Culture is built on ‘moments of truth’

Kevin Green is the Chief People Officer for First Group.

He’s set about reinventing the culture of the organisation from the ground up.

I heard Kevin speak at an event last year was completely bowled over by the way he talked about culture and the way he was trying to build it. I think you’ll love this discussion. There’s a full transcript on the website.

Also mentioned: Waitrose culture episode with Lord Mark Price

Transcript

Bruce Daisley: Kevin, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, you could introduce who you are and what you do. 

Kevin Green: Yeah. Hi Bruce. I’m Kevin Green. I’m the Chief People Officer at First Bus. In fact, I’ve got the, the, the wider brief of the whole group now, but I’ve been doing the first bus since September,2021, so last four and a bit years.

Bruce Daisley: Kevin, I, I met you an event last year and I was really taken with a couple of the things you said. I love the idea of trying to change the culture of an organization. Like First was like a big transport organization because I think it gets into the practicalities of trying to do these things. We, we saw some research last year that, um, there, there’s some research that 85% of frontline workers don’t believe that the company’s culture applies to them. And I guess what I was really taking with your work was you were trying to sort of bring culture to these people who spend most of their day alone. And I just wonder. If you could just give us some context of how you set about doing that.

What are the, what are the first things you think about when you’re trying to build culture for drivers, for people who work in bus Depots? Depots, how would you say about trying to create that culture? 

Kevin Green: I think, first of all, to give you a bit of context, Bruce, what we were, you know, I arrived and came in to do an interim gig just to help people post COVID.

And then what became apparent was New md, new leadership team who wanted to move a traditional bus business, which is all about the asset and the timetable to become a service business where it’s all about people and culture. Now, my first presentation I remember to the exec was. You treat your people as a cost and a commodity.

So the recognition of what we needed to do to seriously provide better customer service, which meant people taking more bus trips. More regular bus trips, you know, return trips. So actually it was about how do we change the culture of the organization from top to bottom. So, but my obsession, I suppose, and my team’s obsession is our frontline employees.

So 18,000 engineers and bus drivers and the biggest population bus drivers. And we spent some time, so what we did was two or three things quite early, which were all about listening. They were about some design thinking. We decided we wanted to do a change program, but we wanted to do it bottom up. So we went out and asked bus drivers and frontline managers their ideas about how do we improve things around here for you?

How do we improve things for our customers? Got three or 400 ideas. Codified it. Got it into 30 or 40 things we piloted, we tried things. We then learned there were 14 or 15 things that were really quite important for our frontline staff. And what we then started to do is to support local management team by putting in some coaches.

Put in those changes. So not top down, change, bottom up, do it with the people. So for example, our canteens was one of the areas where we’d just come out of COVID and the seating arrangements were horrible. So what we did is we got, we got the local teams to buy some second out furniture and created soft areas.

Put tables together to create a more social environment. So very simple things. There was a bit about we hadn’t repaired roofs and the toilets were in poor, uh, Nick. So we spent a lot of time improving those. So I worked with other teams, you know, should the should the HR senior HR person really be doing toilet refurbishment?

In my view, yes. ’cause it has a huge impact on the experience of the frontline stock. So that was some of the things. One of the things that I suppose resonates quite a lot when I talk externally is our staff said, well, why do all the managers behind those locked doors, locked doors in our depot get free tea and coffee?

We are the lowest paid. We don’t. So we decided quite simply one of those decisions you make quite quickly. We’re gonna have tea, free tea and coffee for all frontline staff. So then there was a question of who buys where do we get the fridge? Who gets the milk? You know, there was a view that people would steal the tea and coffee.

So it was symbols of change to show that we’d listen to our people and we could do stuff So that. What we call people centricity. That program was hugely important. At the same time, we were doing two other things, which were predominantly around listening. One was we’d started, I was very committed to doing engagement surveys of all of the workforce every four or five months.

So we do it three times a year. And the reason for that. So I made the targets, the engagement service, a bonus support for all of our managers from senior leaders, right? The way down is about, these are your people, this is what they’re saying. So it is reinforcing that this is a, a management problem that needs to.

To be addressed by frontline managers and leaders. And what we did with that is we then said, look, we’re not interested in big action plans with 25 points. Just pick one thing that’s important to your people and try and improve that in the next three or four months. So what we try to do is build some basic momentum and try and get managers owning the issues and really recognizing. The other one that was suppose resonated at the beginning was we had a performance management system for drivers, which was 14 pages long, right? And it started off with disciplines and attendance. And so it was punitive.

