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September 14, 2020

BTOES Financial Services Live - SPEAKER SPOTLIGHT : The impact of COVID-19 in transforming how we work, engage and interact with each other, and how we deliver value to or customers

 

Courtesy of Voya Financial's Ewan Goddard, below is a transcript of his speaking session on 'The impact of COVID-19 in transforming how we work, engage and interact with each other, and how we deliver value to or customers.' to Build a Thriving Enterprise that took place at BTOES Financial Services Live Virtual Conference.

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Session Information:

The impact of COVID-19 in transforming how we work, engage and interact with each other, and how we deliver value to or customers.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began the world has had to transform how we work, how we engage and interact with each other, and how we deliver value to or customers.

Conversely, our customer's needs are changing rapidly. Their definition of value is changing daily.  

This session looks to address the following questions by sharing stories of success and failure in identifying and rapidly meeting new or emerging needs with simple solutions: 

  • what mechanisms exist or need to be created to clearly identify and understand new needs from your customers

  • what existing solutions have a new or different value proposition?

  • what processes and systems need transformation to be able to rapidly design and test new solutions?

  • How can you understand if a new need will be permanent or long term versus a short term crisis need and how do you decide what to do? 

The key takeaways: 

  • Answers, insights, lessons learned from the questions above

Session Transcript:

You're Goddard. And the ... is a senior operations leader, with over 10 years of experience driving operational excellence in the finance industry.

He is preceded by seven years leading manufacturing, operations, Lean, management consulting, and executive coaching. So, it's very unique when you see someone who has been in the, in, the, in the boot camps of manufacturing, apply methods, and techniques on a very tough environment, and then able to take that should transactional processes in the financial industry. I always find that those, those leaders and practitioners are the most complete, because they have seen it all. So, you and I really look forward to your presentation and your site's. Thanks for being with us today.

Thanks, Jose. I'm looking forward to an excited to share a little bit about that. I'm sure, I'm Definitely not. what, I would go completely on a continuous learning journey myself, so hopefully enough of that lighting, second place that I can provide some insight into some, some, Some helpful information today.

OK, I think I have my screen. Oh, ****. Ready to go. So, again, thank you for the warm introduction.

Where, we're obviously in a pretty unprecedented time. So I thought it might be helpful topic, too early.

Elaborate on, you know, the implications of 19. On our work environments. On how we engage with each other. The impact on customers and how they engage with our products and services and, and talk about it, more on a macro level to start with them and then really drill into some of the examples of how we're dealing with with those, those transitions.

Um.

So as you'll see from the from the Agenda, we're really looking at looking at change mechanisms. What's changed about that in the in the last six months as as where we're faced with a pandemic and the implications of that?

Power, our existing management systems, processes, products and people set up for this new environment and then trying to sort of navigate the landscape of, yes, there are changes, but some of them may not be around forever, and which ones do you pick?

For more elaborate solutions and which ones do you, do, you do more, putting the quick fix bucket to help for a short term need? And, I think some of the examples of what we're, what we're doing it via might be helpful, but I'd be really interested to hear in the Q and A section about how other companies are facing some of this, because we're all in the same boat. We're all in this together and going through a very similar experiences HVAC company.

So, um, I think we also get hung up on change in general, and I do want to sort of share this this concept of the pace of change increasing.

I think in the sixties and seventies, when books were getting mass produced all of a sudden, that was the technology of the day that was going to break the human adaptability spirit and and create mass mayhem across the across the globe. We know that didn't happen. At this concept of change, outpacing our ability to cope with it and adapt to it isn't new, hasn't come through yet thankfully. And I think it does underestimate our ability and capacity for change. And I think if we go in with that mindset, we can, we can, we can address things, a little more of, a, An empowering Rather than saying things are changing at a pace that we can't cope with. and it starts to feel very overwhelming.

Screenshot - 2020-08-03T183453.663So, I think we need a little bit of a paradigm shift that, that we're not ready for change, and change is hard to, when we're doing lots of things, to be ready for change, it's not going away. We know that.

And the more that we can lean into that, versus be fearful of that, I think that the better off we'll be inherent in feeling more comfortable with change is creating an environment where you can learn online fast. And I see a lot of organizations say, test, fail fast. But when. But when a failure occurs, it's really frowned upon.

