The it in question is a challenge which should keep even a FTSE 100 veteran like Vacassin, with stints at United Biscuits, Kingfisher and BAA under her belt, awake at night. Abbey National suffered pre-tax losses of 984 million in 2002 and the company is in the middle of a restructuring programme aimed at slashing its cost base by 200 million by 2005. Its survival plan is to offload assets in international and non-core operations in order to focus exclusively on UK personal finance services. For Vacassin, this means months of overseeing redundancies among the 27,000 workforce, from 650 jobs in Abbeys car finance business which went in June to the looming task of closing UK call centres in January when Abbey outsources a portion of the work to India.
For Vacassin, however, the fear factor was all part of the jobs appeal. Not far short of a billion pounds worth of loss concentrates the mind, she says matter-of-factly. You dont spend time wondering if the platforms burning because its red hot.
The 46 year-old admits that Mike Clasper, her boss at BAA
where she was previously group HR director, thought she was bonkers when she told him about her Abbey challenge. But it was too good to miss, she says: Im a FTSE 100 person. Im better in large organisations; I like scale in a challenge plus a degree of difficulty and complexity.
For someone with such a high-powered job, she isnt at all intimidating. The tight security at the Abbey building youre escorted both into the building and right up in the glass lift to the boardroom floor makes you feel that you are going to meet someone pretty important. First impressions are that she is corporate, with a conservative dress style. But she seems quick enough to enjoy a good belly laugh or two.
Vacassin, who has been at Abbey since June, is working in tandem with another recent arrival, customer propositions director Angus Porter, whose remit is marketing and product development. The idea is that together they can help Abbey realise its dream of providing the best customer service of any high street bank. Most people think banks are as bad as each other and tolerate them at best, she says. Were not trying to be the biggest in the UK but we want to be the best from the customer perspective. That means refocusing the business on customer service and satisfaction and getting the organisation and the people in it to personify the brand.
Reshaping this brand appears to centre on simplicity. As we meet, the centrepiece of the banks restructuring programme the 11 million repositioning of the business from Abbey National to Abbey, is about to be heralded with a turn banking on its head advertising campaign. The aim is to in the words of Arnold move it away from the baffling, patronising and overbearing world of banking by giving customers a more real and simple
service. This shift in the way Abbey treats customers includes the creation of simpler accounts, and the re-writing of customer letters to ensure they are jargon-free.
Banking is overcomplicated right down to the language used in leaflets and we want to simplify it by having a more open way of doing business both internally and externally, says Vacassin. In people terms that will affect everything we do, from the appearance of our job adverts to the tone of our letters through to the induction process.
High on her to do list, therefore, is finding staff who fit this bill and it comes in the form of a recruitment drive called Recruit for Attitude. Around 600 will be needed for customer relations roles 450 based in branches and the rest in call centres. Its more important to get people with the right attitude than those with certain skills, which we can teach anyway, she explains. We want those that can identify with ordinary people who have money
worries because theyve been there.
Shes already modified Abbeys selection materials and induction process to attract them. The idea is to get to a point where people say: If Im going to work for a bank, Id like to work for Abbey, says Vacassin. This is a service industry, the fact that we are selling finance products is almost by the by, so we need people who want to work in a customer service-based organisation. Attitude is really what counts, she adds. We want people who are never patronising and can explain things in a straightforward way.
As part of its drive to attract and retain staff, Abbey is thinking of scrapping the staff uniform. It is running a pilot scheme whereby employees are given money to spend on what they would ideally like to wear. Abbey will then commission a range based on these choices or simply agree on some guidelines. But shes keen to outlaw the use of one identical clothing range for everyone. Corporate uniforms are not made to suit all shapes and sizes, she explains.
The re-launch was announced to 500 managers from across the business on 24 September, the day before press releases were issued to the wider world. Arnold, Porter and Vacassin spent half a day explaining the move with Vacassin concentrating on how the re-launch would impact on staff. This included giving each manager a pack that they could use to brief their teams. It incorporated a video of Luqmans speech, which could be watched on branch televisions, the new Abbey catalogue of products and a booklet for each member of staff which told the story in simple words.
