Bhavesh Vaghela: Hello and welcome to Ops Game Changers, the podcast that shines a light on the crucial role that operations teams have been driving business performance and improving staff and customer experience. So, my name is Bhavesh I’m the Chief Marketing Officer here at ActiveOps, and in each episode, I hone in on one key KPI or one key challenge that business has solved. We delve into how they went about doing this and explore the outcomes achieved. Now, one of the biggest challenges that we all know in operations is about building that flexible operating model, having resources that can be used across different types of skills. So, we’re going to delve into that today. And I’m delighted to be joined by Nicole Mott, who’s a senior manager of transformation at Velonetic to find out how they go about doing upscaling and cross-skilling across their specialist claims and premium adjusters, which is obviously a big challenge from an insurance perspective. So, we’ll hear from Nicole about how the company continues to transform and upskill their people, to try and reduce the attrition and to support their customers, who are effectively insurance companies, expand their services and portfolios specialise highly skilled people. So, without further ado, first of all, thank you, Nicole, for joining us on the Ops Game Changers. Welcome to this session. First of all, before we jump into Velonetic, and what you do from the insurance point of view. Let’s kind of hear a bit about yourself. So how did you end up in operations, Nicole?
Nicole Mott: So, I can’t say that when II left college I really really wanted to go into insurance, but I started at a company called AON and I worked in the aviation department and over the years I’ve had a number of roles within the business. I started off in credit control and then I moved into a more operational role where I was managing teams across the claims area. My biggest role in operations was actually head of claims operations which I did for a number of years. And then I moved over into our premium space, and to make sure that I had that kind of breadth and depth of understanding of the insurance market. And since then, I’ve done operational improvement I’ve done change management, Chief of staff, all within the same company. So even though it was AON, I’ve kind of moved into what is now Velonetic. But I’ve had a number of roles within that company looking at really operations all the way.
Bhavesh: That’s fantastic. So, switching to Velonetic then so tell us something, because maybe some of our listeners don’t know who Velonetic are and what you guys do. So, tell us a little bit about Velonetic and then you know, what does that mean from an operations perspective for you?
Nicole: Yeah, of course. So Velonetic represents joint free joint ventures. So, we are a company that is owned by DXC technology, the International Underwriting Association, which is the IUA and Lloyds of London. So, we’ve got three shareholders that actually make up our organisation. Some people might have heard us previously called Exchanging, or The Bureau and quite recently, actually, last year that’s where we rebranded to become Velonetic. We wanted to have our own identity and to make sure that we had that footprint within the London insurance market, where people recognised us for what we were doing. So that, and people might have also heard of it or thought of us as the London Market Joint Ventures. So yeah, we rebranded last year in August as we’ve got over 20 years of London insurance market experience. That’s for Lloyds, Brokers, carriers, agents, and also company carriers as well. And we work in insurance and reinsurance. We process over a billion pounds worth of premium and claims and transactions and at the moment we’re actually building the new digital platform with the XE technology to actually transform the London Insurance market, so we do all the back-office functions for the London Insurance market from premiums and claims. And we also have a big part of our business, which is also supporting our customers with claims adjusting as well as what we call ‘pas’, which is policy administration services as well. So, we have a real breadth and depth of knowledge in the insurance market across many different areas.
Bhavesh: Fantastic. And I think you know particularly the stuff that you guys do with the London markets like, I would imagine the types of claims and adjustments are very specialist, right? And that probably kind of leads us very much into one of the challenges around from an Ops perspective. And I guess that’s part of that is about upskilling the individuals that you have. So perhaps just tell us a little bit about what operations looks like for you guys, and then we can delve into some of those key challenges.