I think there are ways that we can make change how we make change fearful. And there are ways that we, as leaders, and the things that we build, can make change, certainly easier and more rapid as a result.

The other thing is obviously sacred cows, I think, is a bit of a, an interesting one, I know in banking, my days in banking there, was, there was a lot of legacy systems that couldn't be touched by, certain reasons, but certainly once we scratched the surface.

Yeah, there were a lot of aspects to those legacy systems that we could address, versus saying, no, this whole system needs to stay because of all of these legacy features that were built. So, so don't get hung up on the investment you've put into something in terms of wanting to keep it is, is ultimately another way to make the change curve a little less daunting.

This is a version of that same concept, but I want to put it in the context of, of our business, and maybe our industry as well. So, when you come up with a new product, or your continuous improvement program, or anything really, on the horizontal line, you have a launch date.

And hopefully the value of whatever you've just built and launched is greater than that, the need or the value that our customers expect.

We do make sort of stable improvements over time, but we get in this cycle of not improving the things that we've built, because they're slow and cumbersome.

To a point at which it gets sort of a little style, it gets past its use by day, and you can put any number of things on that horizontal line. I like to use it for, for individuals.

When you're first hired, the value you bring, the capabilities you bring to an organization is far greater than than the, than the organization needs. So, you're filling that gap. You're providing value. If you don't develop yourself, if you don't grow build new leadership capabilities, then you, yourself, can become posture use by date, so to speak. So, you can really use this.

Btog CTAJust sort of think about the evolution of change just to stay ahead and, and, and continually add value.

So, we think about products are really good, one in, in a big part of our business and insurance. You think about life insurance. There are very traditional stagnant commoditized product where hasn't had a lot of innovation or creativity for quite some time.

And we've seen a lot of businesses exiting the life business as a result, because the customers aren't receiving the value anymore. So the businesses aren't receiving the value for those products as a result.

So I think we do want to think about all of these things when we're designing new products, How will we getting ahead of the curve to understand what our customers needs and getting them out there ahead of the curve so that we are delivering value and as a result, achieving profitability. And then how do we keep it ahead of that is the biggest challenge I think we face.

Customer data programs that are very important in this facet. So you create a new customer survey and the voice of the customer program or a net promoter score scenario, and.

In an environment, like ..., where you need real-time, specific data, and feedback, to understand what the needs of our customers are, and how they're changing, really, really, shines a light on some of the, some of, the challenges of the things that were built.

And I think that's, that's an important feature, if you go back to the most sacred cows, I think sometimes, there's a little bit of, this is the way we've always gathered feedback from our customers. And, it's, and it's worked.

But, I think, in, in some of these environments where, more an unprecedented times, some of these things that we've built, no longer as effective as they once were not saying you throw them, throw them all out. But certainly, the value that they were providing, and providing in the current environment is less than what it was.

And the management system itself, So we all have the Toyota production house, and all of that.

The behaviors and principles, and tools and practices that get our results.

So, whether that's hiring systems, improvement, system, use, whatever it may be, the systems that we use to manage our business, we we often launch those with big corporate fanfare and great investment. And I think once we roll those out across an entire enterprise, that by the time you get to the end, they start to become past it used by that because the program is static. And I think, again, in a corporate environment, it just accelerates that gap.

And then obviously, ways of working.

I think, you know, we had a period there where everybody's trying to make the Google kind of workplace, whereas open spaces and collaboration, and obviously, that's been a huge transition I'd seen where we can't physically gather and, and collaborate, and IDA, and, and certainly, that became very quickly passed its use by date, in a lot of instances. And companies invested a lot of money in that.

And so it's an interesting one to figure out how we can create an environment for working and problem solving and improvement in this new environment with an inability for direct physical interactivity.

And I think we're getting better at it, but when you have the option of the physical, we're always going to, we're always going to use it, right? Because it is, there are other elements that you lose in the virtual environment. But we do have to now think about exclusively virtual, which is a challenge for me right here presenting to you. I've done lots of conferences and speaking back all in person, and I can see how you're reacting in response and responding to the things that I'm saying.

So if we have that option, we will always lean on it, and we're all sort of under invest in developing the virtual environment. Obviously, now, we're in a situation where that's passed its use by date. We really need to rethink and invest in our virtual environments, so that we can nurture those collaborations and environments that that will be successful in the past.

