Mike Ashurst:

Hello, and welcome to today’s webinar, “Reimagining the workplace to thrive in the future of work”.

The COVID 19 pandemic has disrupted many aspects of the workplace and people’s working lives. And as organizations are adapting to the new world of work, driven by an acceleration in remote and flexible working, this webinar will hear from our panel of members who will share their experiences from around the world of preparing their organizations for the future of work. And this session we’ll look at a range of HR and people related strategies, including enabling a hybrid workforce, employee wellbeing and engagement, talent attraction and retention, and maintaining a collaborative culture.

I’m delighted to introduce our three panel members today. We have Lisa Osachoff, Chief People and Culture Officer from Wawanesa Mutual Insurance Company in Canada. We have Masenyane Molefe, Group Executive, Human Resources at PPS in South Africa. And we have with us John Wilson, Senior Manager, HR Division at NFU Mutual in the UK. Welcome to you all and thank you for joining us.

To start us off, it would be interesting to hear a bit about each of your organizations and your journeys regarding flexible and remote working, starting from what choices you were offering to employees before the pandemic, how you adapted when the pandemic hit, and what choices you’re offering right now or planning to offer to employees, in terms of where and when they can work. Lisa, could you start us off please?

Lisa Osachoff:

Good morning. Thank you so much. I am the Chief People and Culture Officer at Wawanesa Mutual. We are the largest mutual insure in Canada, founded in 1896. We have 3.9 billion in annual revenue and assets of 10.5 billion. Our workforce comprises of four business lines and 5700 employees. When the pandemic hit at Wawanesa, specifically, in the mutual area, we actually had almost all employees shift to working at home. Throughout late 2020 and into ’21, we worked to decide which path we were going to take. We went with what we were calling, a distributed workforce, and so every employee can register and decide where and how they wish to work. Their roles have been established as either flexible roles, which they can work completely remote, or a proximity role, in which you need to be located, somewhat close to, one of our offices to be able to come in, see customers and things like that.

For all of our workforce, we’ve decided that, whether you’re remote or a hybrid model, we’ve allowed for four moments that matter opportunities, throughout the year, to bring people together. And so all employees must be willing to commute or travel for those particular moments, but we’ve certainly found that employees like the opportunity to have the choice. We certainly are seeing, like many, as we’re rolling this out, some managers are struggling more than others with some employees being remote, some being hybrid and some just still trying to decide what works best for them. So managers are really a key focus right now for us, in terms of, how do we skill them so they can really support the workforce? Overall, our workforce has stayed very productive during the time, and we are really happy with the program that we’ve rolled out.

Mike Ashurst:

Great. Thank you Lisa, and Masenyane, could you tell us about your experience at PPS in South Africa? Thank you.

Masenyane Molefe:

Thank you, Mike. So I represent PPS, which is short for Professional Providence Society. It’s an 80 year old organization, so we actually celebrated eight years last year, and we offer products, insurance products in life, short term. We put investment products and we also do healthcare administration, so quite a broad service of financial service offerings.

Where we differ with many of the competitors around here is that firstly we’re a mutual, one of the few mutuals in the country, and more so, we specialize in professionals. So for somebody to be a member of our organization here, you need to have a four year degree and above. So we only specialize in people who are professionals and qualified professionals, so that’s our big differentiator. And of course being a mutual, the members would then share in the profits and all of those good things that make us a mutual.

If I think about how we have dealt with the last two years, so pre pandemic, if I look at the world right up to March 2020, our work was mostly done in office, like many other organizations. Obviously, except your sales people who are up and about out there. But we also had to quickly, very quickly, adapt in that March 2020 when the announcement was made to say, “COVID has landed in the country and shutting down borders and everybody being put on lockdown,” and all of those things.

We did manage, and we’re actually quite proud that we managed to get everybody equipped to be able to work from home. That was not the norm before. So obviously, that has been our reality for the last two years. So obviously as different lockdown levels have changed, people started coming into the office, quite willingly, some of them, even before we went into our official return to office.

From February this year, we then moved to say, “Okay, we’ll move from a full work from home lockdown scenario, to a hybrid scenario,” where, twice a week, we are now in the office and that twice a week is Mondays and Thursdays for everyone. This also differs a lot from the many organizations of most people have spoken to, because I think many organizations have said people can choose twice a week or twice a week or however many times a week that they should come to the office. Our view was that we really wanted everybody to get that much needed collaboration and engagement between departments, so for us, we found it’s of little use if one department, your own department, is there on that day, but other departments are not there. So it’s actually been quite great from February to have everybody back in the office on those days. There’s that old office vibe, and interacting with people that you would not collaborate with necessarily. So that’s where we are with hybrid, we’re back in office twice a week from Monday and Thursday.