It was all about. You know, these are the things you’re doing wrong. It also took a huge amount of manager’s time. We then got the data and saw that only 10, 11% were actually taking place a year. So we just abandoned that and we then went for a very, very simple process. I. A voluntary conversation that happens every three or four times a year.

We call it a catch up. We train the managers. We gave them some prompts, but it was really an informal human conversation, which is about what’s going on for you? How do we make things better around here? What can we do to improve your life? And that of the, the customer and what we were then doing through the engagement survey and the catchups and the people centricity.

Was kept repeating. You said, we listened. This is what we’ve done to reinforce that fast feedback loops. That we’re taking this on board, we’re taking action. And, and some of the ideas were, you know, a bit farfetched. And sometime we’d have to go back and explain why we couldn’t do stuff or it would take longer.

But it was to pick some simple things and show that we were serious about this. And, you know, over the last three or four years, we’ve seen the benefits of that. Play out. So those were some of the things we did. We then decided there was a uniform project, the uniforms hadn’t been updated. How do we do go about that?

Well, we got the unions involved. We got frontline staff and we got them to drive it. So we did focus groups. We did loads of views where the pockets are, the materials that we used, people of different ethnic persuasions wanting different type of uniform styles. Things from men and women. So. But the whole point was engage them at the beginning of the process, involve them and really start to get them to understand that for us to be the type of organization we wanted, their jobs was the most important.

Bus drivers and engineers, one drives the bus, meets our customers every day. The second one keeps the buses on the road. That was the whole point, and we are here to support you. So culturally, we are very clear about where we were trying to get to, but there were lots of things we were trying to do, and at heart of it was listening and taking action.

Bruce Daisley: You told me something really interesting when we had a conversation. You said that because of the nature of the job, say if there was a daily complaint against the driver or there was something that had gone wrong. Manager felt them, found themselves going to seek out a driver, and the only conversations they were having with drivers in the past had been these disciplinary interventions.

And so as a result, I think you told me that there was some session pulled together talking about high performers, and you said, um, you said to me that, oh, people had been gathered together and one manager had said, I don’t have a single high performer. I don’t have a single. Good performer in my organization largely framed a think because they were going to do all these disciplinary interventions.

And, uh, what I really took from this. I’d love you to explain that, but what I really took from this is that sometimes psychological safety is this sense that our manager has got our back, and when you’ve just got this constant sense that the manager seems to be coming in to have a go at you, people don’t necessarily feel their affinities with their organization or with the manager or with the company.

They might feel it’s with their mates. Or they might feel it’s with their customers. Actually, you know, actually my passengers are, are, are the most important thing for me, but they don’t think it’s the company. And I was, all of those things really contributed to me feeling like, oh, I understand how psychological safety can play an important part, but you need to think about how you build it.

Kevin Green: Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think it’s also, you know, it’s. This was at the heart of a lot of it. Which was our manager’s view, was it was the two things that they had to do was keep control. So it was very much top down hierarchical. It was command and control. It was about getting the buses out in time and doesn’t matter about the people and how they’re doing, just keep it going.

And if there’s an issue, we deal with that in a very punitive, you know, lots of investigations. And where this came from, me and Jeanette, who’s the MD do sessions with our frontline managers. And your point was absolutely resonated with us the first time we did this. Six or seven sessions over two or three days, what’s going on for you?

And we were talking to the frontline managers and one of them said, look, I don’t, I never talk to anyone that does a good job here. And I think there’s quite a lot that do a good job, but I only see them for six or seven minutes a day. And I’ve got a long queue outside my office and I’ve got a reports that I need to do.

So what I do is focus on the problems. Not on the people that are doing a great job. So that’s why that catch up process was so important because we created the time for the managers and told them it’s a priority to have those catch up conversations. So they’ve gotta go out and have a conversation with the people that are doing a good job.

We changed the process around disciplinary, took out all the low light lying stuff. So if someone hits a wing mirror the first time, you don’t pull them in and make it a disciplinary, you have a chat with ’em. What was the problem? If it happens again, then you might have to go formal. So we had to change the formality, the hard bit, the procedure, but it was also about getting to the managers and saying, we want you to do something different.

And training them and giving them a confidence and the belief that if they did that, they’d start to see the improvement in the hard metrics. So at the heart, at the heart of what I’ve described to you, that journey we’ve been on, Bruce, was a hypothesis that if we treat our people well and we really focus on them, but we’ll get two things.

We’ll provide better customer service, which will translate into financial improvements from customers, but it’ll also give us. Lower absence, lower attrition, better productivity. Now I can give you the hard data on all of that. Over that four year. Jenny, we’ve halved some of this stuff. Our engagement’s gone from 41 to 64, so we can see that we are getting, and that builds confidence within senior management. So I had to go with a hypothesis, get the investment, do the first few interventions, and then over time say, look, this is work to, to basically build a transformation, you have to take people with you on the journey, and leaders and managers need to see that a new approach will deliver better results than how they’ve done it before.