28So there are a number of Mainz to go about staying ahead of the curve.

And I think if you talk about transformation, sometimes that they're such large-scale events that, by the time they are designed, funded, built, and launched, they are almost getting close to that best before use by date already.

So when we are doing disruptive events like transformation programs, we want to have a bit more intent with our disruption, with that pace of change on the previous slide ever increasing.

Um, we want to make sure that if we're building a big program of transformation, that we are, we are coming to the very left, something coming in from the very left as far left of this, this graph as possible, the closer we are to the to the midpoint already been bombed beyond that sometimes.

I think we've all experienced programs that feel a little obsolete almost before they've begun, so obviously, if we're going to go through The Big Bang, we do want to, we do want to get further and further ahead of the game. And we'll talk a little bit later about our ability to.

Be more predictive and proactive in our, in our, in our ability to come up with the next big, the big, next, big bang.

Similarly, you want to couple that with an everyday improvement mindset.

I think when you launch a new product, or you build a new management system, or you roll out a new customer engagement program, or whatever it might be, yeah, you do some tweaks, you get some feedback, and, yeah, you make some improvements, but it's kind of a one. And that project was funded in this way, And there's no money left in the bucket for improvements.

And so I think what we need to start doing is keeping money and project buss buckets for sustainability and continuous improvement for all of these things, such that we don't have to do the Big Bang as much as we often do.

We see that with a lot of our legacy technologies.

And what have you, that, you know, the funding to keep the lights on is, is only just enough, and there's not enough funding to have the big O, or the continual improvement, an iterative improvement for, for some of those legacy systems. So, then, you get stuck in an environment where you have to create a big program and a large span disruptive transformational events to be able to stay ahead of the curve and ensure that your systems are really driving the value before they pass, they use by date.

OK, so we've talked about the pace of change and talked about how, when we launch new things and create new things that we need to create improvement.

And both transformational and iterative structures to make sure that those things that we built add value for much longer than they currently on. And again, the culvert environment is absolutely shrinking that timeline. So we need to be able to really augment our focus on improvement and growth of these things. Otherwise, we'll be we'll be rebuilding a lot of things as the, as the change overcome them.

But when we're talking about change, we absolutely need to think about humans and era.

And our, we talked about, our ability to, to, to changes, is greater than what I think we give it credit for. But there are some certain conditions that we certainly need to understand. And I've stolen with pride from a gentleman called Old Pagan on this one because I think he captures it in the way that I've talked about it for many years In the sense of.

one of the conditions that is the human condition is that need. There needs to be a level of pain in the current situation.

For us, to be able to, even want to consider moving to a new situation, so, we have to be super happy, basically, with, with that, with where we are today, and you can, that makes no logical sense. When you think about.

Nobody gets out of bed each day, and, you know, things are going really great. I think I might flip them on their head, so to speak. So, I think it makes sense intuitively.

It sounds a bit odd when you say that, you know, we have to be profoundly unhappy, but I think it's, it's, it's definitely an environment that creates an impetus for change and it's often not gonna work for me. The consultant be the lead to tell you, we need to change.

Screenshot (4)It's gotta come from ourselves to understand what we don't like about the current situation and where we're going in the future, which leads me to my next condition for, for a recipe for change.

I think we need a couple of teaspoons of this if we need maybe a couple of tablespoons of the previous one. If we want to beat the recipe analogy to death.

But basically, you know, we need a clear vision of that future to be able to desired change to be able to just go from, OK, I guess we have to to know. This is going to be great.

And that's really difficult. I mean, I know within, within my company, we revisited our purpose through through power, but not saying we're revisiting our vision and mission for for the company. And then obviously, that cascades down throughout the organization because what we had for a vision really got disrupted. And we'll talk a little bit down the track about some of the ways that happen. But absolutely. You want to think about having a clear vision at all times.

And you want to think about disruptions, lack of financing and the global pandemic. And, certainly, if that creates any things that you need to adjust with your vision. Because if that's not there, if there's not a clear picture of the future, and then anticipation and excitement about what that could bring, you can allow you to lose people along the way, obviously.

And this is fairly generic change management, Civil 101 stuff, But I think as you apply it to a colleague of mine, same sort of scenario, I think it starts to resonate a little more strongly than maybe it has in the past.