Mike Ashurst:

Great. Thank you Masenyane, and John over to you.

John Wilson:

Hi there everybody, or good afternoon where I am, and good morning where some of you are. Yeah, I’m John Wilson, Senior HR Manager within National Farmer’s Union Mutual, which is a UK based insurer. We’ve been around since 1910, so not quite as long as Lisa’s company, but we’ve certainly well established and a large number of our customers are farmers, or within the agricultural sector. The majority of our customers are in the rural communities in the country, so we tend not to have offices in major urban areas. We’re about 4000 directly employed staff, and then we’ve got a network of agencies that sell our products. I know those agencies probably add up to another 2500, but each of those is a self-employed business, so we have a different employment relationship with them.

In terms of the last two years, we had a fairly traditional office based operating model until the pandemic struck and lockdown began, which was March 2020, and within about a week, 98% of our employees, were working from home, which was quite a rapid move for us. We are fairly cautious and thoughtful and spend a lot of time making decisions, but the crisis enabled us to discover that sometimes we can move really quickly. So we did that and many people have been at home for much of the last two years.
During last year, we developed what we’ve described as an informal home working policy, and our initial proposal was that when people could come back into the office, the vast majority of roles, they could opt for a 50/50 working from home model, which we implemented around about September last year. Then the UK went into another lockdown. By November, we were all back at home, so we never really rolled that policy out fully, at least not to the point where we could measure how that was going, particularly.

Then over the winter months, there was quite a demand and quite a pressure from the outside market in terms of employee recruitment, to rethink our informal home working policy, and when we returned to the office in April this year, we launched an 80/20 hybrid model. So the majority of roles have the option, in agreement with their line manager, to be based at home, up to 80% of the time. And we’re two months into that and it’s early days and we’re discovering that there’s a lot of implications of that. Nevertheless, from what we can tell at this stage, it’s landed extremely well with employees and with the majority of managers and leaders, but I’m not suggesting it’s plain sailing for everybody. It’s a very different way of working, and there’s a lot of questions that we are still to resolve, and a lot of things that we are going to monitor and measure to see how effective that policy is.

Having said that, we remained highly productive during lockdown. The performance of the business is very strong, very positive, and I think we also learned a lot about the commitment and creativity of the employees that work for us and we wouldn’t want to not capitalize on that as we go forward. So, obviously, it’s been a very difficult time for many people, but it’s also been a fascinating time in terms of how the organization has changed.

Mike Ashurst:

I’d like to pick up on a couple of things you’ve said there, John and also Lisa. I think you’ve all mentioned that, before the pandemic, although you had some flexibility, mostly, people were in the office, and then during the pandemic, most people were working remotely. And now, as you’ve described, people are now starting to move to a hybrid. Some people are coming back to the office, sometimes some days, sometimes others. So you’ve now got this mixture of people in the office and people working remotely. What I’d like to know is, now that situation has arisen and Lisa, you did mention this, that sometimes some of the managers are struggling with having people in the office and some remote. How is that working out in your organizations? Have you seen any particular challenges with these hybrid arrangements?

Lisa Osachoff:

Yeah, it’s interesting, because one of the things that has arisen is, in this multidimensional way that we’re having meetings, so for those that are in office, if you say, have four people in a meeting room and you have three people on the screen, now this is better than pre pandemic where we wouldn’t have had a screen, we would’ve had some sort of Polycom or something like that. Now you have the screen, but there is still that real need to ensure that the conversation that may happen in the meeting room is inclusive of those on the screen.

I think sometimes we’ve heard a little bit around those on the screen are missing some of that collective energy, because of course, you come into a room, you’re going to chat, chat, chat, and I think leaders, or facilitators of the meetings, are really aware of making sure that the business information is well shared, but how do we make sure that some of that connectivity and fun that we have at work is also translating? I think that there’s definitely an element of simple meeting hygiene or management that some of our managers are, I wouldn’t say necessarily struggling with, but it’s becoming more prevalent as to how you must deal with things in a different way. So I do think that there’s that, because that’s a real element that we see of those that are remote or have joined us during the pandemic where they were remote. They were maybe even a different geographic location. They still want that connectivity, and so you could see, if you don’t manage this well, engagement for those could easily drop, so I think it’s something that we all have to just pay attention to.