Now, that’s not to say there isn’t a DNA and they bounce back even now, four, five years on, there are times when it, the behaviour bounces back and we have to keep going and reiterating. So making sure the soft measures are aligned to the hard measures, making sure that leaders and managers see it regularly and see that what they’re doing has a huge impact on the performance of the businesses was critical to our thinking.

And I think, you know, as we’ve executed, it’s delivered. 

Bruce Daisley: What I was really taken with was the system thinking. Quite often organizations might talk about culture or they might talk about service, but they don’t necessarily see them as, as a piece of the same thing. Um, when I saw you, it was your annual awards that night, and you said to me, you said like, tonight we’re gonna be celebrating.

A bus driver has done something outstanding. Amazing. There’ll be a beautiful story and we’ll, we’ll celebrate them, but we need to think about the circumstances. Create that. And you, you sort of gave me, I scribbled this down at a time, but you gave me some sort of mechanics of thinking about that. You said, every day a driver will be faced with 25 moments of truth that shape what customers think of the service.

And you, you start doing some maths for me that’s 125 a week. That’s 500 moments of truth every month. That’s 6,000 moments of truth per driver per year. And we’ve got 14,000 drivers. That’s. 80 million moments of truth every year, and I was really taken with that. That like thinking about that in that sort of atomic sense, the, the way you treat a driver will in turn have an impact on whether the driver allows someone to sit down, maybe someone who’s infirm to sit down before they.

They pull out or whether they help them with something else. And it was really taken with the, the idea that quite often organizations don’t do the hard work of thinking about if they want to get better customer retention, better profit, better results, then that leads, that leads in turn to have had better customer service.

And that in turn needs to be thinking about treating the drivers, the people delivering that service better. And I love the through line you built through that. 

Kevin Green: Yeah, I mean it, and I’m pleased you listened to that. ’cause I tell that story quite a lot internally in, in our organisation and, and it resonates with someone, not with others.

So I’m pleased you took it up because it was a way of demonstrating that. Moments of truth. So the, we did a piece of work really early on, which was about, we asked bus drivers, you see, oh, you, you are, uh, slightly behind time. You’re coming up to a bus stop and you can see someone, an older woman with two big heavy shopping bags running towards your bus.

Now, what do you do? She’s sort of indicating, she’s obviously keen to get on the bus. Do you just ignore her and accelerate, get back on time? Hard metric, you know, on time. Performance is critical for us. Or do you stop? Allow the passenger to get on, say, good morning to her treat. Oh, well, and she’ll be incredibly thankful.

And actually, when we did the survey, 72% of our drivers would do the hard metric drive past her. So for me, this was taking examples like that and going, so how does that customer feel? What does she say? Who does she talk to that day? What does she say about our service when she goes to thinks about shopping or going to visit friends or a medical appointment?

What is she thinking about our service? So for me, you know, you can take Cuban stories, but if you then quantify them and turn them into hard metrics, you can then really get both the rational and the emotional of your manager’s population thinking about this and taking action. So it really does resonate.

’cause we have so many moments of truth, you know? You know, we have a big issue at the moment about, um, people on wheelchairs with disability, and we’ve only got one place on our buses to put them, but it’s also where we store the buggies. Now, as a bus driver, you’ve gotta work that out. You know, you’ve gotta be quite creative and think about how do I support the people, you know?

And you are under pressure on time and all. So in reality, we’ve now started to create real scenarios, which we know happen every day, and then giving our managers development and advice about what we’re expecting of them, because. We didn’t really ever tell them that. We just told them that the far facts keep to time, keep the bus on time and, and just drive it safely.

That was it. And in reality, we didn’t talk about the customer experience as part of their job. And actually now we’re making it much more of a ’cause. We know from the feedback from customers how important it is to them. And then the impact that we get from that is that they travel more often and also they talk to their friends and family about how good the service is within their town or city.

So. You are absolutely right. Turning soft stuff, systems thinking, showing how the soft metrics feed into the hard metrics and how this isn’t about just being nice to people. It isn’t just about creating good work. Now, personally, I’ve got a, my own crusade is about that, but in reality, I know that if we do that consistently, we’ll end up with, you know, better place to work.

The engagement will go up, the absence will go down. All of those metrics, customer service goes up. Financial performance improves, I can then reinvest. So you know, we’re the second highest performing FS C two 50. Our share price has doubled. You know, our profit has doubled our EBIT or as we’ve been driving this cultural transformation.