Nicole: Yeah, absolutely. So, Operations. We have our main operation within the UK, but we also have an operation in India that supports us as well from processing in the operations area. So, we, have had some really kind of specialists’ areas particularly in the claims arena where we have adjusters who have lots and lots of experience in particular, we call them classes of business, but they’re specialty areas. So, things like marine, aviation, political risks. And in that space in particular in claims space we have some really highly skilled really respected adjusters that actually support our customers. And with that, obviously, what we’re trying to do is make sure that we are
getting the support from them for the younger generation that we’re also bringing through our organization. Because in the London market it it’s quite known that we have a talent challenge trying to bring in new people from outside of the insurance sector, but also from graduates and school leavers as well. So, one of the challenges. That we’ve had is making sure that our senior people are passing on that experience, that knowledge and starting to coach and mentor some of those people that that are coming through whilst also trying to attract new talent into the business as well. So that that’s been one. of our challenges that we’ve been facing particularly over the last couple of years. And our adjusters are phenomenal at what they do, and they have that knowledge and that experience, and that network and they understand how the market works. Insurance is a really complex in in some lines of business really complex, and the knowledge that they have can only be built up by experience, talking, liaising, you know, having those relationships with people in the market as well.
Bhavesh: But I guess you know that therein lies the challenge, right? Because I can imagine that some of your customers specifically want those adjusters because of their expertise. And I guess you know, from an operations perspective, you know, your best practice would say, you know you can cross skill people, right? So, but in your scenario you can’t, because actually, somebody who’s very special in aviation, for example, is probably not going to be suited for marine or whatever it happens to be. So, the traditional element of you know, being able to have operations folks that can do multi tasks becomes more of a challenge. So, I guess that means it’s all about upscaling then, as you kind of highlight to that, how do you make sure that you’ve got the retention of those individuals because you’re investing time and years of experience to those individuals and retaining them. Because I would imagine this potential risk of attrition somewhere along that process. And then you know, as you say, how do you bring new people on? And once the new people are in, you’ve got to be able to, I assume, get them up to speed and get them more and more experience as quickly as you can, so you have a bigger pool of more specialist adjusters for those requirements. So, it’s actually a quite an interesting challenge of how you do that compared to a traditional Ops function of a different type of a bank or insurance product. So, I mean, how do you even think about joining those dots? How does that start with you guys? You know, what do you do?
Nicole: So, you’re absolutely right. So, when you when you talk about kind of specialists, that’s what makes the London market unique in as much as and we see this across the whole market. And people specialize in a specific area. So, like you said aviation, marine political risks. And that’s where all the experience and all of the knowledge comes from. So, there’s a number of things that we’ve kind of embarked on to kind of help us support that. So, it’s supporting our most senior people and really getting them to be real coaches and mentors to some of the younger people that are coming through. We’ve tried also to look at this in a different way than not to use the traditional mainstream process, which is where a more senior person mentors a more junior person. We’ve actually implemented quite recently two different ways of mentoring. First one is and people might know it more as reflection, sorry, reverse mentoring. We’ve actually called it reflection mentoring, which is where a more junior member of staff actually mentor, someone more senior. So, and that’s really difficult for the actual senior person who’s obviously all the experience and wants to give that to other people, to actually take on a different role. We started this about 18 months ago, and we’ve had a really successful relationship where junior claims adjuster actually mentored our CFO.
Bhavesh: Oh, wow!
Nicole: And that relationship has absolutely blossomed. And the CFO, when you talk to them and hear the feedback they got from that relationship as well has been really key. So, this isn’t just about how do we take the more junior inexperienced people and give them all the experience. But it’s also, how do we make sure that we’re enriching and supporting our more senior people as well. So that’s why we implemented that because we thought that, and we’ve seen some really great value in that. We’ve also implemented something called speed mentoring. So normally, most mentoring relationships you would have over a longer period of time what we’re actually doing is we’ve identified some key senior people in in the business, and they are doing four week mentoring with people that actually come forward and asked it could be anyone in the business and around like a topic.