And, I think, you know, even if you aren't doing transformational change, like we talked about in the previous slide, even if you're doing the big change, I think, in this environment, we really need to still break it down in small steps.

It makes it less daunting when you talk about a transformation coming down the line, you know, that there's months and months and months of heavy lifting and adaptation and training and all of those things.

So, I think breaking it down into small steps and having more incremental improvement milestones that are clear along the way and shorter than what they probably normally would have been maybe 12 months ago, will help us stay on the journey for longer.

And certainly, it's working for us to really break down these these big events into much smaller chunks and much, much more tactical improvements while still showing that vision for the future and how it can X, But making sure that we're just focused on the next and the next and the next. kinda like in that two week sprint of an Agile Agile methodology.

So we've talked a lot about change on a systemic level, on a global level and on a human level.

So I want to talk about a little bit about our management system, at Boyer and just in general, I think we all have management systems, as I mentioned previously.

And all of them have been built for a specific purpose. The tools are there to bring the principles to life, to get the outcomes that we seek, and help us move us closer to our vision.

Um.

I think we've designed those for specific environment, and then a lot of those things certainly have shifted in the last six months. And we do need to rethink about our system. Is it still driving the same outcomes at the same level as they, as they were before?

And if they are not, then, what do you need to do differently in the way that you run your business to continue getting results in this new environment?

So, certainly, customers at the top of everything, we think about a boiler. And, I think, you know, if you think about anything in the Lean Management system kind of context, customer value is at the core of everything. So, you know, where a lot of our business at boyer's is done through the workplace. So employee benefits and retirement plans, and those sorts of things.

So, when you think about an environment like perfect 19 where, you know, mass furloughs have taken place across entire industries.

We are where we work across every industry. So, we see that the gamut of no impacts a complete, complete impact.

So, we have to think about how our products are serving these people in these environments. So, where we traditionally worked through the workplace. Now, we're working, direct, with a lot of individuals.

So, we have to think about how a value stream maps reflect what our customers value, or need right now, and how that's changed.

Screenshot - 2020-08-03T183453.663We have to absolutely think about whether that change is a six month thing at 12 month thing, and maybe if if there is an end to the 19 Will it still be a requirement? And design accordingly, and then waste elimination is obviously the things that don't add value. So if values changing and we need to change our lens for waste as well. And there's certainly been a number of ways that, we've gone about that.

We'll talk a little bit about ... programs and how we're shifting our investment there to start to think about that. A little more proactively investing and CX programs that has certainly helped us.

Think more holistically about value streams and how we deliver value throughout our processes and how we adapt to value in changing circumstances.

I mean virtual problem solving.

I already discussed a little bit around, how do we, how do we interact and engage and collaborate in a virtual environment?

I think PDCA or as UPS is a little shout out to McKinsey led deployment of continuous improvement.

But that problem solving format, it is definitely, or has been designed for, standing around and building on each other's ideas iterating, lots of body language that's engaged. Lots of hands-on tactile stuff, more. So in my manufacturing guys, obviously, I think, in the finance industry, we've definitely blessed with a lot of digital information. So we can do a lot of our analysis and problem solving in a virtual environment. Much more effectively, obviously. But we do need to think about these things. I mean, design thinking is one of the, most sort of collaborative and connected, and human engagement experiences from a problem solving perspective. And that's going to really struggle and we have had difficulty ourselves and adapting that one to a virtual environment mistake. Proofing again is, is probably a lot easier, and in finance versus manufacturing, but mistake proofing.

Um, it is often best suited to a physical environment as well.

We've had to rethink a lot of the way we go about it. We've had to sort of augment our virtual conferencing capabilities, heading in Zoom, as I'm sure we all have. But also of the engagement capabilities, training along with that, Et cetera, et cetera. But we do need to think about.

That structures for problem solving that worked before and what's changed, and what's going to be effective going forward.

And I've talked a little bit about VLSC. Again, I'll get into this a little bit more detail as we get into it. But, basically, our system is appropriate.

