Culture is built on moments of truth: how First Group made the team matter
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
Summary
- Rebuilding culture from the ground up requires listening to frontline staff and implementing bottom-up changes based on their ideas.
- Shifting from punitive discipline to informal human catch-ups builds psychological safety, trust and engagement.
- Prioritising people and removing administrative bureaucracy directly drives superior frontline service and stronger business performance.
Transcript
Introduction
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 wider brief of the whole group now, but I’ve been doing First Bus since September 2021, so the last four and a bit years.
Bruce Daisley: Kevin, I met you at 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 organisation like First, because a big transport organisation gets into the practicalities of trying to do these things.
We saw some research last year that 85% of frontline workers don’t believe that the company’s culture applies to them. And I guess what I was really taken with in your work was that you were trying to bring culture to these people who spend most of their day alone. I just wonder if you could give us some context of how you set about doing that. What are the first things you think about when you’re trying to build culture for drivers, for people who work in bus depots? How would you go about trying to create that culture?
Taking a bottom-up approach to culture change
Kevin Green: I think, first of all, to give you a bit of context, Bruce, I arrived and came in to do an interim gig just to help people post-COVID. And then what became apparent was a new MD and a 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.
My first presentation to the exec, I remember, was: “You treat your people as a cost and a commodity.” So there was a recognition of what we needed to do to seriously provide better customer service, which meant people taking more bus trips, more regular return trips. Actually, it was about how we change the culture of the organisation from top to bottom.
My obsession, and my team’s obsession, is our frontline employees: 18,000 engineers and bus drivers, with the biggest population being bus drivers. We spent some time doing two or three things quite early, which were all about listening and design thinking. We decided we wanted to do a change program, but we wanted to do it bottom-up.
We went out and asked bus drivers and frontline managers for their ideas about how we improve things around here for them, and how we improve things for our customers. We got three or four hundred ideas and codified them down into 30 or 40 things we piloted. We tried things and learned there were 14 or 15 things that were really quite important for our frontline staff.
What we then started to do was support the local management teams by putting in some coaches to implement those changes. This was not top-down change; it was bottom-up, doing it with the people.
Small symbols of change
For example, our canteens were one of the areas where we’d just come out of COVID and the seating arrangements were horrible. So, we got the local teams to buy some second-hand furniture and created soft areas, putting tables together to create a more social environment. Very simple things.
There was a bit about how we hadn’t repaired roofs and the toilets were in poor nick, so we spent a lot of time improving those. I worked with other teams on this. Should the senior HR person really be doing toilet refurbishment? In my view, yes, because it has a huge impact on the experience of the frontline staff.
One of the things that resonates quite a lot when I talk externally is that our staff said, “Well, why do all the managers behind those locked doors in our depot get free tea and coffee? We are the lowest paid and we don’t.” So we decided quite simply, in one of those decisions you make quickly, that we’re going to have free tea and coffee for all frontline staff.
Then there was a question of who buys it, where do we get the fridge, who gets the milk? There was a view from some that people would steal the tea and coffee. But it was a symbol of change to show that we’d listened to our people and we could do stuff. That program, which we call People Centricity, was hugely important.
Creating fast feedback loops
At the same time, we were doing two other things which were predominantly around listening. One was that I was very committed to doing engagement surveys of the whole workforce every four or five months, so we do it three times a year. I made the targets of the engagement surveys a bonus metric for all of our managers, from senior leaders right the way down. It is about: “These are your people, this is what they’re saying.” It reinforces that this is a management responsibility that needs to be addressed by frontline managers and leaders.
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.” We tried to build some basic momentum and get managers owning the issues.
The other one that resonated at the beginning was that we had a performance management system for drivers which was 14 pages long. It started off with discipline and attendance, so it was punitive. It was all about the things you’re doing wrong. It also took a huge amount of managers’ time. We then looked at the data and saw that only 10% or 11% were actually taking place a year.
So we just abandoned that and went for a very simple process: a voluntary conversation that happens three or four times a year. We call it a catch-up. We trained the managers and 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 customer?”
Through the engagement survey, the catch-ups, and our People Centricity program, we kept repeating: “You said, we listened, this is what we’ve done.” We did this to reinforce fast feedback loops, showing that we’re taking things on board and taking action. Some of the ideas were a bit far-fetched, and sometimes we’d have to go back and explain why we couldn’t do stuff or why it would take longer, but it was about picking simple things and showing that we were serious. Over the last three or four years, we’ve seen the benefits of that play out.
Involving the front line in decisions
We then decided on a uniform project, as the uniforms hadn’t been updated. How do we go about that? Well, we got the unions involved, we got frontline staff involved, and we got them to drive it. We did focus groups and gathered loads of views on where the pockets should be, the materials used, people of different ethnic backgrounds wanting different types of uniform styles, and specific fits for men and women.
The whole point was to 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 organisation we wanted, their jobs were the most important. Bus drivers and engineers: one drives the bus and meets our customers every day, and the other keeps the buses on the road. That was the whole point, and we are here to support you. Culturally, we were very clear about where we were trying to get to, but there were lots of things we were trying to do, and at the heart of it was listening and taking action.
Moving away from command and control
Bruce Daisley: You told me something really interesting when we had a conversation previously. You said that because of the nature of the job, say if there was a daily complaint against a driver or something had gone wrong, a manager found themselves going to seek out a driver, meaning the only conversations they were having with drivers in the past had been these disciplinary interventions.