Mike Ashurst:

Great. We will talk a bit more in a later question about how that might impact on the culture of the organization, but just again, staying with the practicalities. John, did you have any further observations from your company?

John Wilson:

Well, I recognize that issue in particular, the hybrid meeting. When we were all remote, it was straightforward, when we were all in the office, it was straightforward, apart from those poor people at the end of the conference phone. But I don’t think we’ve learnt enough about hybrid meeting etiquette to understand how to really make that work, and I’ve used that phrase in particular because that is some work we’re doing with our managers and our management development team, on what the role of that facilitator or the chair of a meeting, in ensuring that inclusivity happens. It may be that we can’t replace the face to face experience for everybody, but there are small things we can do and just very practical steps that I think can make sure that people don’t get forgotten when they’ve put their hand up on the Team’s option and they’re waiting for somebody to notice.

Mike Ashurst:

Yeah. Great. Masenyane, I think you mentioned that your people are returning two days a week. Is everybody in the office on the same day then?

Masenyane Molefe:

That’s correct, Mike. I think that is actually one of the reasons we’ve gone that way, because we started reading up on all of the challenges that many organizations are having about managing this two tier environment of in office, virtual, people who are perpetually at the office, and people who are not seen because they’re working from home. So we really did try to avoid that, which is why we came up with the twice day, everybody in the office. And with us, it is everybody, so we didn’t differentiate that role to say, “If you’re in this role,” or, “If you’re in that role,” because our view, again, is that all of us are essential workers and all of us, a lot of our work is through others and we interact a lot. We collaborate a lot within teams and with other departments, so that is one way.

I think we are also very aware, and we found as well, as I think John mentioned, that hybrid meetings are difficult. It’s actually way easier to either have a meeting which is all, everybody’s virtual, or everybody’s physical, because if you try and have hybrid meetings and we do have those, we do find that the people who are virtual do miss out. They miss out on the in between chats, on the pre-meeting, those few minutes, check ins with everybody. Yeah, and I mean, I think it’s been very difficult, even for the people who are managing and running those meetings or workshops, whatever, to always bring in, or you almost have to deliberately remember that there are people dialing in from home, so you would have to… It’s a deliberate effort to bring them in.

One of the challenges we are facing a little bit different on this one is that, because now, on those days everybody is back in the office, there’s the usual obviously challenge, and I think the biggest one is people just saying, “Oh we are now back to the reality again of the commute.” We’re seeing traffic rise again. Gas prices have not helped. The fact that they’ve gone up, but one of the big challenges I think that we didn’t anticipate is the fact that people are now back in the office on those days doing work that can be done remotely, so often, staff are still in the office, in Zoom meetings and in Team meetings. And they’re asking, rightfully, “Why are we in the office, if we’re going to be doing Zoom and Teams meetings?” Because it’s almost like nobody wants that. Zoom and Teams are not going anywhere, even if you’re going back to the office. Those are with us to stay.

I think that is, for us, one of the big challenges that we are having to manage to say people are back in the office and it’s great. We’re seeing each other, we having that face to face connections that we’ve missed over the last two years. But the big question that still needs answering is the issue that, you know what? The tools that we’ve learned over the last two years have not gone away with us going back to the office, and that therefore also questions the whole move about going to the office. So those are some of the questions, I guess, that we are still grappling with.

Mike Ashurst:

Great, thank you. Just staying with you Masenyane for a moment, so the next question is, what impact has the move to hybrid arrangements had on how people can effectively work together? And here I’m thinking more about, and you mentioned this, in some of those informal communications, the water cooler discussions, how people maybe end up working only with their own teams and missing the interaction with other teams. What steps are you taking to deal with that?

Masenyane Molefe:

Sure. So, it was an interesting, I guess, finding that we had that, in the last two years, when we had lockdowns, we found weak links got weaker, strong links got stronger. So strong links were typically people, natural teams. Natural teams work very close to each other because, we found managers and teams checking in weekly with each other. Which was quite unusual, even before COVID, we didn’t necessarily have teams doing that, but we had teams, for all sorts of reasons and just because we were going through a pandemic and really having to check in on each other emotionally and all of that. People grew stronger as their natural teams.

What didn’t happen was, if you are in HR and somebody sitting in IT or some other team, that link what we… Because, unless we have a specific work related meeting that we need to chat about, I wouldn’t obviously bump into that person. We wouldn’t bump to these people. We would never see them, so we literally only saw people for the first time after two years when we started going back in, so that was the first one.

