I recently caught up with Jason Kinsella from Lloyds Banking Group who has been leading the digital transformation of their HR service and I’m keen to spread the inspiration by sharing some of their impressive results and lessons learnt.
Jason talked about how Workday has helped them improve in three key areas; Culture, Insight and Agility (nicely nicknamed CIA).
Culture
Like other organisations we’ve worked with, Lloyds quickly discovered that pretty much all holiday requests were being approved so they removed the approval step altogether. This frees up time for managers, speeds up the process and encourages a culture of trust where people have conversations to check holiday is convenient before entering it in the system.
Moving towards a culture of career conversations rather than tick boxes, Lloyds have removed performance ratings and encourage regular check ins instead which are planned by the employee and their manager, not dictated by annual HR cycles.
Just adding the Feedback worklet to the home page increased feedback by 10%, meaning that 16% of the business now regularly use the feedback module. This has created a culture of ‘in the moment’ feedback across all grades and teams.
Lloyds have deployed a tool called Hive (a Jive solution) which they use as a one stop shop for User Guides and to find answers to Workday-related questions. For the first two weeks, Jason and his team were answering all the queries but after that, colleagues were starting to help each other and share solutions across the organisation. This created a culture of ‘self-help’ instead of going straight to a call centre.
The team then responded to feedback that it would be ideal if users didn’t have to come out of Workday to access Hive so the team added a worklet to the Workday home page that takes users straight through to the tool.
Since going live in November, the team have made 285 improvements to business processes, creating a culture of data-driven efficiency and continuous improvement.
Over 80% of job changes used to be exceptions which took time and frustrated everyone involved. Now 90% of job changes go through the system, creating a culture of process adherence and consistency.
Insight
Like other banks and asset managers in our Financial Services HR & Compliance network, Lloyds have a number of regulations to meet that need ever increasing visibility and insight into the individual accountabilities of staff in certain roles.
90% of people at Lloyds that are impacted by the Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SMCR) are identified by Workday based on job profiles which has made the regime much less taxing for HR and Compliance.
Like most of our clients, exit surveys at Lloyds were rarely and inconsistently completed despite being a likely source of broad and deep insights into talent attraction, development and retention. Now 95% of leavers complete an exit survey which is completed and collated in Workday for action.
Agility
As part of a move to more agile ways of working, Lloyds removed the ability to search for jobs by grade, aiming to encourage lateral moves as well as upwards promotions. However, there was consistent feedback that many people, particularly those at risk, wanted to search for jobs by grade to see what else they might be suitable for and so the team switched this search by grade functionality back on overnight achieving greater user satisfaction in just a few hours.
Electronic P60s are available on Workday and mobile devices which means people can show these on their phone when applying for mortgages.
Realising the power of having all data and processes in a single intuitive platform, Lloyds are moving Compensation and Learning into Workday this November. This supports an agile organisation to easily link people’s performance, development and reward in one place.
Top tips for companies embarking on a cloud-enabled transformation
As a Finance and HR transformation consultancy who helps companies deliver Phase Zero (a set of activities and decisions needed before starting an implementation), the Veran team and I were delighted when Jason said the reason they could complete such a successful Phase One in just 13 months, was because they spent a prolonged period laying the groundwork and doing thorough due diligence and planning before jumping in.
Jason’s three top tips for success are:
1. Prepare your data before you start – collecting and cleansing data from existing legacy systems and spreadsheets always takes longer than expected and to reap the culture, insight and agility benefits of a cloud system, the required data has to be prepared before you start.
2. Agree your processes before you start – cloud technology enables faster, easier processes but there are thousands of decisions to make. Designing your future processes upfront, agreeing roles & responsibilities and therefore understanding the change impacts the project will bring, will enable bigger benefits and better adoption. Veran has proven end to end processes which we use as a starting point to accelerate this preparation before starting the implementation.
3. Speak to other customers – Lloyds wanted to make sure they were partnering with the right vendor and learning from their peers so they spoke to a huge range of customers, especially outside of the banking industry, taking inspiration from tech firms leading digitalisation such as Google and Facebook.
Veran is a technology agnostic consultancy that helps businesses prepare for and deliver Finance & HR transformation.
For more information visit www.veranperformance.com and contact me at becky@veranperformance.com