So, I’m actually doing one of these and my topic is personal brand. So, I’m helping again, some of those, those inexperienced and other people within our business to understand how they can network and look at their own personal brand to actually help them with their career. So, it’s not as well just always thinking about the technical pieces that you know where we can support and help people with their skills, thinking about some of the other aspects of that as well. And alongside that we’ve also come up with an adjuster program, and that program is where the senior adjusters then support some of the more junior adjusters in their progression. And we have specific topics in there that are really helping them so they will go to court, and they will see an actual claim actually unfold within an court environment but they’re there also to help us support with like day to day, questions and things that you know, the adjusters want to ask and get some more insight into as well. So, a lot of this is about developing and learning and teaching but also having and making sure that we are developing our senior people just as much as we are everyone else in the business
Bhavesh: That’s fantastic. I think there’s some really interesting ideas. There was kind of works on what you’d normally do right in some cases. I’m curious in terms of the senior individuals being mentored. Did you get pushback? If that’s when you started that program, or what people generally quite open to it, because I guess that you know you would assume at that senior level. There’s not enough time. So, you you’ve got. You’re always, you know, you know have a lot more to do. We don’t have enough time in a day to even think about mentoring, right? Let alone being mentored. Did you get that push back, and was there any kind of key things that you can think about that you implemented that changed it?
Nicole: So, we didn’t get any pushback because we actually asked because we did it as a pilot. We wanted to make sure that it was actually beneficial in the business. So, we actually asked senior people to actually come forward. So, they was already bought into it because again you know they they’re the ones that have come forward and said, we want to do this. We also did some training because it can be quite daunting for the Mentee and the mentor because they’ve got a completely different role reversal. So, we did some training with them and what was really interesting when we were getting the feedback is for someone who’s quite senior the natural way is just to maybe take over and revert back into a normal mentoring relationship. So, we had check and balances with myself and another colleague with each of them. So, we had one-to-ones with them to say you are still progressing down this route of reflection rather than a normal mentoring relationship, because sometimes it can be easy to kind of just fall back into that relationship. So, we didn’t get any pushback but the feedback that we got was really powerful for that senior person. They got to see things through the lens of someone else. A lens of someone who’s doing something day in, day out. And he actually sat so the CFO sat with that individual and watched them do their job to understand some of their pain points, and some of the things that they have to do every day, and some of the challenges they might face and to be able to do that is really powerful. Sometimes when you’re really senior, you you’re thinking about strategy. You’re thinking about you know, what the business needs to be doing to some hit revenue and things like that to be able to take a step back and spend time with people in the business that actually contribute to us being successful and understand what they do on a day-to-day basis and what works really well, and maybe some of the challenges they’ve got can actually then really help them when they think about strategy and where they’re taking the business forward. So, from that as well, it was really interesting to get that feedback.
Bhavesh: And what about it from the other side? From the more junior individual who’s been mentoring the senior person. Did you see them after they get over the, which I think is natural, mentoring somebody way more senior than you. Once you get over that, did you find that they flourished as well in terms of their confidence, their career and progression within the organization?