I think one of the other things that we also found, which was a huge benefit, was they locked down and using the new tools that we are using now, closed geographical boundaries. So where we previously, for example, we used to have staff sessions for head of the staff, or for regional staff. We then, obviously in the last two years, started having these sessions online, where everybody could join in. And I mean, I can’t tell you how much staff, particularly from the regions and the many remote offices that we have, do appreciate that to say, “You know what? They’re in the room. They’re in the room equally with people who are in Johannesburg, people who are in head office.” So we’ve decided to keep those staff sessions, carrying on being virtual, sorry. Simply because you also get a much bigger attendance.

I didn’t mention earlier, our staff headcount is about 1400. Typically, for any of those sessions, we can have 500, 600 people attending, which those numbers, we would never have had in a physical staff session that we used to have before the pandemic. I think we are also evolving, as we experiment with different solutions with this new world that we’re in. We’re very aware that a lot of companies are unsure about long term strategy about hybrid. I mean, we’ve seen many companies, recently, we saw Apple flip flopping about how often they want people back in the office. And we also see companies, and we’ve also done a bit of that, where the temptation is to fall back into traditional models. But I think we’re very open minded to say, “This is one big social experiment that is going to evolve, and we will evolve as time goes on to say what works and what doesn’t work.”

Mike Ashurst:

That’s great. How about in Wawanesa: So in terms of this, with the hybrid working missing out on some of the communication between different teams that you would have if everyone was in the office, what are you doing to try to solve that?

Lisa Osachoff:

I wish I had some sort of real nugget of, “This is the way it’s going to work.” I can tell you, I don’t know that we have truly solved for that, and the solve that I’ve observed works the best, is again, I really think that Masenyane said it well in terms of the, we’re in this social experiment, but where we’re really seeing when it works well, is when we have good leadership. Because it’s the leaders that are even more amplified as the real connection point between, either other groups, their own groups. So if a leader’s really strong, they’ve created some of these connective points, either some fun activity or something like that, or they’re remembering really how to engage all the stakeholders in the work that they’re doing.

I think in this hybrid world, engaging your stakeholders earlier in work processes does seem to be, probably more critical, to the outcome of work. Because we no longer have these hallway chats of, “Oh, hey, next week I’m going to ping you about whatever.” We still have to somehow have that hallway conversation, and that’s that early engagement of all stakeholders in work that we’re doing. So I would love to tell you we have some great process in place, other than identifying really good leaders that do this well and having them share their best practices, I’m not sure that we’ve got this yet.

Mike Ashurst:

Thanks Lisa. And John, how about at NFU Mutual?

John Wilson:

Yeah, I’d really pick up on that last point, Lisa. I think, again, some areas of the business have really taken to remote working. Without being too stereotypical, the IT function would be one, and at the same time, they’ve come up with some great large scale communication approaches, which we wouldn’t want to lose that. We want to keep that and share that approach and get it used by other areas as well, because they maintained sight of their divisional director on a weekly basis throughout lockdown, which they would never have had in the office, but he’s had town hall events throughout, and it’s appealed to their way of working. That’s worked out very well.

Going back a bit, I think a bit like we’ve heard, at a team level, I think people are working out with their manager when they’re going to be face to face and when they’re not, and it’s quite manageable and that’s happening. The most difficult bit are the impromptu bumping into someone, asking a quick question, making a decision or clearing up some bit of information that had gone astray, or just flagging up that you’re going to be in touch with them about something else, like you said, in a week’s time. I think those things are much more difficult to recreate, and maybe we have to use a bit of the technology we’ve been using for the last couple of years to do that and to get into the habit of doing that.

Maybe we do have to have some orchestrated and set piece events, which are just to mix. They’re maybe there for a business purpose as well, but they are to bring different functions together. I think that’s probably something that people are already practicing and we could be doing more of, so it’s very much a discovery phase that I think we’re all in. But we mustn’t forget what we’ve learned. We spent two years learning how to do it from home. It can’t be that difficult to then spend two years learning how to do the mix and the transition of it.

Mike Ashurst:

Sure. And that is the great thing about being part of ICMIF because, not only do you learn what works well or what doesn’t work well in your own organization, you have the opportunity to find out what’s working well or not in other organizations as well. So just moving over to the cultural elements. Many ICMIF members pride themselves on being a great place to work with a great culture, and being together in the office was a big part of that culture. So now there is less focus on the office, is this having an impact on that culture? I’m not saying if that’s a good or bad thing, and if so, what are you doing to address this? John, could you have started off on this one?

