A traditional loan business prepares itself for a new way of working
Door-to-door lending is a phrase that conjures up a range of intimidating images. But Sarah Dickins (pictured), people director at Provident, which provides a range of products both on the doorstep and online, says her business is both well-intentioned and well-established. Initially set up in 1880 to help families who were struggling to buy school uniforms, the company has 2.5 million customers – and now it has integrated the culture and values that befit its scale.
When Dickins joined in 2012, she found an organisation ready for an “aggressive” turnaround programme to meet the changing needs of customers and grow into new markets. With more than 8,000 agents – and 11,000 employees in total – Provident’s staff pound the streets visiting borrowers in their homes to discuss their needs, deliver cash loans to their door and collect repayments, which puts people at the heart of the business.
But Dickins says staff were still reliant on paper-based records for customer accounts and there was a higher-than-ideal turnover of sales and collection agents. It was time to modernise and change the culture.
“We were struggling to attract agents, find them and keep them in that first year. So we put in place structured recruitment processes and an induction which we called ‘Best Welcome’.” This involved reviewing whether Provident was finding the right people for the roles, and whether these recruits understood what the job would entail.
Under ‘Best Welcome’, new recruits go out with an accredited agent to witness the job first hand before they start with the firm. The lender also introduced a standard induction for agents and field leaders. And 12 academy branches have now been launched to deliver training. In the first year after the changes were introduced, the results were dramatic, with a 25 per cent improvement in agent turnover.
Another advance came in the form of mobile phone apps for agents to manage their customer accounts, and a new website – with a candidate tracking system – to operate alongside a refreshed employer brand. “Before the new website, recruitment had been very manual, so centrally we had no sight of the frequency of the vacancies, what the progress was on hiring, where we had gaps or where we didn’t have anyone in the pipeline,” says Dickins. “The technology enables us to be much more proactive but also to go direct to market when hiring for some roles where we’d been heavily reliant on agencies.”
Dickins says that with the digital modernisation came efficiencies which led to redundancies. The company supported staff through the process with an outplacement programme and the offer of voluntary redundancy for clerical staff, she says.
Ensuring workforce engagement throughout the process has been crucial, she adds, with leadership training playing its part: “I put a good case forward about investing in people and investing in leadership… we knew we were not going to embed the change effectively without equipping our people to take their people with them.”
The people department brought in practical leadership training around leading people and teams through change, with actors and role-play sessions. Board members went through the training personally to ensure they understood it. As the training is rolled out, a board member opens and closes each session with managers and function heads, to demonstrate their commitment to development and get employee feedback.
Dickins says the training has helped “blend together” existing, experienced staff with those who have just joined the business. This had the added benefit of improving relationships across departments, which aided the move to a matrix organisation, combining functional and divisional structures to bring together employees and managers to accomplish a common goal. This is key to future business growth, because in tandem with the turnaround programme, Provident has recently launched two new businesses: Satsuma an online lender irreverently advertised by a singing orange; and Glo, a guarantor loan business.
New communication methods have helped further engage staff in the change. They include a regular radio chat show with the managing director and other senior leaders answering staff questions, and weekly in-office ‘huddles’ to keep staff up to date on how the business is doing and what their immediate goals should be to keep the turnaround on track.
“Our leaders really got the simple people strategy because it gave them a different perspective on why we’re here as a people team. It gave our team a unique opportunity to be able to say ‘what’s our strategy? What are we trying to do?’ By keeping things simple we’ve been able to achieve a lot by connecting what we want to do with the operational agenda.”