Nicole: Absolutely confidence at like was a massive thing but also just being able to have those different conversations with people at different levels. I think sometimes there’s this stigmatism with senior people, that they’re kind of put on this pedestal. And you know and what this allowed, it’s not just the person who was mentoring, but also other people in our business to go, actually, that person’s approachable. Seeing a senior person sitting next to somebody and watching what they’re doing is great for other people to see. And then that opens up conversations. So as a senior person, you then start to hear and see things that are real that are actually happening on the ground rather than what you think is happening. And so, I think that from that viewpoint it was really great for the senior person, but also for the person who was mentoring to build their confidence, to feel that they can have those conversations, to feel that they have someone that they can go to and talk to as well. And I don’t think they realize the impact that then also has on those people around them. And because they’re gonna take them on that journey with them, because if they feel confident, being able to have open conversations with senior people in a business then that’s gonna encourage other people to do that as well
Bhavesh: Completely. I think that’s you know, when you when you look at
businesses today, I mean as one of the, you know, probably the biggest challenges with any kind of career is being confident enough to have those conversations at different levels, right? And that’s seems like a really interesting way of doing it. I’ve never come across anybody that does the reverse mentoring. So that’s really fascinating to see how that’s worked for, you know, potentially the stuff that you’re doing. Now, one of the things about all this, though, is, you know, you can put all these fantastic initiatives together, but ultimately comes down to capacity, right? Because ultimately, do you have the time within your environment or your day-to-day roles? I can imagine claims, and some of the, you know, the more complex stuff that you guys work on can be all encompassing and take up most of your capacity during the during the day and for periods of months, I would imagine, for the claim. How do you go about freeing people’s time up so they can actually do these things which are, we’ll see, incredibly important to from a progression point of view, reduce attrition, all that wellbeing or that staff engagement stuff. How do you go about doing that kind of stuff?
Nicole: So obviously, there’s a number of things we do. The first thing comes from our CEO. He is very vocal around the development and our people. So, when you’ve got a message and a directive that comes down from the top, and then that does make it a little bit easier because he’s really supportive, and he wants all of our people to develop, and he also recognizes that we need to retain our people. And in order to do that you have to develop them. Secondly, in, in, particularly in our Ops area, our operations director, again, is really focused on people’s development
and makes sure that her managers are all given the time to ensure that every single individual has time to do development. With that there are certain things that we have to do for people around compliance and things like that where they have to take those courses, but where we as much as possible we really encourage people to look at their own personal development, talk to their manager, look at what courses they can go on to develop themselves. And that’s what I was saying. We’ve also created this adjuster program. So, the senior management within our business and the senior manager within clients is really supportive of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. And when you’ve got people’s buy-in, then things happen, and it’s made to happen. We also obviously use ActiveOps tools to capacity manage as well. That also gives us the insight to ensure that everyone has that availability and capacity to invest in themselves. One of the things that we’re really focusing on at the moment is investing in yourself, being yourself at work. So, when you’ve got all of these things where you’ve got the directive from your CEO and your senior leadership team, and you’ve got the tools that then allow you to support that, and you’ve got managers that are all brought into there, and you’ve got a workforce that that are really driving to do the best for their customers and for themselves. It all then just comes together.
Bhavesh: Yeah, I think I think you’re right. I think it’s a. It’s a combination of things, isn’t it? It’s not just in free up time for you, but you also have to want to do it. I think that’s the thing right and having a senior, or in your case, the CEO, very passionate about it, makes a massive difference, because it sets the tone for the rest of the organization in terms of what we believe in part of that is also you’re in that environment where you know you do have to bring in new individuals to the organization or to insurance. As you said. You know, it’s probably something you hadn’t thought about going into insurance before you started, and you know most of us end up in a career that we didn’t think we were gonna be in. And then we end up in either tech or insurance, or wherever else we end up and sometimes look back and say, how did that happen? And here I am. But you know you’ve got to try and make a conscious decision, you know, trying to get talent across businesses and in operations is very, very hard, and retaining those individuals over a period of time. So, you know, these initiatives clearly enable somebody to come into your organization and feel part of something that they can also grow their career with it. Have you? Have you kind of seen any kind of can you point to any results that you’ve seen over the last 18 months? two years of doing this transformation stuff? Everything things like attrition go down or staff engagement. How do you measure it? This, I guess, is a question.