John Wilson:

Thanks Mike. Yes, it’s a big topic, and particularly at our exec committee and senior levels there’s no doubt there is concern that our culture will be difficult to maintain. It’s not across the board, but there’s definitely some, some discussion and debate about that, and how do we recognize it if we are diluting something that’s absolutely critical to how NFU Mutual operate? I think that it’d be that same bit of magic that many mutuals have, when it comes to the customer and the service ethos. We lose that at our peril. Yeah, there’s a lot of work going on, first of all, to understand what we should be measuring and monitoring, and secondly, what we should do about it, if we spot anythings that we think could be potentially damaging. Our primary measure of culture is through our engagement survey, which is an annual event, which we run with Gallup as our partner.

But for the last two years, we’ve had some additional questions from Gallup, which are about culture added in. They were initially added in to check out how people were feeling in the pandemic and whether they were being supported and had all they need to get through working from home. But, in conversation with Gallup, we’ve identified some that are measurable against some of their benchmarking databases, and we’re going to take those questions forward and track those and use them as a pulse survey for targeting different areas of the business and checking out how people are.

The first opportunity we’ve got to do that is early June, which is the next time that our engagement surveys run. We’ve maintained very high levels of engagement through the pandemic. Nobody quite knows what’s going to happen next, because since then, we’ve returned to the office and we’ve introduced hybrid working, which we think we’ve done in a way that is flexible enough for employees, but also works for the business. But there’ll be a little test at the beginning of June to see how we’re doing. That will be our second chance to measure these particular extra questions, which, they’re about inclusion. They’re about openness and transparency, and some of the things that we feel have driven our great place to work initiatives.

Then on the more tangible side, there are many productivity measures and so on, that will be tracked as well to help us determine whether the culture is… I mean, I expect it to change and evolve, and I think that’s a positive thing, but we must assure ourselves we’re managing the risk of losing something.

Mike Ashurst:

Sure. Yes, Masenyane.

Masenyane Molefe:

Sorry. I had to jump in because I think, John rightfully says, we probably will lose something and, I mean, we worry about the same things as well. In fact, this is probably the big one that we do worry about. My view is that the jury’s still out on this one. I feel that time will tell. We obviously worry as well about whether we’ve spent so many years and so much effort in building our great company culture and whether, for remote work or hybrid work or the world we’re in now, all this flexibility and people choosing, wanting to choose whether to be in the office or not, whether all of that will dilute the company culture that we worked so hard to build. That is the big question.

I think we will see an evolution of organizational culture in many organizations, including ours, including how we define organizational culture. We’ve often defined it as, how we do things around here, and I’ve been asking myself this question to say, “Is organizational culture physical or not?” Because we seem to have a very close… As soon as you talk about remote work, the next question often that comes up is, what about our organizational culture? One of the questions I started asking myself and trying to research is, is organizational culture really physical? I do think we’ll start seeing an evolution of what we knew as organizational culture to something else that will emerge as new organizational cultures.

I think the new organizational cultures will transcend our historic reliance on the physical office being the physical place where the melting pot of all our different… When we would come together in our diversities and minds and everything where, basically, our physical offices were this melting pot. I think this melting pot may have to be something else or somewhere else. But I do think the way we define organizational culture in a few years time will differ significantly to the way we defined it five years ago. And I think, obviously, a lot of that, it was a big part of the office. The skyscrapers and all of the big fancy offices that everybody built, and the office bars that came with it and all of the perks that everybody brought in, in the last 10 years.

Whether those will still be relevant today or not, I doubt it, but I do believe that we are heading into a new era where organizational culture is going to take on a very different meaning. I do think that staff are going to unlearn and relearn new ways of how to interact, how to learn, how to onboard new staff, how to onboard new young learners who we are worried about to say, “What happens if you’re a graduate?” All of us, when we were young graduates, we were taught with somebody sitting next to us, but how will that look for new graduates joining our world in the future, if everybody, or if the default I should say, is hybrid? I think there’s lots of interesting questions. We don’t have the answers. I don’t think anybody has the answers, but I think we take comfort in the fact that there is a new culture evolving. We don’t know that what it looks like, but we’re open to seeing what that will look like in the future.

Mike Ashurst:

Yeah. Great. Thank you Masenyane. Lisa, do you have anything to add to those comments?