As a result, I think you told me that there was a session pulled together talking about high performers, and one manager said, “I don’t have a single high performer. I don’t have a single good performer in my organisation.” It was largely framed, I think, because they were only interacting to do these disciplinary interventions.
What I really took from this is that sometimes psychological safety is this sense that our manager has got our back. 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 chapters feel their affinities with their organisation, 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. They feel their passengers are the most important thing, but they don’t think it’s the company. All of those things really contributed to me feeling like I understand how psychological safety can play an important part, but you need to think about how you build it.
Kevin Green: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s also at the heart of a lot of it, which was our managers’ view that the two things they had to do were keep control. It was very much top-down, hierarchical, command and control. It was about getting the buses out on time and it doesn’t matter about the people and how they’re doing, just keep it going. If there’s an issue, we deal with that in a very punitive way with lots of investigations.
Where this came from was that me and Jeanette, who’s the MD, do sessions with our frontline managers. Your point absolutely resonated with us the first time we did this across six or seven sessions over two or three days asking, “What’s going on for you?” We were talking to the frontline managers and one of them said, “Look, I never talk to anyone that does a good job here. 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 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.”
Proving the hypothesis with hard metrics
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. They’ve got to go out and have a conversation with the people that are doing a good job. We changed the process around disciplinary procedures and took out all the low-lying stuff. 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 them. What was the problem? If it happens again, then you might have to go formal.
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 the confidence and the belief that if they did that, they’d start to see the improvement in the hard metrics.
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, 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, and better productivity.
I can give you the hard data on all of that over that four-year journey. We’ve halved some of this stuff. Our engagement has gone from 41 to 64, so we can see that we are getting results, and that builds confidence within senior management. I had to go with a hypothesis, get the investment, do the first few interventions, and then over time show that this works.
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 tendency to bounce back. Even now, four or five years on, there are times when the behaviour bounces back and we have to keep going and reiterating. Making sure the soft measures are aligned to the hard measures, and 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 business, was critical to our thinking. As we’ve executed it, it’s delivered.
Bruce Daisley: What I was really taken with was the systems thinking. Quite often organisations might talk about culture or they might talk about service, but they don’t necessarily see them as pieces of the same thing. When I saw you, it was your annual awards that night, and you said to me, “Tonight we’re gonna be celebrating…”
Making employees feel part of something
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 a phrase to me when we were talking, you said that people want to feel like they’re part of something. People want to feel like they’re a participant in something. It really stuck with me. I’ve used that phrase a lot in the last nine months since you said it, which is quite a simple thing, but I think it articulates it well. When working, “I feel part of something” rather than “I feel next to it.”
I guess drivers certainly work alone, so you don’t chapters feel part of something for eight hours on the road or however long their drive is. 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, like the catch-ups, are clearly part of a regular communication rhythm 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. We’ve really amplified that so that we basically say we’re looking for ideas, we’re looking to improve things. You’ve got a vested stake in giving us your ideas and you’ll see things happen, alongside us feeding back on what isn’t happening.
That’s what we’re trying to create. When I first went to our depots, people would walk past each other in a depot and not even say hello or good morning. How do you start to shift that? What I’m talking to managers about is role-modelling. 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 creates the sense 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.
Removing bureaucracy to humanise work
We want to simplify the ways in which we structure ourselves and make clearer lines of sight between leaders and the businesses that they’re running. We’ve done a lot of work around frontline managers because, for me, they’re the huge catalyst of change. I think the more you get frontline managers to coach, moving away from manager-and-control, the more you’re gonna start to move the agenda and have the right type of conversations.
Conversations change organisations. That’s my point. Actually, you’ve gotta give people the dialogue, the time, and the process to be able to do that.
So we’re trying to unpick processes. We’re putting in investment so we can actually make things better. We can give better people data so they can start to own their own performance and their people relationships more effectively. We’re trying to improve the app so there’s much more engagement online and people can get information and do stuff within the business, rather than chapters having to phone people up or fill in pieces of paper.
There is a huge amount of trying to remove bureaucracy and process, and trying to humanise work, but also keeping that focus on the line of sight between treating your people well, your people treating your customers well, and how that leads to improved performance every day, day in, day out, which leads to superior financial performance so we can reinvest at the beginning of the cycle. It is more of the same, but with different interventions, different tools, and different things that we need to do to move us onto the next phase.
A final thought for HR professionals
Bruce Daisley: Kevin, we’re out of time. I’m so inspired by what you do because I think it’s a brilliant example of people not chapters talking about culture, but actually thinking about the tiny little building bricks that contribute to it. Normally people get lost in the bravado of the big stuff without bothering to do the detail of the little stuff. So you’re an inspiration for me.
Kevin Green: I would say one final comment about HR people. I’m an HR professional—a business person, but an HR professional. The thing I say to HR when I go out and talk at conferences is: forget perfection. Think 80/20 minimum viable product. Does it deliver for your people?
Whereas I think we’re chapters interested in the best competency framework or the most brilliantly designed process—forget that. Does it work for them? That’s the point. Look at the outcome you’re trying to create and forget the process. We spend far too much time as a profession thinking about the intervention itself. We’ve gotta become much more like marketers: think about the audience, think about the behaviour shift, and focus on getting the outcomes you’re looking for. 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.