Nicole: Yeah. So, there’s two things I think you just touched on there. Around staff engagement and also attrition. They’re the main things and we’ve definitely seen our engagement scores kind have been improving. And it’s not just about the engagement scores. It’s about the engagement participation. So, when we started doing our engagement scores the participation was a bit lower and when I looked at that, it was like, so you know, if you’ve got X amount of people that aren’t responding. Are they engaged, or did they just not want to do it? So, you’ve got this kind of void of not knowing whether those people are engaged or not. So, we did quite a bit of work, really understanding why people didn’t answer the survey. Was it time? Was it that they didn’t get it? They didn’t know that there was a deadline all of that kind of stuff, even to down to the point of the time that we did it was it actually, when it was the summer and loads of people were on holiday. So, we did a lot of work on that. So that there’s it wasn’t just a focus on the engagement scores going up. It was also on the participation of the engagement cause. That’s a really strong factor and also, not just looking at scores. What’s really important for me is reading the comments. The comments tell you more than any engagement score. So, and having that commitment. So, I committed to everyone in the business that I would read every single comment. And I did. And actually, what that drove was an action plan that maybe wasn’t necessarily just aligned to the scores because the comments were really powerful. And there was a lot of stuff that came through on those comments. So also using things like that, I think, is really powerful. And then attrition absolutely. And one of the things that we’re looking to do now is, even though we’ve got DXC Technology who’s one of our biggest shareholders, they have their own graduate program and early careers program, we’re looking whether we can devise that ourselves within Velonetic so that it’s really, really focused on insurance, because that’s really key because when you’re going to talk to people at universities and look at the different talent or apprentices, or, you know, early careers. We want that passion to come through, and what we would really like, as with kind of building this framework is, then ask senior people, so like our senior adjusters to actually come with us and talk to people about how great it is to be in insurance, because you’re absolutely right. I don’t think anyone sits at school and is like, I really wanna go into that unless you know your parents are in it and so to have people that can actually talk about insurance in a real passionate way to then really entice people to go, actually, I think I’d really enjoy that. One of the other things that we’re starting to do, and we actually piloted it with my two children is for young children to come in and do their work experience with us, and my eldest he came in and he spent two weeks with us. He spent some time with a Fine Arts underwriter. And he came away, and he was so excited because he was like “Did you know, did you know? Did you know?” And I was like “oh, yeah, yeah.” And he was talking about things I never thought that he would talk about with regards to like fine arts, you know, paintings and things like that. And then he actually said, oh, we were talking about me going into insurance and doing something I didn’t realize that they have insurance for footballers and sports. So just by having the opportunity for a young person to spend a couple of weeks with someone as well, so they can start to pass on some of their experience and knowledge. That’s what inspires the next generation to wanna come through and actually come into our industry. So, you have to invest to then take things forward. And that that’s the kind of key thing I think that we’re doing at the moment we’re investing, like, you say, a lot of different initiatives that will then hopefully give us that return on investment in 6, 12,18 months’ time and also looking at things not just through you know how we do things now but how are things gonna be done in the future? So, looking at, you know, what skills do we need to provide our people with regards to AI…
Bhavesh: Absolutely
Nicole: and you know what kind of skills or their needs for the future. So, when we’re talking about upskilling, it’s also about crosskilling and helping people to understand
what I do today might not be the same as tomorrow. But the skills I’ve got are transferable. That then opens up a whole new world because, and I’ve got a really great example of this. I had someone who who’s actually joined my team in in change, and when she applied for the job, she had her own business, and she said, I don’t know whether I can do change. And then when I spoke to her about how she interacts with her customers, and I said have you ever had something where you’ve had to up your prices as an example? You’ve had to talk to your customers and say, oh, I’m putting my price up. She went “Yeah.” And I said, “so you’ve taken your customer for a change of something like business”. She was like, “yeah, I have.” And it’s just helping people to understand that there’s different ways and different lenses you can look at things using the same skill. And again, I think that’s really powerful as well.
Bhavesh: I think that’s a that’s a really interesting and actually a very inspiring example, because sometimes you don’t know, you know you do things day to day without realizing you’ve got those skills. I mean, I take a little tangent, actually, Nicole, because I think you said something that which was really interesting. And I think it’s very topical right now, which is the whole impact of AI and what’s AI gonna do for us. I mean, you’ve got one level where AI is gonna eat us all up, and you know, destroy us all the way through to take all our jobs away through to, you know people excited by it, I mean, what does AI look like for insurance in your mind? What you think it’s gonna be, you know, what are the exciting things about it? What are the fearful things about it?