Lisa Osachoff:

I think my colleagues are right on. When we talk at our executive level about the culture and with our senior leaders and there is this push to… Because I think right now, we’re right at a catalystic tipping point, where our employees really valued how we cared for them through the pandemic, and now they’re waiting to see what’s next. I’ve cautioned some of my colleagues to say, “Well, we’re going to take this dip. Well, we don’t have to.” There is an opportunity, the same as when people talk about great resignation or great reassessment, it is also the potential of the great talent acquisition into your organization.

I do think it’s one of the roles, I think, that HR can play really well at the table right now, is that there are six sides for every story or opportunity, and we really have to think about making sure we’re bringing that balanced approach to how we’re looking at culture. And whatever we’re saying, “It’s going to be this way,” I think all of us in our space can show data that says, “Well, maybe it could be a little bit of this and maybe it could be a little bit of that,” because I have said anybody that says they’re an expert in this right now, run, because nobody’s an expert in this. Even organizations that were hybrid prior to the pandemic, it was a different hybrid model than what we’re talking about now, because it’s more expanded, so it is really a new way of working.

Mike Ashurst:

Yeah. Great. Thank you, Lisa. Just picking up what you said there about the talent attraction. So we are constantly hearing that, for talent, you mentioned the great resignation with difficulties in attracting and retaining talent across the industry. Are you seeing much of this in your organization and how are you as a mutual insurer developing an employee value proposition that will help you to attract and keep the right people?

Lisa Osachoff:

Yeah, it’s really interesting because we have quite a large division in the US, where the US has certainly seen more of the great resignation than we have in Canada. We’ve seen a little bit less of this in Canada. Having said that, we have seen some increase in our overall turnover, but what I would say in that is, again, some of that, I think goes to people’s direct experience with their leader. Some people really reassessing after two years, what do we want to be doing? So there is a little bit of that.

I think in terms of talent attraction, the need for, not only… Because, I’ll tell you, anybody in recruitment or talent acquisition, they can tell you exactly what the value proposition of the organization is. It was one of my colleagues, I think it was John, that said, “It’s the magic of the mutual,” and it really is. We’re a purpose driven organization, so we do attract a certain type of candidate.

I think what we’re seeing is, it’s more important that it’s not only that HR touchpoint in the recruitment process that can really speak to that, but the hiring managers. If you do a meet and greet with others on the team, that everybody can speak to the total value proposition of the organization. Why should people join? So I think almost educating, across the board, a little bit more. Everybody can speak to their slice of their experience, but when you really want to… How do we sell to a member? We want to tell them all the value.

I think when we think about talent attraction, that’s become more evident, that we need to do that in a better way and in a way that attracts across demographics, because what is attractive to one demographic, maybe less attractive to another and vice versa. But the value of what we bring, there’s something for everybody, so we have to be a little bit more deliberate in how we’re actually approaching that.

Mike Ashurst:

Thanks Lisa. John, how are you dealing with this at NFU Mutual.

John Wilson:

Yeah, I’d just pick up really on that input from Lisa that, I think, slightly counter culture for a mutual, but I think we’re realizing we need to shout a bit more about what is so great about us, but we’re typically humble. However, the things you’ve mentioned, I think are our unique selling points. It’s interesting because I think for us, and I’m pleased to say it’s accelerated now, for example, our ESG and diversity and inclusion initiatives, because we know that there’s a big market of potential employees out there, for whom those things are important. So we might have been doing stuff, but we’ve kept it fairly under wraps if you like. But our recruiting friends in the resourcing team are saying, “No, we must tell people about this and we must tell people about this.”

We haven’t had a dramatic downturn in applicants, but we’ve noticed some indicators, so where we used to get maybe a dozen people applying for a role, it’s now hovering around five or six, which is interesting. And therefore, you have to work a lot harder to get them over the finish line. I think the other thing that my friends in resourcing was telling me, that there’d been a lot more salary offers that come in late in the day from other players that have lost us some candidates.

We know we were right to extend the flexibility, because that seems to be very important in the marketplace at the moment. But I know that the resourcing teams are working harder than ever to get people over the finish line, like I say. So it’s not easy out there, and I think it is because some of the things Lisa has highlighted, in terms of people reassessing. I’m not sure of whether the great resignation is happening, but people are thinking about things and what they really want to do, and I think all of that is driven by the pandemic experience.

Mike Ashurst:

Thanks John. Masenyane, have you anything to answer that?