And 

Bruce Daisley: tell me this then, how do you balance that? ’cause that is to some extent saying I’m going to gift some degree of autonomy, some leverage, some, some, some personal control, some some sort of self-determination to drivers. But in a system where they are quite rigidly bound by look, you know, having a good service all also depends on the buses coming on time.

Right. And the buses being timely. How, how do you reconcile those two things that that individual leverage, that individual autonomy with being part of the greater good, being part of the greater system? It seems like a really tricky one to balance. It 

Kevin Green: is. It is about talking about. We want them to do all of it, and they’ve got to make some trade offs.

You’re right. So we’re trying to treat them as adults. We treated them as children. You know, just do what we tell you. These are the three things, and if you don’t do it, we’re gonna punish you into, look, we’re gonna treat you as an adult. You’ve gotta try and make trade offs between keep it on time. The other thing we had is this thing about clean buses.

You know, they always saw it as someone else’s job, you know, in the. In the depots, the buses are clean. When I’m going, you get on a bus and it’s dirty and it hasn’t been cleaned properly and there’s some litter. You pick it up, you deal with it. Well, that’s not my job. Well, your, our job as a business is to provide a great experience for our customers.

If you can get them to do that, then you go look, and we’re all a team and we’re in this together. So what we’re trying to do is to create a sense of belong. We’re all in this together and it is about balancing and trading off and working collectively in depot. So we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about teams and that’s why when we do problem solving at Local Depot level, we get ranges of people involved because our engineers.

And our bus drivers had different canteens, different rest areas. And what we’ve been trying to do is get them together because, you know, they, they perceive it’s two different things. You know, I drive the bus, you fix a bus, you clean the bus. Well, in reality, collectively we’ve got, you know, do you report force as a driver?

Well, yes, some do and some don’t. But actually that’s your job because that’s about preventation prevention and keeping the buses on the road and giving that information to the engineers. So that’s what we’ve done. You know, as you can tell, you have to keep going back and be getting quite granular. But the thing I suppose I’m passionate about, Bruce is.

The problem with culture is it gets quite philosophical at some point, and you talk to other HR people and I go turn it. Ask the questions about what’s important to your people. Think about their experiences every day and help them tell you what you need to be doing as a business. And if you do that and follow through.

You’ll build momentum and you’ll ’cause human beings like to see progress. They like to react, they like to go, oh, you know, we’re buying lots of electric buses because we’ve got a big sustainability agenda. And you know, and they, they love them. They’re easier to drive. They’re quieter. They, they provide a better customer experience and we’re doing something for the environment.

So some of what the work we did, so the work around narrative and values came later. Because I didn’t wanna lead with that. I wanted to get some practicalities and some traction on the ground happening before we engaged our people in. How do we create our purpose? How do we create our values? So for me, there’s a bit about making sure that you don’t do it in a top down, sequential way.

Build this stuff bottom up. 

Bruce Daisley: You used the phrase to me when we were talking, you said, um, that pe people wanna feel like they’re part of something. People wanna feel like, um, they’re sort of a participant in something. And it really stuck with me. I’ve, I’ve used that phrase a lot in the last, uh, sort of nine months since you said it, which is quite a simple thing.

But I think it articulates when working, I feel part of something rather than I feel next to it or, you know.

I guess drivers certainly work alone, so you don’t always feel part of something for sort of eight hours on the road or however long their drive. I wonder what else you use to make someone feel part of something. 

Kevin Green: Yeah, I mean, I think some of the things I’ve talked about, so the catch ups are clearly part of a sort of regular communication in depots, giving people information.

We’ve got an app that we use for two-way communication so drivers can communicate back and give ideas. You know, and we’ve really amplified that so that, you know, we basically say we’re looking for ideas, we’re looking to improve things. So that whole, you’ve got a vested stake in giving us your ideas and you’ll see things happen now and also feeding back what isn’t happening.

So that’s what we’re trying to create, that, you know, when I first went to our depots, we’d have to, people would walk past each other in a depot and not even say, hello. Good morning. So how do you start to do that? So what I’m talking to managers about is you role model. Do you know everyone’s name? Do you go out every day?

Is it about visual management? Do you go around and say, what happened at your weekend? How’s your football team doing? All of that stuff, which creates that. We’re interested in the human being. We are interested in the person, we are interested in the job and how we do things better, but we’re interested in you and your ideas.

So everyone brings a free brain to work. It’s not just about driving the bus or fixing the bus. It’s tell us about what you think we can do better and then. Demonstrating one that you’ve listened, but two, wherever you can, you take some action and if you take action, then you play it back. You told us there was a problem with the leaks or the toilets.