Nicole: So, I think, obviously in the insurance market at the moment, particularly in the London insurance market. We are going on a digital journey, and we’ve been a marketplace that has been always focused on relationship building and very paper driven. So that journey started about probably two, three years ago. Well, it’s actually been a journey that I think some iteration has been going on for years, but we but we’ve got that real focus on that now. What that will allow us to do is actually expand as a market into other jurisdictions and also globally. And we’re helping to build the future in that digital space within Velonetic. And it’s all about making insurance easier and helping our customers to be able to improve what they’re doing for ultimately the end client. So, it’s exciting. I think in the insurance market with just at the beginning of that journey. So, it’d be quite difficult for me to talk about kind of what’s it gonna look like? What’s it gonna look like, and what’s possible? But just even listening to conversations that happen. We had one of these this morning actually around, you know. Chat GPT and what you know can come out of that. And some of this is especially in insurance you’re never gonna get away from the fact that the knowledge is needed. It’s complex, it’s specialty, that’s what makes a London Insurance market unique. And that’s what brings customers to the London Insurance market. But it’s also then looking at, you know what are some of the things that could be automated, that then allow, you know people to do the really enrichment of those things and actually provide a better customer service. And that’s ultimately what everyone wants to be doing. And that’s then where businesses will grow, because then we’re gonna get more business. We’re gonna have more capacity to do that. And we’ll get people coming to the London Insurance market to actually place their risk with us.
Bhavesh: I think you’re right. I think most companies are in that starting journey, even though AI has been around for years right in since. You know, it’s just topical right now, but it’s been around. But I think in operations it has up the potential to be transformative in the way we do things in the way we engage, you know, with the ultimate aim of helping, you know, provide a better service to customers or employees, and usual, you know things that we, as operations people care about. So, I think there’s a real, interesting journey that we’ll go through over the next three to five years as to how we use these new technologies to better improve while maintaining a brand presence right? Because you don’t want to reduce your brand in any way because you’re using a technology. So, it’s gonna be an interesting journey.
Nicole: Some of it as well is, when we started on our robotics journey, it’s also
change management is really aligned to any of this stuff. So, having great change management, supporting what you’re doing in any business as it’s changing is imperative, I think. And just as an example, when we started on our robotics journey, we really tried to make sure that the processes we were looking at to automate, the people that were doing them, those suggestions actually came from them. So, we set up a board, and we asked all of our people in our business to come forward with ideas. Straight away these were their ideas, we were saying to them “What parts of your job are really, really mundane? That that you know. If you could. You’d like to be automated so you could really focus on the value add to our customers.” So those ideas came from them. And then, as we started to progress, we kept them informed so that they were actually part of the journey, and they helped us with the process. They helped us build the robotic process and we actually named our robots. So, they actually had names. So, we had Poppy was one of them. So, it’s also about using your change experience and change knowledge with change practitioners to help people go on that journey so, they don’t fear what’s happening, and it was then a really positive experience. And we didn’t have that thing you know where you’re talking about, you know, people were fearing about what does this mean to me? So, I think if you if you do those things simultaneously, you’re in a much better position to not have people worrying, or that resistance pace as well.
Bhavesh: I think it’s underestimated. I think. You know, when I look at, I talk to many senior Ops people all over the world and I can, I can definitely say that one of the drivers towards success in operations is actually the change management piece, and how you bring people along the way in the journey. And you know I’ve been lucky enough to interview so many Ops Game Changers, and there’s a uniqueness around, you know, bringing their teams along that path. And it becomes incredibly successful and powerful. Really, really interesting. And in in some ways it’s so simple, right? It’s the obvious thing you know. Ask for you know their own suggestions, and you know, pick off the things that are the most annoying, and you know people become more okay with them. And want to be part of that journey. So, I think sometimes we have you know, tendency to overcomplicate things, don’t we? And sometimes it’s the simplest thing is the best thing. Really.
