The Learning & Development podcast is hosted by our Chief Learning Officer David James. Featuring L&D leaders from across the globe, each conversation focuses on hot topics in the profession. This transcript is from the conversation between David and Jilly Julian on developing a people development strategy.
David James: Welcome to the Learning & Development Podcast. I'm David James from Looop. In each episode, I chat with guests about what lights them up in the world of people development. This week, I'm speaking with Jilly Julian, who is Senior L&D Business Partner at Horwich Farrelly, who is implementing a very different post-lockdown people development strategy.
Before we get into it, if you're enjoying this podcast, please do give us a five-star rating on your podcast app of choice to help others find us, and thank you if you’ve already done so. Now, let's get into it.
David: Jilly, welcome to the Learning & Development Podcast.
Jilly Julian: Hi, David. Nice to be here, thank you.
David: Now, Jilly, first of all, how are you and how have things been changing for you over the last few weeks with COVID and lockdown and the like?
Jilly: Well first of all, thank you for asking. It's really nice when people actually ask how you are at the minute. I'm good and we're good. That includes me, it includes colleagues, the team at work, it includes the family because it's all one big homogeneous group now. I think that's really the knob on what's changed over the last four months, I guess. The lines have blurred quite significantly.
Everybody has different circumstances in this. For me, it's been intense, really intense, because everything has amped-up. From a professional perspective, things have become more intense as the need to provide additional support and tactical, responsive, useful support, but also with homeschooling, with trying to nurture small kids through a really weird period in their lives. It's been intense and I'm very much looking forward to a holiday. I'm not going to lie.
David: No, I agree with you there. I heard a lovely phrase, when we read all the time that everybody's working from home, I heard someone challenge that and say, "No, we're living at work." You go, "Oh, my goodness." Whether it's factually true or not, I think that there is something to it that it's a different dynamic to the-- I don't know, the relaxation and the different dynamic of what working from home means. It was something you'd look forward to and now it is this constant hamster wheel in which you have to be disciplined in order not to overdo too much of one thing.
Jilly: Absolutely. I think that's a really crucial differentiation here. In that nobody is working from home because they are enabled to work from home, they are working from home because there's no option and regardless of whether it fully works or not, that's what we're doing. I saw something similar and it was we're not working from home, we're working in the middle of a global pandemic.
David: Let's be real, yes.
Jilly: Very different.
David: In light of all that then, Jilly, how has the current situation and how it's evolved, impacted on your people strategy at Horwich Farrelly?
Jilly: It's been huge. Not least because, the word transformation gets bandied around way too much, especially on LinkedIn. The transformational impact of everything that's been happening is massive. I've described this previously as being an organisation that was about to pilot some fairly small scale flexible working in one part of the firm and was looking at ways that we could reduce the amount of paper, etc, and move to a paper-light way of working.
We're now almost completely remote and paperless, overnight. When you look at the degree of change that that means for the firm, in terms of processes, the way that we operate, our operational model has changed completely. Do you know what? A high-five to us, a pat on the back, it's kept things going. I think we'll look back on this as being a success story, but what it means is we're essentially looking at a completely different business.
There has been a really pragmatic moment of, "Okay, we understand now that the long-term view of this will be very different to the structure of the business that we've been working with in the past." We need to revisit our people development strategy completely and say, "Okay, for the shape of the business that we now have and for what we can anticipate about the coming two, three, five years, we know that's going to be different."
We can't just lean on the kinds of principles that sat behind previous iterations of a people development strategy. We've got to build now for the business that will exist for the foreseeable future and for the way that that will work and acknowledge that that is a change and that is a difference. Otherwise, we just risk potentially going back to some of the-- not the bad old days, but the practices and the ways of working and the mindsets that albeit only a short time ago were the prevailing way of doing things but now are kind of out of date.
I don't want to say irrelevant, because it's important to build on that, but we don't just want to automatically default back to 2019's ways of doing things. It kind of feels like going back to 1919's way of doing things at the moment because things are so fundamentally different.
