to inspire creativity.

Beyond these areas, we have a meditation room, which may be considered to be one of the more unusual elements that was included, but again there is a science behind this and the space is in line with the behaviour we are trying to foster. You can’t help but be more relaxed in this room.

It doesn’t just finish with office space; there are a number of initiatives that are to start in the near future. Remember, we are only week three in the new space. There will be activities, following themes such as mental health, activity, sleep, nutrition etc., run in conjunction with experts in the field.

There’s loads more to come which I have not mentioned. David is truly passionate about this project and he definitely has some tricks up his sleeve. For me, it’s a very exciting time to be working at Ogilvy Healthworld and, being on the receiving end of these initiatives, I’m pretty excited to see what lies ahead!

What advice would you have for our delegates about creating and delivering a successful wellbeing initiative within their organisation? Do you have any experience you could share with them?

As a participant in this wellbeing initiative, I can speak to what works and what doesn’t work from an employee’s perspective. Wellbeing shouldn’t be a tick-box exercise. It’s all too easy to give your employees free coffee and fruit and tick that box as done. You won’t see any real results from this.

WPP Health and Wellness agencies are in a unique position. We are a group of progressive healthcare communications agencies and this gives us the opportunity to be more playful with the way we execute initiatives.

David’s advice is to work with what fits into your culture. The culture of your organisation is important, and your wellbeing should be in line with those values; it doesn’t have to be dry!

How we’ve translated and implemented the science behind health and wellness may not be in keeping with the values of other organisations. What’s important is interpreting the evidence in a way which is culturally appropriate for your organisation.

How will we know that this has been worth it? Well, we won’t know for a while. We have set a benchmark by running a survey at the beginning of week two; so we have a good idea of where we currently stand. We also know that some things will fail, but that is sort of the point; we need to know what does and what doesn’t work. The plan is to gain feedback from employees at regular intervals, look at the uptake of different activities, gain an understanding of what motivates people to get involved, and how we can improve in future.

Hear more from Helen and other specialists and experts speaking at our upcoming conference “Building the Business Case for Culture”.

 

Video: Bridge Talks with the Dorchester Collection

Bridge Talks is back in 2018 starting with 'A Night with the Dorchester Collection' on June 12. Eugenio Piri, Chief People and Culture Officer, opens up the doors to the amazing cultures that support their businesses. The event will look at the important role that all employees play in delivering an outstanding customer experience and share their journey to putting in place a business case for culture.

Tuesday 12th June, 6:30pm. £30.

Book your ticket

 

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…

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