Among other items on Vacassins busy agenda is a brand new leadership scheme (leaders being at any level within the company, she says) that also sits nicely within the new customer-friendly, personal finance Abbey as well as a virtual university. To find material for this she has sifted through every single piece of Abbey training to ensure that it is on strategy. Everything else has been dumped. She is also scrutinising Abbeys current HR structure as part of her wholesale overhaul. Currently there are 640 HR staff.
The structure is too centralised, she believes. In a large organisation where people are physically in lots of different places and the purpose of that business is to deliver customer service, you need business performance development support closer to the ground. Im not going to fully decentralise HR as that would duplicate resources and be hard to maintain standards but I will expand it to include people who can be nearer to staff out in the business. At the moment we dont have HR presence at the area level. She adds: One of the things I think HR does
badly is spend lots of time talking about business models without ensuring that line managers have the capability that they need to do the job.
For such a high flyer Vacassin was a relatively late starter. She developed an interest in what she describes as the effect of power and leadership on organisations and individuals while studying law at the University of East London. However, she fell pregnant with her first son during her finals so put her career on hold to become a full-time mother. The family went abroad, to France and Spain where Vacassins late husband Eric was studying politics and languages. When they returned to UK soil Vacassin, then aged 26, began doing administrative work for an Italian restaurant chain. This temporary job was to be her route into United Biscuits when the food giant bought the chain.
Vacassin soon found herself working in United Biscuits
headquarters and achieved her goal of getting into personnel. By 1986 she was the first woman and youngest-ever personnel manager of United Biscuits company Terrys of York and therefore something of a novelty. And it was at Terrys that she first met an unlikely mentor.
We had a full-time convener called Tony Appleton who was physically enormous, well over 20 stone and had a disgusting habit of flicking his false teeth in and out with his tongue, she remembers. He walked into my office the first day and said: Hello petal, which I definitely thought was a bad sign of things to come but I learnt a hell of a lot from him. He taught me the benefit of having a really good quality union. Terrys wasnt a closed shop but the union representation was so high it might as well have been. I enjoyed working with him in a masochistic sort of way.
In 1988 Vacassin was headhunted as she has been for every HR role shes had by Kingfisher and worked her way through its high-street outlets, getting to grips with a completely new sector as she is now doing with financial services each time. She started out at Comet, where she was head of employee relations and finally ended up, in 1996, as HR director of Superdrug.
Her home life in Farnham, Surrey, in contrast to her work life is fairly quiet, she says. Im not an extrovert wheres the party? type. She listens to music an eclectic mixture of blues, reggae and Bob Dylan and relaxes with her two sons: its a million miles away from the day job.
But back in the office, Vacassin sees Luqman at least once a week as she is a board director. Shes the first HR director to have that honour at Abbey but typically plays down the significance of her executive director title. Overall he thinks that there is more bad HR than good but to deliver the right proposition for customers he needs the right people its as simple as that, Vacassin says with a shrug. But Ruth Tait, a partner at headhunters Heidrick & Struggles and a friend of Vacassin from her BAA days, knows exactly why Vacassin is where she is. There are only a few HR board directors but Priscilla is a true business partner, says Tait. She is highly commercial, a good strategic thinker and looks at the HR contribution within the wider business context so shes more than capable of contributing to the board. Shes highly committed because she truly wants to make a difference and has got this special integrity that makes her independent and fearless. Asked about her brightest career moments, Vacassins cites seeing people that shes trained go on to be high flyers Cathy Wilsher, now HR director of Gatwick Airport, is an example. The thing that Im most proud of is that Ive developed some really good people wherever Ive been, she says.
Even in her own time thoughts of work are obviously never far away. Vacassin lists researching work-related stuff as one of her hobbies. For the past four years shes been working with the Institute of Organisational and Social Studies, a self-funding research institute which has links with Brunel University. Her academic work included providing the institute with research on the development of her top managers and she is once again teaming up with it while at Abbey.
With an HR challenge of the scale which awaits her at Abbey, Vacassin might well have to put all her academic theory into practice. The worst that can happen is that the company could either end up in a takeover situation or Ill be on the job market, she says nonchalantly. But I truly believe that we can do this.