“We weren’t a bad employer, we just didn’t care enough.” Carl Fillery’s assessment of Civil Service and public sector membership association Boundless (previously known as the Civil Service Motoring Association) may well strike a chord with business leaders, and their frustrated HRDs. “People weren’t motivated,” adds Fillery. “It was grey and flat.”
But Fillery isn’t the kind of person to be content with ‘not bad’, or ‘grey and flat’ for that matter. So in 2014 he staged a takeover from the incumbent CEO (he himself was in the COO and deputy CEO role at the time). His vision: to transform the organisation from a loss-maker characterised by a culture of fear and blame to a human-centred, profitable and sustainable one.
It’s working. Boundless, which rebranded in May this year to reflect the organisation’s fresh enthusiasm, has turned around £3 million of losses into a surplus in just 12 months. And they haven’t done it by cutting costs; in fact, 10% of 2015’s turnover was reinvested, and 20% will be in 2016. “It would have been easy to rip out the cost, but what would that have meant for the future?” points out Fillery. So, how did the organisation do it? Fillery and his operations director Ailsa Suttie, who also leads people and culture, share some of their key lessons.
Be human
“We just needed to be more human,” sums up Suttie of the need for change. “It’s about clarity and being clear with people. Be respectful, praise them where they need it, help them remove blockages, help them grow.”
“I don’t distinguish when talking about people, whether it’s the people we are selling to or the people who work for us, they are all people,” adds Fillery. “If we were talking about marketing, we’d be saying: what’s the customer journey? What’s every touchpoint? It should be the same with our people.”
Central to being human is getting rid of business jargon. “I was fed up with corporate speak,” Fillery recalls. “If I can’t understand it, how can anyone else? We decided we were going to treat people as humans. Talk to them. Get them involved. Tell them what’s going on. Have a simple plan, and don’t get distracted. Say: ‘Here’s the vision, now colour it in.’”
Play to your strengths
Boundless embraces strengths-based performance management, focusing on what individuals bring to the organisation, and outcomes rather than inputs. Everyone now has a job description of only one sentence, keeping things simple. Suttie introduced the strengths-based approach with the executive team, before cascading it down the organisation. “It wasn’t easy to begin with,” she admits. “People were having to be very honest about themselves, their capabilities and their desires.”
But the approach started to pay off when, six months into it, the senior management team were invited to present new strategy ideas to the leadership. Fillery ended up committing £200,000 to an idea to expand into wholesale. “The vision and the responsibilities we were starting to have an impact,” he recalls. “Using our strengths raised everyone up to the roles they should be doing and highlighted who our next leaders should be.” “We gave birth to an innovation team that day,” adds Suttie. “We have an environment now where no matter how ‘out there’ an idea is, you’re welcome to pitch it, whereas before you might have been viewed as rocking the boat.”
What is critical, Fillery adds, is that these new ideas didn’t need new people to generate them. Although there have been some staff cuts, the turnaround has not been achieved through a wave of new hires or by bringing in consultants. “People think that real change can only happen when you bring fresh people in, but if you look at the strengths within the organisation and flip that switch, it happens much more quickly,” Fillery says. “And it’s more meaningful and stable. While some people did leave, we have people who have been here 25 years who are now the stars in innovation.”
Rip up process
For Fillery, the “number one thing” was “ripping up process”. Suttie, who worked as an HRD for many years before moving into the operation’s director role, feels the same, joking she doesn’t know “how [she] survived in HR for so long” given her hatred of process: “I don’t like process for process’s sake and bogging people down in it.”
One of the processes to go has been the overly complex performance management programme. “Neither of us could understand it,” says Suttie. “You can’t go through 27 pages of behaviours once a year and expect people to flourish.” Replacing it is a real-time measurement system which means never having to do reviews again. The live dashboard provides real-time stats on four measures: personal performance, organisational temperature, collaborative working and overall business performance.
“Personal performance in real time means people meeting objectives as they go along,” Suttie explains. “They set their own activities against outcomes and log progress. It also works at a team level, measuring how people are using their own strengths and those of others.” ‘Organisational temperature’ uses questions which relate back to the six areas Boundless measures culturally: respect, praise, growth, strengths, blockages and clarity. “It gives us a picture of how people are feeling and where in the organisation they are, and also a sense of what needs attention,” says Suttie.
Leaders need love too
Having attended the CIPD conference last year to talk about Boundless’s journey, Fillery had a revelation: “It is leaders that need to be educated, not just HR people. When I think about my predecessor, Ailsa wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of driving this culture through.” He adds: “There’s a bit I need to do now, to help leaders embrace this.”
He recognises that being a membership organisation, with members rather than investors being the key stakeholders, Boundless is in an easier position than many more short-term-orientated companies to drive through a genuine culture change. “The beauty of our organisation is we are not living one quarter to the next and we can have a long-term plan,” he says. However, he adds that the emotional attachment of his external stakeholders means “you have to win hearts and minds”, which presents different issues.
It’s about challenging “the skill-sets of the people we put in charge”, he adds. “I can’t see a board saying: ‘We want a people-centric CEO.’ I hope that changes. But it’s not as simple as being sociable. It’s about caring about people and truly listening.”
And what if an HRD is not blessed with a people-centric CEO? That relies on a leader having enough self-awareness to step back, Fillery believes. “You don’t necessarily need to have this ‘wonderful character’, but you need to commit,” he says. “The leader has to say: ‘It’s not natural for me, but I empower you [HR]. I will take a step back, I won’t screw it up and you can roll me out at the right points.’ That’s still committing.”