David: In so many different ways, it really isn't just about the location in which you work. Fundamentally, expectations have changed as well as people's values and drivers and all sorts within that. You can imagine that if this hadn't have hit, then we know what people strategy is about, it is about making sure that we're facing in a forward direction. The people strategy speaks pretty much to the HRD or the CEO and it shows how things can be better than they are today. It's a build, really, acknowledging everything that had happened before. I take it that from what you just said, this isn't the case for what you've been developing?
Jilly: No, it's not. I have to freely admit that in previous lives when getting involved in development of people development strategies, there's an element of creating them that to your point there is perhaps about what will appeal to the HRD at the time, or what will appeal to the exec at the time. In recreating a people development strategy recently, my go-to thinking has been really purist.
All the stuff that we see, people waxing lyrical on Linkedin and Twitter about the best practice way of doing this stuff, I think is more critical now than ever to come back to what are the key drivers in your business? What are the things that will support the survival at worst, growth at best of your business and using those as the key tenets to then build the strategy from.
Regardless of what somebody thinks is sexy at any given moment in time, regardless of whatever the current popular viewpoint is amongst the L&D community at the time, all of that has to be disregarded. It has to be about what's the stuff that is going to make the difference in terms of the businesses like I said, either survival or growth. Ideally, what does the build look like now?
To bring it back to that principle of the business measures, the business requirement for success, that's the stuff that we need to overtly support. Really, it's not just about drawing the thread anymore, it's about being obvious about the fact that developing our people is a really key building block within that path to growth for the business.
David: In the past-- I was going to say, it wasn't that long ago because of the lockdown and everything you're thinking it seems like decades ago.
Jilly: I know.
David: One of the real anxieties around L&D was how do we align to the business? How ridiculous does that sound right now? When, as you're describing, everybody has to be, first of all, recognising how the world and your customers have changed and what then requires adaptation on the part of the people? How does the organisation adapt, how then do you prepare those people to do something different, either to achieve greater ends or in some cases when it's transformation, different ends.
It is laser-focused on the key factors that are going to mean that the organisation is successful or it is not. If L&D are then looking still at perhaps more philosophical approaches. I'm not disregarding purpose-driven leadership for example, but this is the stage where you've got to take a look and you have to be really clear that your solution, which you are calling purpose-driven leadership, is solving the actual problems that your organisation and its people are really facing. We can no longer take a buzzword or a philosophy that is in vogue and fresh to the organisation and then overlay that, thinking it must make some difference. It's much more around understanding cause and effect to achieve results. Is that where you are?
Jilly: Yes, absolutely. In my head, it's almost about bringing the commerciality that we're constantly encouraging in the businesses and the organisations that we're working in and applying that to our own practice. I can't honestly claim to be able to develop a people development strategy unless I've had enough understanding to be able to get my head around the commercial drivers for my firm or the commercial drivers for the clients that we work with.
Looking at our market now and the potential for the future, then what's important there? What do we need to be developing within our people here to be able to consider what will drive that value much further down the line? Because like I said, in such turbulent times, then we've got to have that focus that's more than six months out. It's partly why I really, really hate that conversation about the new normal and that was a phrase, it feels very early to be saying things like that and also-
David: We've not landed yet. This isn't normal.
Jilly: No, no, no. Realistically, we have to be looking at months, years down the line. We do have to be genuinely strategic about what we're doing at the moment, as well as responding to the immediate and tactical need, that's a given. In terms of that strategy development, it has to consider what's happening in UK industry right now? What are the likely legislative shifts that are going to have an impact further down the line?
Like I say, equally in the-- certainly, in my case, it's about understanding what that looks like from a client perspective. It's been a very different experience of developing the strategic outline for people development to anything that I've had before. There's no doubt about that.
David: You mentioned about LinkedIn earlier. Over the years, I've seen there's a bone of contention in L&D that we can't be accountable for results. There is a reason why we measure engagement and attendance, completion, satisfaction, and the like, is because, do we really make a news for ourselves that we can't possibly affects performance and results, but I wonder whether in light of what you've just discussed here, have you outlined what the measures of success would be for your team's involvement?
