BGL Group’s Catherine Lynch puts technology at the heart of her transformation project
There’s something missing from the comfortably plush Peterborough headquarters of BGL Group, the financial services provider behind disruptive home insurer Beagle Street and ubiquitous comparison site comparethemarket.com. There isn’t a meerkat in sight.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” smiles Catherine Lynch, group HR director. It’s possible she is simply fed up of the furry critters that have become synonymous with the company’s biggest brand. Or maybe it’s a sign of her determination to focus on the fundamentals rather than the window dressing.
“In aircraft, you’re always told to put your oxygen mask on first before you help anyone else,” says Lynch, former head of HR at Barclaycard and HR director of Santander, who joined the firm in 2013. “It’s the same in business. Before I arrived, we had a scattered HR team. My concept has been around creating ‘One HR’. The team we have today is smaller and has real business experience.”
Around a third of the HR team has changed during this period. And Lynch says her new setup is highly focused: unafraid to employ visual or conceptual metaphors to inspire (at Santander, she says she created ‘HR Team Oarsome’), she talks of ‘climbing peaks’. HR professionals carry cards emblazoned with the term, and an explanation of what each peak represents.
“Each year we say our aim is to ‘bag a peak’ – we’re two peaks in, having moved from HR that was administrative to being at the ‘business insight’ stage,” says Lynch. Business alignment comes next, with the task that HR must “forge relationships with the business… The challenge I’m setting HR is that we will deliver against this promise rather than have a master and slave relationship.”
It’s determined stuff, but Lynch insists the big issues deserve tackling, and that nothing should be off-limits for a new HR director. “I was hired by the incoming CEO [Matthew Donaldson] and my first job was to re-OD the board,” she says. “It was a bit outdated compared to the disruptive brands we are known for.” She arranged for board members to be sent on competitive strategy workshops specially designed by INSEAD professor Karen Cool. “I thought it was vital the board understood the sources of competitive advantage. Yes, we could have Googled it, but the course was extremely commercially focused and we made specific decisions as a direct result of it.”
Senior executives could have taken exception to the approach, she admits, but the move fits with BGL’s overarching five-year strategy, which is to ‘add value and create prosperity’. This comes with four separate values – to be innovative, entrepreneurial, competitive and enduring – and it couldn’t work without everyone being aligned, says Lynch. So far, the results are promising: 2014 saw a 13 per cent increase in revenues, to £507m.
“Insurance is quite a maligned sector, but it’s quicker than people expect, and that gives us the freedom to be more innovative,” says Lynch. Technological advancement, she adds, should be more than just customer-facing. “People often talk about HR needing to be close to the CEO or FD, but I believe it’s the CIO that HR professionals need to be working hardest with – this is the person at BGL who is enabling us to invest in technology that will provide employee insights.”
It’s here that Lynch’s most ambitious project is taking root. She is part of the team implementing a ‘Progressive Workplace Initiative’ – aligning HR and IT for the benefit of the group’s 1,200 employees. This means quarterly pulse surveys, enabling HR to respond to the sorts of reward packages staff want, encouraging collaboration with staff, and even designing the intranet to feel thoroughly up to date through the use of ‘parallax scrolling’.
Lynch describes how these efforts support a high performance culture – one which is unapologetically tough, but where staff are well rewarded and enjoy plenty of ‘human touchpoints’ (lunch with the board for all new joiners after a month; coffee with the directors each Tuesday). A new head of reward is one of Lynch’s more recent hires, and work to supplement the employee brand with benefits (including monthly draws with a top prize of £3,000) is credited with keeping attrition in call centres to just 16 per cent.
And, of course, there are those peaks. “The last one will be conquered soon,” says Lynch. It’s enough to make you forget the m-word has barely been uttered all day…