This is what we’ve done, it’s gonna get done in the next three months. You’ve told there was a problem with, I dunno, the signage on the buses and they’re in the wrong place. You gave us feedback that our ticket machines don’t work properly and they’re keeping going down, so we will invest in things. But the uniform, I suppose, was the big win for me.

Our drivers. Kept saying the direct uniforms were not fit for purpose. And we’d looked at it time and time again year after year and just kept doing what we’d done. So we said we’re gonna invest. We’ve got a new brand, we’ve got a new purpose. But then you basically engaged the workforce and we had a bit, we had a, we’d vote on the different colors and the different, so everybody was asked their view of opinion, and then we went out with the results.

And we’re doing the same with engineers. So it’s about, you know. I’ve got, I can give my ideas. There’ll be focus groups and surveys, but then everyone gets a stake in giving us their views and opinions. That means they start to believe and actually see that the organization is less listening, and we are in it together.

We recognize that we’re creating a difficult work environment and our job’s to make it easier for them to provide a, do, you know, do a, provide a great service to provide a great customer experience. So there’s lots of things we’ve been doing, but all of that, very much from that sort of concept of listening and taking action.

Bruce Daisley: I get the sense that with a job like this and, and then, you know, the job’s never done. As you are looking into the, you know, you’ve got that first stage done, or maybe that’s the first and second stage done. What, what presents itself to you now? What are the big challenges you’ve got going forward? I, I mean, there’s, yeah, 

Kevin Green: look, this is.

The beginning, I said this is a five to six year journey. We’re sort of for it a bit years in, and I think there’s another three or four years to go and you never get there. And you know, it’s always about iterations and improvements. Um, there’s more about the leaders and the managers. We’ve done a big leadership intervention about a year, 18 months ago, where we did an immersive experience for all the leaders to talk to them about, you know, most of them had never had any copper leadership development.

Lots of them had only worked in the bus industry and and hadn’t got experiences, so they hadn’t had a business education. But they also, a lot of the stuff we were talking about in terms of customer service, customer service, profit chain people, engagement, were sort of new concepts and we wanted to. To give them the language and the tools and the processes.

So we did work around that. We did a target operating model to simplify the ways in which we structured ourselves and to make there more clear lines of slight between, uh, lines of sight between leaders and the businesses that they’re running. And we’ve done a lot of work around frontline managers because for me, they’re the huge catalyst of change.

I think, you know, the more you get frontline managers into coach, away from manager and control, the more you’re gonna start to move the agenda and you’re gonna have to type of. Conversations. You know, I think conversations change organizations. That’s my point. And actually you’ve gotta give people the dialogue and the time and the process to be able to do that.

Um, so we’re trying to unpick processes. We’re putting in work that we’re putting in, you know, we’re putting investment in so we can actually make things better. We can give. Better people data so they can start to own their own performance and uh, their, their people relationships more effectively. We’re trying to improve the app so there’s much more of an engagement online and people can get information and do stuff within the business rather than always having to phone people up or fill in pieces of paper.

So a huge amount of trying to remove bureaucracy and process and trying to humanize work, um, but also keeping that focus on, you know, line of sight between. You know, treating your people well, people treat your customers well, that leads to improved performance every day, day in, day out, which leads to superior for financial performance.

So we can reinvest, uh, at the beginning of the cycle. More of the same, but different interventions, different tools, different, different, different things that we need to do to move us onto 

Bruce Daisley: the next phase. Kevin, we’re out of time. I’m so inspired by what you do because I think it’s the, the brilliant example of people not just talking about culture, but actually sort of thinking about the tiny little building bricks that actually contribute to it.

And normally people get lost in the. The bravado of the big stuff without bothering to do the detail of the, of the little stuff. So you’re an inspiration for me, 

Kevin Green: I would say, which is just a final comment about HR people. So I’m an HR professional. I’m a business person, but HR professional, as you know, the thing I say to HR when I go out and talk at conferences is forget perfection.

80 20 minimum viable product. Does it deliver for your people? Whereas I think we’re always interested in the best competency framework, the most brilliantly designed, forget that. Does it work for them? That’s the point. Look at the outcome you’re trying to create. Forget the process. Whereas I think we spend as a profession too far too much time thinking about the intervention and, and we’ve gotta become much more like marketeers.

Think about the audience, think about the behavior shift. And focus on getting the outcomes you’re looking for. So that would be my final thought. Sorry Bruce. 

Bruce Daisley: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me, Kevin. I’ve enjoyed it. Thank you very much indeed.