Jilly: Full disclosure, I'm very much in the camp that satisfaction ratings and attendance and trading penetration by headcount, that does not work for me. If we're not in the business of supporting business performance directly, then that's where I struggled to say, what is the value that we bring? We have to look at the business measure of success as the measure of L&D success.
I know that's not a new thought. Where that plays in here really importantly comes back to, it's where you build that strategy from, it's understanding those drivers in the first place. If I know that productivity, for example, is one of the real basics that is going to be important in sustaining the business and growing the business, then I need to understand what that looks like in different parts of the firm and then that needs to become a part of our measure of success as a people development function to say, “Can we draw the line? By doing this, can we expect to see this difference?”
We can then track that back and it's not particularly sexy, but it's really important. That's what is important to the senior leadership team in the firm. It's what's important to teams of people who are also experiencing this very intense period and needing to be able to crack on with minimal distraction from their purpose and that's just the nub of it all.
David: I always say that the hardest part of any initiative, if you're going to make a difference is knowing what to work on. If you don't know what problem you're solving, then it really doesn't matter what you do. I think that L&D, for many years, have been caught in a trap of thinking that our role is the delivery of programmes and the provision of content, it's not. It is in and-- Kevin Yates said it brilliantly on a previous episode, said, it's helping your organisation to win whatever winning in your organisation means and that is it.
If you're not close enough to critical points of failure in your organisation or certainly inefficiencies in practice and the achievement of results, then it doesn't really matter what you do. This is why I think that we're in this situation where expensive platforms and suites of content are a bore, that people don't really engage with. You just buy everything and you think that there's got to be something in there for someone and then we will track and encourage engagement because if we get people there, then they will learn and then there's this false equation that learning equals performance. Where really, the whole thing fails if you don't know what you're trying to affect, which leads me up to the next question, because I wonder, Jilly, what role is learning tech playing in the delivery of your strategy?
Jilly: Oh, God. It's like a keystone to the whole thing at the minute. Again, I think it's been fair to say that we've had to expedite our tech transformation, at Horwich Farrelly. What's great is that actually, a lot of the planning, the thinking, the map for it all was there. It's had to be brought forward at pace because of these circumstances. I'm sure a lot of organisations have been in a similar position where thinking that's already happened is now just being really sped up and really brought to the fore and the trick has been trying to do that in the right way at the right time.
Now, in our case, what we've needed to really bring forward is some externally sourced content. Again, making sure that is right for what's needed right now, in a way that's going to work for the people across our firm and also making sure that the way that people are able to engage with that is as easy and as quick as it possibly can be. We have a lot of content development happening in-house.
We have some really specific pieces that we need to have that internal expertise brought to bear on, which means that essentially, we've been in a position where we've needed to be able to do that in a very, very fleet of foot way to support the speed of tech transformation and to support the immediacy of that performance support that we talked about a minute ago.
Gone are the days of being able to do something that-- we can probably land that in a month's time, well God knows what the world's going to look like in a month's time and people have a barrier to being able to perform right now. It's all about that pace and being able to get those barriers and points of friction eased in the most efficient way that we can. Obviously, when it comes to efficiency in that respect, having the right platforms is massive.
David: You mentioned performance support, what kind of stuff is your key format, would you say?
Jilly: It really varies, David, to be honest. It really varies. A lot at the moment is about making sure that people have access to the most engaging, broken down resources that we can, and I'm using the word resources deliberately because in terms of what media and content is applicable, it varies wildly. In some cases, because of the subjects that we're supporting people with, and in some cases, because the audience might vary and there might be some stuff in there that actually we want to make available elsewhere. We've produced quite a bit of material that our clients can engage with to understand more fully the service that we provide.
Also, I think that variety is in there because we do still have a range of technical capabilities across the firm. I mean, in a very literal sense, some people might not have audio enabled on their laptop yet. There might be people who have different setups, different devices that we need to be able to accommodate a really varied estate. For very practical reasons, as well as the fact that we understand that that's ideal to give people a varied suite of options. Really, tactically, we need to mix it up.
David: I wonder if you could bring this to life for us and give us an example of how this works, perhaps with induction?