And I think I think our answer internally was no after addressing it Because, you know, we had, we had a scenario where we were listening to our customers via complaints about, you know, this new environment from 19 isn't helping me. The product isn't helping me in the way it needs to. By the time we identified that, and then built a solution, we missed the market, essentially, or at least the first wave. And so, I think you can start to see how your immune systems are effective or loss, as this organizing starts to change customer value and the propositions that we deliver, you really need to drive that The way you listen to your customers. In a different way, to be able to stay ahead of and identify new opportunities and issues as well.

Then the people themselves. So we talked about the human need for change and the recipe for success there. We talked a lot about the environment and our collaboration needs. Education is another interesting one. We obviously like to attend a lot of conferences and after a few months, you have all adapted to virtual conferences. As you are all here today, displaying your adaptation skills, about internal training programs, we've, we've invested heavily in and struggled to re-imagine those in a, in a virtual environment.

And I think it's taken a lot of businesses, including ours, several months, to really get those programs back up in an industrial virtual environment and in a way that adds the same value as they did before.

And when you lose a few months of training, you really start to see the trickle down effect in quality and productivity as we, as we sort of try to close that gap of a few months of adjustment, that it took us to get there.

So, I've talked a lot about listening to our customers, and I think this is more getting into the buyer experience, but I'm guessing, and hoping it probably resonates across the community, the listening into this, this webinar here today. But we really, obviously, invested a great deal in the left side of the screen, on the React side.

And obviously, there are regulatory reasons why you would invest heavily in managing complaints and driving that, but if that becomes a core channel for you to listen to your customers, then it's kind of too late.

In a lot of regards you've already like that issue or poor quality or problems slipped through to the customer. But that stage, you've already probably lost that customer.

28You potentially normal through word of mouth and reputation damage and And it's just not going to provide you the data to improve it in a proactive way.

That's going to help you Grow your customer base in any way. So, yes, we do need to manage complaints, and we do need to Provide empathy and support and service to our customers where it hasn't gone well. I don't think there's any company that has no complaints But we but we do want to not rely on that as ads as a channel for the voice of our customers.

I think similarly feedback surveys I think there's such an inundation of surveys that that typically the only people that are emitted enough to want to respond to the survey and provide feedback more in the complaints bucket than anything else. It's kind of rare that you'll hear a really positive story.

Although, I will say in a lot of our situations, it ... where we, where we pay the claims promptly or what have you. We do get a lot of positive feedback.

But, I think in general, um, feedback and surveys that are after the fact after the product's been delivered after the survey has been delivered. And often, a little too late in the next, for driving, improvement, product innovation, or whatever it might be. A Voice of the customer. Voice. To the industry. Voice Of the patna. So, how you're listening posts across those different channels, are they effective, did they go deep enough of a broad enough in terms of the breadth of voices within those segments?

To really get a good feel for trends and issues with customers in the industry as a whole, and, and how we're interacting with our partners, We've invested pretty heavily there And we feel pretty good about that one, but, again, it's probably not enough on the anticipate side for us to really have an effective conversation about using that information to drive product, innovation or improvement.

To stay ahead of that customer value, schematic that I showed a little earlier, what we ask that you admit students seeing great results in is, um.

Customer Experience, CX. Journey maps is something that we started.

Actually, a couple of years ago, and, and we're starting to see good results in terms of, you know, when we start to pull the data and analyze a marketplace, or a product, and start to map an ideal state, and gather feedback from our customers on design versus failure, it starts to influence vision for the customer experience. That influences everything that we do.

And it's starting to help us build things that are anticipating needs versus react, responding or reacting to needs, which is helping us be first to market. It's helping us.

Solve problems, real world problems, that people are facing, especially through the 19 environment. And, as I mentioned before, you know, we had some hits and misses in responding to over 90.

And I think we, I think we will probably hit more than we've, we've missed based on our investment in the customer experience work. Having user sessions is going to be critical. We're way.

Dabbled and probably increasingly looking to, to sort of create more of the big, idea stuff, is in the incubator space so hack a thons and design thinking, and I think.

They're still immature processes in the sense where it's going to take a long time to get a hackathon together.

Get the ideas, uh, I guess, Groomed into a into a file is less than them. And then re hackathon and finalized, and launched, and then deliver. That timeline is probably still too long in a coven. I'd seen environment. But I think that, just in general. Pace of change environment. So we, we see value in it and we've gotten good results from it. But we do need to make it faster to make it more effective.

And I think continuing investments in those, right and right side of the ledger opportunities, well, absolutely.

