A discussion with Sara Gomez, Chief People Officer, and ENGAGE CEO, Dr Andy Brown.

We were joined by Sara Gomez, Chief People Officer at Lloyd’s of London to discuss how she worked with ENGAGE during her time at Lloyd’s, Direct Line Group and Moss to:

  • Redefine engagement as a strategic business tool by asking business leaders three questions
  • Support the senior leadership team in role-modelling and driving engagement
  • Deliver improved business outcomes through informed decision-making based on the power of predictive insights

How did Sara do this? Find out in her discussion with ENGAGE CEO & Co-Founder, Dr Andy Brown. (The discussion has been edited for readability). 

Asking three questions

Andy: When we first talk to you as CPO or talk to your CEO or your ExCo, we ask people three simple questions. What is the business trying to achieve strategically? Where are you trying to get to? What’s the strategy to get there? What’s the ambition? And that’s the business understanding. And for us, that’s trying to understand why are we trying to engage people. What would the business outcomes be if we achieve that?

Sara: I always describe myself as a businesswoman who does HR as opposed to an HR professional through and through. I spent the first half of my career in retail leadership roles, so I come at everything with a business lens on things first, and then think about the people implications of that. I think that’s what first gave me that connection with the way that you do things. My first encounter with you was at Direct Line where I experienced the first part of your process. The very first question in itself is something that can be so helpful in trying to get a business to articulate what that strategy is. If I think about when I was in the FinTech startup, some people knew what the business was trying to do, but as it had gone from 300 people to 600, or even from the first 50 to 200 plus when I joined, you start to need to be able to tell a story. In defining that, it helps business leaders know what their story is and therefore what you want your people engaged in. It’s almost a matter of a surprise when you start there and I think it’s such a useful step.

Andy: Absolutely, and what we’ve done with you and the ExCo of Lloyd’s at the moment, I think has helped them see that engagement needs to be anchored in the business. It’s not a separate, standalone HR exercise, That’s a big difference for us. It’s really about understanding what you want your people to be engaged with. Most of the models of engagement out there are very HR only. It’s all, ‘are you engaged as employees with us as an employer’? That’s a really important part of it, but there are other elements as well – like are you engaged with delivering a great customer experience or are you engaged with the business strategy. The final bit is, if that’s what engagement’s going to look like, then what parts of the day-to-day, employee experience are going to impact that? Is it about how we’re led or managed or communicated with? In terms of defining engagement, how do you think that’s helped in the business?

“…engagement needs to be anchored in the business.”

Sara: When you talk about “engaged in what”, I think that’s the key thing about this. It’s not about engagement. It’s what you want as a business outcome from that engagement, which immediately puts it on a business footing. I had a remuneration committee chair in one of my businesses. I remember once she said, “engagement’s not about happy people, Sara. It’s about people who give a damn”. I think people enjoying what they do, and getting satisfaction from it is important. But engagement’s quite a different thing. That’s the point: you need to confirm what it is you need them to be engaged in. At Moss, it was all about the customer. It was only 1,300 people and 120 stores around the country, For us, it was making the connection with the customer. I think articulating that when you’ve got remote workers, really helps you understand it. We’d had a new initiative about making men feel amazing, which was a very deliberate “feel” thing. We wanted our shops to be able to create that experience. So that’s what we were measuring; how connected with that vision and mission were people?

For the startup, it was seven years old, going into scale. There, it was around, how do we get people to understand that strategic direction collectively? The office in London when I joined, there were 27 people in it, and it ended up being much bigger. It was really understanding how do we tell that story to people who weren’t there in the beginning and what is it we were trying to do. If I think about Lloyds, where we’re not a PLC, we have this marketplace. So, sometimes it’s difficult for people in functions like HR or finance to know what outcome we’re delivering. So there, we were trying to define how we make the market thrive, which is what our vision is, and really connecting people with that. It starts at what are you trying to do as a business, and then what you want people to be engaged in to achieve it? At Direct Line, there was quite a lot of work on segmentation where you had a 12,000-strong organisation. You’ve got call centres, and then you’ve got actuaries and underwriters. So again, it’s just what do you need from them differently to deliver what they were trying to do.

Andy: Those early conversations get leaders thinking about that in a much deeper way than just saying “let’s buy an off-the-shelf survey”, get the data, runoff and distribute the results. It’s engaging leaders with what does engagement mean for us as a business. If you think about those four businesses we worked with you in, all massively different. At Direct Line, I remember talking to some of the guys in the auto repair centre, which is such a different audience to say, a call centre, and what engagement looks like there will be quite different. So how do you construct something that is tailored and bespoke to the organisation?

Sara: It’s a very active process, isn’t it? It’s not just a, here’s your survey, on we go. There’s some upfront investment in terms of time. And I know when I arrived at Lloyds, we were using a tech platform for engagement. What was clear to me was that there was a disconnect between the executive and engagement completely. It just was not owned by them. And that was one of the reasons we came back to you because you get that, you get the ability to have very senior stakeholder involvement, which starts with talking about the business itself.

To listen to the full discussion, click the link below.