Jilly: Yes, absolutely. Again, like all of this, we had grand plans for how we were going to change our induction back in January, the New Year. Wow. It was something that we were looking at to really reinvigorate the new starter experience, to go from a really quite, dare I say old school, way of inducting people into the business to actually putting more focus on how we get people up to speed, quick, smart.
That's now obviously evolved into how we get people up to speed, quick, smart, remotely, and just add in that extra layer of challenge. That's something that we've been able to really make significant changes with, in a really positive way. Again, in line with what we'd always intended, what was in plan, but because we've needed to be able to put the tech platforms in place to enable that in the flow of work and performance support.
We've been able to make the most of that to be able to give our new starters what they need, when they need it, at that point in that early days and weeks in the firm and actually use it to loop back around with some iterative feedback, how's it going, all of that, which has been able to make it feel really nice and personal. So far, we've had some really nice narrative happening around that.
David: Have you been using automated campaigns with that?
Jilly: To the extent that we can, yes. I think because it's still quite an early journey for us, we're being a little bit cautious about the level of automation just yet. When we know we have core content that's right for people then absolutely. The core is there for people from day one, they're going to get these pieces posted out to them because that's what you need on day one.
Day three, once you have a chance to get to grips with some bits, here's your next chunk so that we're not overloading people. Getting away from the bad old days of if somebody has a spare couple of hours because nobody's put anything in the diary yet. I'll just read the internet, read these policies. Nobody wants to be doing that. Not even the people who wrote the policies want to be doing that.
David: No, no.
Jilly: It's about making sure that that engaging new starter experience that's also pragmatic is there from the outset.
David: Are you collecting user insights along the way as well?
Jilly: Yes, we are. That's a really big part of this. It's important as well, because not only in terms of the data that we get back in, but in terms of new starters to the firm actually understanding that they have something to contribute here and that we're interested in their insight. That it's a dialogue and it seems counter-intuitive to have mostly automated kind of tech solutions that becomes the mode of doing that.
It doesn't necessarily translate as that from a user experience and actually, creates this really nice dialogue conversation loop that sets people up to continue to want to feed into making improvements in their early days, which is really important.
David: I think one of the important changes in Learning & Development, certainly that I've seen, is that if you focus on the performance and you invite insights based on what it is that people are trying to do and they're not able to do, they will tell you. If you try to engage in dialogue about what people are trying to learn or what they're not able to learn, you don't get the same engagement because our language and expectation of learning isn't the same as the people we're seeking to influence because they are working.
They are learning as they overcome challenges. If we reframe that in support, first of all, understanding their challenges. Number two, seeking to help them address those challenges. Then number three, engage them in a dialogue about those challenges they're in. I don't know if that's the experience you've had?
Jilly: We've had a lovely example just this week. Where it wasn’t in the new starter realm, it was something else that we've been putting out there that involves a shift in way of working. We actually, via the automated mechanisms, got some feedback about a particular resource relating to this difference in ways of working and responded to it and started the conversation about it.
Actually, the comments we had back is that kind of, "Wow, I like to make sure that I always leave comments." I was actually being quite light-hearted about it. I just didn't expect that anybody was actually going to be picking up these comments. Literally, a feedback mechanism, people can be so used to it being one way. There's that right now talk to us more about that, help us to develop this. What's your experience of it? It's been a bit of a kind of, "Oh, I wasn't expecting it to go there. Didn't see that coming".
David: It's funny how a lot of enterprise social networks don't take off in organisations because of the fundamental lack of trust. A lot of big organisations operate from low trust, but then they expect high trust from the employees. Because of that dynamic, it doesn't quite work. Again, you gain trust if you are seeking to understand and support people with what they primarily care about. As that example then shows that people will engage, but will also be surprised by what's been involved. It's a high trust exercise focused on the most important things that people are there in the organisation to do.
Jilly: Yes, absolutely.
David: Going back to the induction example, how has this been received by new starters and by stakeholders who I'm sure would have had different expectations about what induction would look like?