Nicole: I think all of this is about just always keeping in the forefront this is people and we all you know, want to do a good job, and we want our business to be successful, and we want to be successful, and ultimately, we’re people, and if you communicate and engage with people and get them to understand. You know, the bigger picture. You know what’s the overarching strategy that we’re all working towards, and they’ve got a purpose in that, and how they’re going to contribute to that. Sometimes it’s those small things that like you said are the simple things that can sometimes be forgotten. So, it’s if you can take a step back and think about. You know, what are those simple things, and try and embed those, or revisit those or reinforce those? Then the impact that that gives you is so much more and the sometimes, that what we get caught up in which is the run of the meal, you know all of that kind of stuff.
Bhavesh: Exactly. I think it’s spot on there, really. It kind of leads us back to you know the journey that you guys have been on. There’s a couple of things that I’d be curious to understand from your perspective. I mean, it seems it seems like a really fascinating journey that you’ve been on certainly from a kind of change perspective also trying to tackle some challenges within the, you know, the market insurance space with resources and skills, and you know, and bringing new people on, and as well as the attrition side. Looking back at the journey that you’ve been on. What are you most proud of?
Nicole: Oh, it’s a great question. That’s one I often ask in interviews. So, from an operational viewpoint I would say our claims business. We went through some significant change probably seven years ago. And that’s when I took over the whole claims area, and that was quite challenging because our market had asked for choice and at the same time, we were trying to build our claims operation. So, it was exciting, because obviously, we, we were trying to build an operation as there was this significant change that was happening in the market, and we did it. And you know it’s now the business that it is, and it’s really successful. We’ve got some phenomenal people in that team and being able to lead that with our claim’s director at the time was yeah, probably the thing I’m most proud of, because it was all about our people. It was all about getting them, to buy in to what we were doing and being able to work so closely with the operations director at the time at the claim’s director sorry at the time. and have that kind of growth as well as looking at, how do we retain our staff going through that turbulent time that we’re like, you know, what’s happening? Are we gonna have a job? And to be able to do that and grow at such pace to secure you know roles for them. It was brilliant, and what that also created was a real team camaraderie, where everyone pulled together. And that was that was a real attribute to the claims director at the time leading that and I think then myself and the managers I had underneath me. So yeah, I think that’s the thing operationally I’m most proud of. From a from everything else in in my role I think that the people stuff that we do as a business. We’re really focused on people. We’ve had a real focus, as I said earlier, with regards to, you know, being authentic and being yourself at work, and that’s been driven by ERG Groups that have been set up. Looking at the engagement scores listing. One thing that I kind of is a philosophy of mine is, try to listen to understand, not listen to respond and I think that doing that and seeing how our business has started to change, particularly with the rebrand as well. It’s kind of. There’s been a number of things that have happened where it’s like it’s all coming together now, and we’ve got the Rebrand, we’ve got a CEO who’s really kind of driving that agenda and then we’re able to really focus on our people.
Bhavesh: That’s fantastic,
Nicole: And you know, to see new people coming in, and the amount of new people that we’ve employed and the fact that you know the engagement scores that you know they’re coming back with are really positive It’s something that I’m really proud of personally, and I think it’s an amazing organization to work for.
Bhavesh: I mean, I think you know it’s not to be underestimated. I think some of the
biggest challenges with operations is about getting people on side and engaged and excited, engaged with the brand and what you’re trying to achieve. So, you know what you’ve described today, it’s been phenomenal. I think some of the you know, the things that you’ve put in place would be great insights, for you know your peers and other organizations to think about different tactics that you can use, and it kind of leads me to that question. I guess you know, if you’re gonna give somebody advice, you know one of your peers, you having to chat somebody about what you’ve done. What would you? What would the advice be if they wanted to do something similar?