Masenyane Molefe:

I mean, I would very much echo what Lisa and John said, I think we’re experiencing pretty much the same thing. We have not seen the great resignation, certainly not to the level that has been reported in the US. We have also seen, as Lisa said, a slight uptake in our turnover, but nothing too unusual. Definitely more than we have seen in the last two years, but I think that’s also to be expected with the level of economic activity starting to normalize.

One of the questions that we are seeing a lot in interviews in the recruitment process is this very question that we are discussing today, to say how are we, or what are we, offering in terms of flexibility, in terms of, ‘Is this role fully remote? How often am I going to be required to be in the office?’ So, that is definitely the big question that candidates are asking. It’s definitely a candidate’s market out there where they are choosing which employer they are wanting to join. We are seeing candidates voting with their feet very last minute in the process where they would decline offers, or we are also seeing a lot of their current companies counter offering. John, you mentioned that we you’re seeing a lot of that as well.

I do think, and I do like the idea of, really making, or taking, advantage of the fact that we are mutual, and that does give us a very unique selling proposition to say our role in society is just so different. The fact that we have benefits to members.

Our role in society, and I mean, I will take that on board to say, it is actually time for us to be bold, because I think that the mutual benefit is to speak to a certain type of person and the person that we do want, a person who wants to make a difference in society. Yeah. So I’m very much in agreement with a lot of what Lisa and John have already mentioned.

Mike Ashurst:

Thank you. Right, we’ve had quite a few questions. There’s one that I would like you all to answer, and then we’ll just see how much time we’ve got to maybe quickly ask one of you each of the last few questions. The first one is how do you develop your leaders, so they’re equipped to lead in a hybrid environment? John, could you take this one first please?

John Wilson:

Yes, thanks Mike. I think it’s right that a couple of people have already made comments about the importance of how leaders operate and role model in this new climate and that’s something that’s important for us. Last year we ran a virtual training program for all our people managers, which is about 700 people, which was about leading remote teams. That was in the first half of last year. We were giving them a whole set of… There’s a lot of practical stuff in there, tools and techniques as much as philosophy, but it was very much about how to ensure people continue to develop, continue to pursue their qualification studies, and also, how you manage performance, how you have performance and feedback conversations. The importance of managers staying in touch, even when there’s nothing to say, particularly, but not to let people drop off the radar. Lots and lots of tools and tips that people could take away from those sessions, as well as the bigger picture, which was looking at why those things worked and why those techniques were effective.
This year we’ve started… I mean, the campaign, as it were, has started and there will be another set of large scale events for managers, which I think will still be virtual, because you can get 150 people in a virtual training room a lot more easily than you can in a hotel in Stratford-upon-Avon. That is focusing on hybrid as opposed to remote, so it will take some of the learning from the remote training, the leading remote teams training, and align it with the hybrid challenges as well. To achieve that, we’re working again with our partner, I’m not on the sales force or anything, I’ve mentioned Gallup again, but we are working with them because they have a lot of research into both hybrid and remote working and which companies sustain high performance in those different scenarios. So we’re tapping into that and we’re working with them to do a similar roll out of leadership development events this year, for that same group, that went through the previous session, but that’s the structured training bit.John WIlson:

But there’s other stuff which is about leadership from the top and the behaviors that we’re expecting to be role modeled, so it’s actually given us the opportunity to refresh our behavioral framework, to refresh our mission statements and vision and restate them. We’re not changing them, but we’re definitely seeing this as an opportunity to remind people what we’re all about and to emphasize the importance of leaders, adopting behaviors which work for those people in the office, as well as those people who aren’t in the office, and that’s not easy. A lot of it involves learning as you go and actually learning, groups exchanging best practice, all of those mechanisms. But that’s a bit of a rushed whistle stop tour of where we are our thinking anyway.

Mike Ashurst:

Great. Thanks John. Masenyane, are you doing similar things at PPS?

Masenyane Molefe:

Sure. I mean, I’m actually reminded, as John was giving his input that, in the whole bit about reminding people what we are about, and we experienced that in the early stages actually of the pandemic where, obviously, new world and lots of questions coming to senior leadership. We, at that point actually, reminded people about our values to say, “Guys, let’s go back to our values. Rather than ask all these questions, let’s go back to our values,” which really are our anchor, and they really did help us navigate the last two years. We reminded people about the fact that we have all agreed and signed up to say we will take extreme ownership, we will do the right thing. We will be eternally curious, so if you do all of those three things, in whatever you do, you’re probably on the right track.