Jilly: It's a big shift in some respects because in days gone by, induction would have been something wholly owned by the L&D department. To the point where we literally have people for the first few days of their lives with us and then release them back to the firm. Obviously, now things are far more integrated into somebody's early days and weeks. It's far more about them getting to know and feel a part of their teams, etc. That's even without factoring in the fact that everybody is remote.
There's much more reliance on what line managers are doing at different points in that process as well. I have to say, given particularly the circumstances that we're under at the moment, I think everybody is okay with that. There is a moment of, "Okay, this is a big shift but this is how it needs to work." Then off the back of that is the realisation that actually, this really does get people feeling at home and able to take on the new challenges and get up and running far more quickly and far more effectively.
It seems to have landed quite well so far. Massive caveat that as with many organisations, there hasn't been a colossal amount of opportunities to test this out, because recruitment has been really quite quiet over the last few weeks. It has been happening in some pockets of the firm. Like I said, the early narrative is really positive around this, which is really encouraging. I think what it represents is that proof of concept that actually the very traditional view of what an induction looks like, it can be completely different from the way that we experienced the firm's new starters. There are some real tangible benefits off the back of that.
David: Has this required your team to work in a different way and how have they adapted?
Jilly: We have genuinely had to give our heads a bit of a shake in terms of the way that we would go about creating some of these experiences. I'm really lucky to have a team of very skilled designers and learning specialists that have already given some real deep consideration to what digital learning in our firm looks like, and what we want people to experience, etc. As soon as the lockdown period hit and everything suddenly became remote, everybody's heads just got straight into that place, which is fantastic. It has meant a real shift in thinking to more of, "Oh, God. I don't necessarily like going agile." Let's say lowercase A.
David: Yes.
Jilly: To make the shift from designing something that might have been more traditionally oriented and might have needed to be the perfect finished product into maybe more that iterative way of working has been a bit of a shift. Speed to market being of the essence has been a bit of a shift as well, which can make people feel uncomfortable sometimes. To make that move to the shorter bursts of activity that get you to that end product working alongside an SME rather than for an SME, can be a real shift in mindset.
It would have been easy to feel quite exposed within that. What actually it's done, I think it's really strengthened some partnerships around the firm, which is fantastic. It's definitely been a shift in mindset. I think what I'm getting played back to me from the team is that they're finding it really liberating.
David: Oh, that's good.
Jilly: I think, to have the platforms in place and the system's there, to be able to work in that quick to market way has really, really helped. Both in terms of the learning platform, but also in terms of the collaborative platforms that we've now got around the firm like Teams, for example. All of those pieces come together to actually give us options that maybe we didn't have before.
We're a geographically diverse firm. That had always been a barrier. Things have become quite Manchester centric in terms of that was where head office is in and therefore, that's where things happen. Clearly, that's all been blown out of the water by the current circumstances. I think that's actually really done us good.
David: I wonder, Jilly, how has your own perspective of L&D changed in recent months?
Jilly: Oh, good question. I think what the last few months has really done is crystallised where things are starting to get to with L&D anyway in terms of that more holistic view of what we do within the organisations that we work in or with. Within the people development strategy, I deliberately call out things like well-being being a critical factor in productivity. If we’re supporting productivity with this traditional L&D initiative here, then actually, there's a need to consider all the factors that come into play within that and to not shy away from them or say that they're caveats, but to actually embrace the opportunity to positively influence them.
That more holistic approach has definitely been crystallising for me. I think also the kinds of things that we always talk about in terms of L&D, now incorporating more of a marketing mindset. That all-around engagement, what happens with the comms experts that we have around us? What happens with the business development experts that we have around us? I think that's coming to the fore more and more and more. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
David: No, no, I don't. I think the marketing comparison gets confused sometimes in L&D. I think sometimes it is oversimplified to marketing our content. Creating personas, taking a look to see what content might be most applicable, and then marketing that content. I think that the more useful way of looking at it is that in marketing, you're seeking to influence the right people to do the things that you would like them to do. It is fundamentally different because it doesn't involve just popping your content to the right people.