Nicole: I think I think it is that listen to understand. Don’t listen to respond because, you know, like I said the most powerful thing for me when I think about people and operations, and how you can keep people engaged and want to stay with you to. You know further their career with you. The biggest thing that that I took away was when I read the comments from the engagement survey, it was so powerful. Because, you know, you get all the questions that are very prescriptive, you. know the questions that generally ask to give you an engagement score. When people have the opportunity to actually write something, that’s when you get the feeling you get, you get to read how people feel. Not answering a question, yes or no, or one to five. It’s how they feel, and how honest and open they are. And I think, if you can do that and have those opportunities to just listen and actually, listen to what people were saying then that helps you to then go, okay, what do I need to fix?
Because another example of this is, we literally just did an engagement survey in January and myself and the HR Director we looked all the responses, looked all the comments. And then I actually went back to the organization that do the survey. And I said, “can you independently look at the results and tell me what you think?” because I’m an employee as well. So, when I’m looking at the results, I might actually be bias, unconscious biases when I’m reading the comments or looking at the survey. “So, can you independently tell me what you think and see if the two things correlate?” And they actually luckily everything did. And but they actually came up with a couple of things that that we hadn’t thought of, which was really good. So, and that then has allowed us to then go. Okay, so what’s our action plan and our action plan is based on what our employees and our staff asking for what we think they want.
Bhavesh: Yeah, it’s actually fantastic advice. I think there’s a psychology around. If you’re if you’re gonna be putting the comment in that, there’s something there, right for sure. So, I think that’s really sound advice for everybody that’s in operations just trying to do some transformation exercise. Regardless of what you know industry, you’re in. So, one final question for you, Nicole, if you don’t mind. What is, you know, if you look at crystal ball, what do you think operations are gonna look like in the future?
Nicole: Oh, that’s a good question. I think it will look very different but that’s not a bad thing. So, I think that people, as I was saying earlier, I think people’s roles will
will be different and will change. But the skills that people have can be utilized in a different way. I think it’s still going to be really busy. I think it’s still gonna be quite
challenging at times. Customers are still customers, and they still have a high expectation. I think that we’re gonna have to, yeah, kind of raise the bar to meet those expectations. So, I think that they’re all of those things are still going to be there it’s just gonna be how we approach. That might be different. But I think as long as you communicate and take people on that journey with you, I think that we’ve got the opportunity to have something in the future that will look and feel different. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a bad thing.
Bhavesh: No, I think that’s a very wise view of what’s gonna happen. So, Nicole, listen, thank you so much for joining us. I’ve really thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I’ve learned a lot about how you can bring people on the journey. And I’m with your son by the way, I’d want to be an adjuster in the fine arts or even, you know, have a soccer player or something that would be, you know, that’d be awesome. A football player that’ll be the best. Opened my eyes anyway. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Nicole: Thank you for having me I’ve really enjoyed it.
Bhavesh: So, I mean, you’ve got an incredible business. You know your CEO, and the kind of direction that you’re going, the emphasis on people. There’s so many companies that pay lip service to this stuff and you know it certainly appears that you know, you guys, don’t and you’ve really focused on solving what are gonna be challenges in the future, retaining staff, bringing new people into the industry and you know, having a journey and a process that individuals can go through. So, thank you so much for sharing that with us.
Nicole: Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you for having me!
Bhavesh: And also thank you very much to our listeners for joining us. And you know. Please do check in to catch up more episodes of Ops Game Changers to hear more fascinating insights from other leaders like Nicole in the field of operations, and how they go about overcoming, you know, challenges that we all face in order to drive that productivity and boost up performance across their enterprises. So please do like and subscribe and thank you very much for listening.