In terms of leadership practices, we’ve also rolled out a similar program that John talked about for our leadership teams, all about leading remote teams, even including little things about how frequently to check in individually and with teams, because obviously there was such a big need while we were on lockdown. One of the things we’ve done, for all staff now, is that we’ve also taken this opportunity to say, “This creates…” Or they’re coming back to office and lockdown has presented us with an opportunity to relook the way we do work and the way we are productive and the way we do it. We actually call it, working the PPPs way.

So we call it working the PPPs way, and it’s all about staff individual effectiveness, to say, “How effective am I in this new world that we’re in?” It’s about teaching people how to master the remote working tools. About time management, about prioritizing, about very granular things like, “Does this need to be a meeting? How long should this meeting be? Do meetings need to be an hour or can we keep it to 30 minutes?” For example. But it’s about teaching all of us to be more effective with our time and with the way we use our time. Do you give yourself enough time as an individual to have focused time, to really not just be pushing the same busy for the sake of being busy.

We have found a lot of value in that to say, as we are rethinking the new world, we are also on this journey with the rest of the staff to say, “You know what? The new world will also mean all of us should be better and more efficient people.” What we don’t want to get back to is the old world again, where people were in back to back meetings the whole day, every day, and we are questioning all of that model to say, “Was that even right, the way we worked?” I mean, there’s been an amazing… And we’re still rolling it out and we iterate it quite often, because there’s so much research and different company experiences about this particular topic about individual effectiveness. Individual effectiveness in this new world of work that we’re in.

Mike Ashurst:

Thank you, Masenyane. Lisa, how about Wawanesa?

Lisa Osachoff:

Very similar to my colleagues, but the one thing that I’ll add is, so I’m working with my team now on, I think, this leadership rollout program. We’ve seen it works. The keen people that take it always take it away, apply it. But particularly in this new world, how are we actually taking that learning and dropping it into habit building? Because, the one thing I think that does seem consistent in the data is, and I think this is why Masenyane is talking about, what’s that efficiency in challenging yourself to do the work better is, when we still get busy and we’re going to have those busy or stressful times, or whatever, it’s easy to revert back, and especially in this hybrid world. It’s very easy to revert back into some behaviors that are not constructive for organizational culture, how people work, how people interact, empathy in the workplace, all of that.

So how do we take our more traditional leadership learning and drop it into different mediums? So it’s a little bit of a reminder, dripped throughout of, you took this course and how is that working? I think we’re looking at, even evolving the way we deliver this material into… Learning in a virtual environment is different, and so we’re just challenging our norms around that, to try and develop more stickiness in the actual behaviors we’re teaching.

John Wilson:

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point, Lisa, at the end there, and something that’s very interesting in terms of the way you support people post the traditional training bit and the need, in fact, for different types of business coaching support. Which is, somebody will come alongside you and say, “Well, did you do that thing? That action plan you created the other week, have you done those things?”

Mike Ashurst:

Great. Thanks everyone. Well, we do have a few more questions, but we’re not going to have time. Luckily I think you’ve addressed, at least in part, some of them already by what we’ve talked about. We will try to find a different way to answer some of the other questions, but I don’t really want to run over the hour because I know everyone’s busy.

Thank you very much to Lisa, Masenyane and John for forming the panel today. It was really fascinating to hear your perspectives on what’s an overarching topic, affecting all ICMIF members. I think what we’re learning is that we’re a social experiment. No normal is the new normal, and really, we’re just figuring things out as we go along. In this fluid ever changing environment, there are no universal correct solutions to the challenge we’re facing, as we strive to get better, how we work together and serve our members. That’s why it’s so useful for us as ICMIF members to be able to come together to share our experiences and diverse perspectives, so that we can help each other to navigate the complex challenges we are all facing.

With this in mind, we have created the ICMIF virtual roundtables for HR leaders. I know Lisa, Masenyane and John have all participated in, and these are monthly meetings. Usually the first Wednesday of each month. The next one takes place on Wednesday the 8th of June 2022, between 3:00 and 4:00 PM, British summertime. Here’s a list of the topics we’ve discussed over the last 15 months or so in these meetings. Normally we do these in a round table format, in breakout rooms, but sometimes we have guest presenters, depending on the topics.

The average attendance at these meetings is 15. Everyone who attends these meetings reports back how valuable they find them. So these are open to HR people from all members, so if you are or any of your colleagues are interested in attending, please let me know and I’ll add you to the invitation list. We will actually run some of the unanswered questions through the HR group as well.

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