For a FTSE 100 company, with revenues surpassing £7 billion per year and employing more than 2,000 people in the UK alone, Sage - the global accountancy and payroll software firm - is as invisible in London's busy Gray's Inn Road as it is non-existent on most people's consciousness. Despite occupying the same trading plinth as technology behemoths BT, Vodafone, Microsoft and Oracle, as bricks and mortar you are highly likely to walk past it. And yet its anonymity feels a lot deeper than this. Wise-sounding though this company name is, why should any graduate choose Sage as their dream employer when the likes of Apple, Google, eBay, HP, Dell or SAP far more immediately leap to mind?
As its HR director Adrienne McFarland beckons me into a rather sober office (she immediately implores me to visit Sage's rather more spectacular HQ in Newcastle which she affectionately calls Tracey Island), I do not have too long to wait before my answer comes. McFarland is one impressive HRD.
'My main remit - my objective," she corrects herself, "is for Sage to be a Most Admired employer, to enter Sunday Times lists and be on people's lips." But while it may sound like the grand, unachievable ambition of many an HRD, McFarland, who has just completed her first year in the job, has already achieved a tremendous amount in her short tenure, and all crucially with this end outcome in mind.
"We've grown rapidly in the past few years," she explains, (Sage has bought 17 companies in the past three years) "and in the early days, a cohesive people vision has not been the business's priority. Until now, that is ... "
Since taking on the top post last year, - although she has actually been with the company since 2001 - McFarland says her priority has been "fixing the basics," and creating a sense of an internal brand first. "We wanted to define what it is that makes us special and, overwhelmingly, I believed it was our people, interesting work, the challenges we overcome and our community feel. But I couldn't translate this externally at careers fairs until our internal culture was codified first."
'Codified' is a rare slip of the tongue for McFarland, who confesses to having a hatred of HR-gobbledegook. "I want to avoid HR jargon; HR is really all about being very simple," she says, and this approach is apparent in the way she has tackled the Sage brand.
"The area I've really wanted to concentrate on is management development," she says. "We have a middle management population of about 300, and these are the people who needed to live my Sage vision of trust, integrity, simplicity, innovation and agility." At the same time, she has made it her priority not to 'brand-wash' these people out of all their best behaviours: "I wanted managers to lead, and construct leadership around a 'Sage Way', but at the same time, I think it's important we don't squeeze out their own styles. This is why we have called our programme, Enable."
These possibly conflicting aims are actually working well. A five-day residential course, complete with executive buy-in (at least one member from Sage's top 10 team talks about their own leadership at the event), is the structure of the course. "It's very important our managers have their own way. We don't want to manufacture people," says McFarland. "It's about them finding their own way but within set parameters." Absence rates among these managers has already been cut from 3.77% to 2.75% (accounting for a saving of more than £400,000), promotions within this group are up by 19%, and, more importantly for McFarland, she notes that 73% of the workforce now say Sage has a coaching culture - up from a lowly 58% before the project first started.
So far 260 of the 300 have attended the course (one of which is run per month). A further 73 should have completed it by the end of this month. An unanticipated success is that managers have formed informal buddy-groups to keep in touch with each other, and share solutions to different issues. And the programme doesn't finish here. "The real aim of Enable is to move managers through to our next new programme, Inspire," says McFarland. "What we felt was missing was a type of development for all staff to get to the very top in the company. We've worked with Lane4 to develop a programme about what makes a great leader, and this course will last six months."
So far a pilot with 13 managers already identified as potential talent are testing the programme, (six of whom have already been promoted because of it), and the plan is to roll it out to another 10-12 people each year. And, says McFarland, it is different from typical succession and talent management reviews: "Our problem is that we're a decentralised business, with lots of different silos. I actually hate succession plans. People and business change all the time; the two are linked, and I prefer to find people who want to be stretched."
But the biggest brand-building component of her tenure, she believes, is yet another project - this time one that does not just develop the top talent, but actually engages the rest of the staff in the business. "It's called Aspire, and it completes the triple," says McFarland. "Aspire is a totally new idea in Sage. It's a system of practical learning and support - an HR toolkit - for people who want to make their first move into management."
Aspire was born out of the fact many first-time managers in Sage are actively promoted from within, but most come from IT or technical backgrounds and often do not have management experience. The impact of Aspire has just been included in McFarland's 'Your Say' engagement staff engagement survey, and she is brimming with pride about the results: "Not only did we get an 80% response," she reports, "but we saw a marked improvement in job satisfaction, feelings that Sage was a 'great place to work' and improvements to our engagement index."
Not everything was so rosy; many staff still see Sage as a stable place to work, but want more 'risking-taking and innovation'. Neverthlesss McFarland says it has at least set a structure for further improvements.
The fact the Enable/Inspire/Aspire programmes have made a real breakthrough is something of which McFarland is evidently proud. The HR department actually has a once-a-year Development Day to showcase to staff what HR is doing and what it has achieved. This is another example of her vision to make HR more visible in the business and trumpet its successes where warranted.
But will these activities really set the platform for promoting Sage as a serious employer of choice? McFarland thinks so. "We're now trying to get the words in place about just what our external brand is ... it's not as easy as it sounds but it will be based on how we've built our existing brand."
McFarland admits the journey to creating a sense of the external brand has involved taking hundreds of tiny steps, each of which has had the potential to trip the HR team up just when they least expect it. Just one of these included a bizarre problem that was found to exist around job titles.
"Among our 1,800 staff a year ago," she explains, "I found we had more than 700 different job titles. This was not a recipe for creating a single employer brand under our banners of fairness, equity and transparency. If you give someone a unique title, but there is no reason for it, it causes problems."
A year, and some heavy communication later, the number of titles has been reduced to 120 among more than 2,000 people, and has meant introducing entirely new frameworks for deciding pay levels and job evaluations. Linked to this, was the fact that very quickly McFarland discovered sizeable numbers of staff members were overpaid, while others were not paid market rates.
She says: "For the former group, we had the hard task of explaining there had been a legacy of bad decision- making in pay and status, and these people's pay will be frozen until the rest of similar people in the company catch up. The underpaid, meanwhile, have been given above average rises. Going forward we won't let this run away again, and we now have a strict list of job titles that people can chose from."
When quizzed on how delicate these conversations must have been, McFarland chooses her words carefully: "If people understand the facts, then I think they will give HR much more benefit of the doubt than I think most people would be aware of."
Confidence in her ability to make tough decisions that work very much sums up this inspiring HRD. "I do really feel that I've achieved buy-in," she says unashamedly. "I make sure I'm seen in the business; I tour the offices and let it be known that we (the HR department) are only a phone call away. It isn't always easy, because when you talk to management about 'people', suddenly everyone is an expert in HR, but the bottom line is that I feel I do have commitment from everyone."
Is this what she feels HR is really all about? "It's about being a good decision-maker, but it is also more about acting on gut feelings and having good judgment about an issue."
With these qualities in bucket-loads, you feel it will not be long before McFarland's vision is achieved - having more people know who Sage is, and reading about it on the Most Admired, or Best Companies to Work For lists.
CV
1968: Born in Belfast; educated Newcastle upon Tyne
- BA in politics and social policy; University of Westminster - MCIPD
1991: Joined KPMG's graduate recruitment team
1992: HR consultant, Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust, London
1993: Head of HR, government practice, Accenture
2001: Joined Sage; held a number of HR positions
2007: Appointed HR director, Sage UK and Ireland