You have to understand who they are. Understand what they're trying to do. Understand what they're not able to do efficiently. Engage in dialogue rather than simply delivery. Run experiments to see whether you are working with them and collaborating with them, and can actually help move the needle in a meaningful way. That's where marketing departments across all different organisations are all seeking different ends. Whether it is to drive traffic, whether it's to increase leads, whether it is to increase footfall or generate leads and sales.
It's all about understanding a particular buying persona to influence them in order to do the stuff you'd like them to do. I think it's so much easier in organisations because we don't have to even create personas. You just have to understand your people. The HR systems are full of dry data that you can colour in with conversations. When you're engaging in conversations with them about what matters most, the solution, a lot of the time becomes very, very obvious.
Jilly: It's really easy to make assumptions about what's important to the business at any given moment in time. Then when you start to get down into, okay, what about this particular department? What about this particular demographic? What about this particular person? As you say, it gives that shade, that nuance to the understanding of how this needs to translate in this firm. It stops us making broad-brush assumptions. If there’s anything that I would hope, it would be a lasting legacy of what's happening right now, it's just a step away from assumptions. On a very immediate level, you've got people coming back from furlough at the moment.
Let's not make assumptions that they're all bright and shiny and well-rested and happy about the circumstance that they're in. In the same way, let's not make the assumption that the folks who've been in the organisation for the last six months and have been trying to keep the pedals turning are more in the right mindset for the here and now. It's about being able to step back from all of the assumptions from our own experiences, and actually just keep asking those questions. Keep that inquisitive approach. Traditionally, of course, which L&D folks tend to be pretty good at. To keep that level of understanding current because everything's changing week on week at the minute.
David: Not to be asking questions about what people want to learn, but only focusing on what it is that people are trying to do, and take the conversation from there. It's such a fundamental refocus. Now, Jilly, final question. As we've been discussing here, there is a real change happening in L&D as organisations need to help in the way that we've described. Sometimes, as you said, for the organisation to stay alive. Professionals see how they can make more of an impact as a result. Now, what advice would you give to your peers about the journey we all need to make from here?
Jilly: Well, I think that last point around stepping away from assumptions is really important. I think to constantly test what we think we know, is going to be a skill that we're all going to need to sharpen quite significantly. Again, not just in this circumstance. I know it's a moment in time. I think there are going to be so many profound and lasting ripple effects from everything that's happening at the moment. I think to do that, not just within the organisations that we're working with, but at a much broader level, and to actually embrace what we're constantly encouraging others to do in terms of looking at what are the market forces that are at play right now? What are the regulators starting to talk about in different industries? What legislative shifts are likely to take place off the back of the way that the world is changing at the moment?
To actually kind of embrace the stuff that we might go and rant about on Twitter, occasionally, she said. Actually, to bring that more global thinking into some of our day-to-day practice. To make sure that we are testing ourselves and not just staying in our world as we knew it/know it, and don't perhaps want to necessarily test too strongly in case it is different. To actually roll with it in the way that we're expecting the folks that we work with, in our organisations to.
David: Wonderful. Jilly, if people want to follow you or connect on social media, what's the best way they can do so?
Jilly: I believe I'm the only Jilly Julian on LinkedIn. I'm quite easy to find that way. I am @JillyTats on Twitter.
David: Wonderful. We’ll put some notes and links in the show notes. Jilly, thank you very much for being a guest on the Learning & Development Podcast.
Jilly: Thanks so much, David. It was fun.
David: As Albert Einstein said, and as what Tracey Waters from Sky said on this very podcast, "To do the same things and expect different results is the definition of insanity." Because L&D is now expected to make a demonstrable difference. Faster and more efficiently than before. What Jilly and her team are doing is leading the way on how we can all achieve this.
If you'd like to get in touch with me, perhaps to suggest topics you'd like to hear discussed, you can tweet me @DavidInLearning, or connect on LinkedIn or Facebook, for which you'll find the links in the show notes. Goodbye for now.
Jilly is Senior L&D Business Partner at Horwich Farrelly, having previously head People Development roles at MAG (Airports Group), The Co-operative Group, PZ Cussons and Capita.
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