Give us the kind of value and staying ahead of the curve, as we, as we, as we anticipate.

So, that's my final slide. Now, I've only got a minute here to go.

But I don't want to spend the last slide on a downer. But I think there are many barriers to just sort of ...

speed of change and speed of improvement and speed innovation.

And I'm not saying that we want to sort of go around or ignore those. They're all there for a good reason. I think, when we generate a lot of success and thinking about these things is more about an FMEA failure mode effects analysis opportunities.

So, yes, these barriers that exist and are real and organizations across the world, um, but ignoring them isn't going to help that's going to make those batteries bigger and it's going to make those barriers, slow things down significantly such that you're gonna miss the mark with responding to carve at 19 type product responses and those sorts of things. So just step through that from a cultural lens. You know, are we ready for change? We've talked about that right out of the gates.

Does your organization trust you and change hits from a cultural perspective? So do we sort of I change with an air of mistrust or fear? Have we failed in the past and being scolded for it?

And that level of trust in the culture is going to, is going to need to be understood and that barrier needs to be understood if it exists in entity to mitigate in some way. Whether that's a trust building program, like we've done at Boyer, we invested heavily in, merrily, merrily building trust in formulated sessions. And that's been really successful for us in terms of driving improvement.

And having people understand why the improvement is taking place, and trust that, that's a good thing from a process perspective.

You know, we we have to have risk functions. We have to have compliance and regulations. And that has to be a healthy tension between a risk function and, say, a product function because, Well, you know, product once that wants to absorb all the risk. And compliance wants to absorb none of it. So, having that ... coming, somewhere in, the middle, is important.

Screenshot (4)But you need to understand the implications of all of those things.

And there are ways that you can make the risks smaller by doing the same thing. So we've done things like crunching the risk into a small subset, have smaller bets in terms of two tests and pilots versus full-scale rollouts. Having an Innovation Fund that has slightly reduced risk, or slightly greater appetite for risk, because it's on the floor.

Not part of the whole.

And I think, um, they've been good practices that have helped us speed through some of those, what can sometimes be very complicated processes, and from the process lens standard, Oracle current best method, I think we build our standards. And then they sit gathering dust forevermore. We do want to make sure that we're driving a current best method kind of mindset in terms of that process. Yes. It's just the current best way we do something, but we're always looking for better ways width is versus This is the Standard.

And we do it this way, forevermore and technology in banking, in my time in Australia, was, it was often cheaper to build an entirely new business with a new banking platform from scratch, Then it was to rebuild your your legacy platform. So I think understanding those barriers, and I talked a little bit about a previously, in the sense of the barrier, is the legacy system is difficult to, to enhance or improve. But there has got to be parts within that, but we can, and we can make steps towards a better situation there.

And I think that's, that's something to think about as well. So obviously, we want to bring these, these things together, And when we understand the barriers that exist within these three areas, I think we can really hit that sweet spot. You really get speedy in terms of how we improve and innovate, and bring things to market and deliver value to our customers at a time of need. Which is right now.

So that's, that's the final the final piece, I'll think, I'll hand it back to ...

Facilitate the Q&A.

Terrific, terrific you and thank you so much for sharing the journey at the ... Financial Affairs and the and how how their organizations responding to this time with the pandemic. It's being a common theme with all the banks and financial institutions and the leadership we have spent this week with, you know, talking here that if anything that the pandemic has accelerated, innovate, the pace of innovation, it has accelerated digital transformation. And, as, you know, one of the code so that we had early on is that there was one institution that has been on this journey for the last five years and because of enterprise risk management related concerns, they had not fully deployed at the digital workplace. And then and then in five days, a full on, because they did not have an option, they had to do it.

And then all the legal and safety and security concerns the war lower and the priority list the TSO.

The question is, I believe you're experiencing something similar at oil financial. And I'm just curious about what are some of the two, top two or so leading change is that you have seen happen during this time to adapt to this new reality to adapt to the pandemic social distancing setup.

Yeah. I think one of the ones that you just mentioned was, was probably a big one for us. Like we were even moving away from a virtual environment for working and saying, You know, if you're in a proximity, you want you in the office. Because we want to know a problem solving culture, where we collaborate, and that sort of Google Workspace kinda kinda deal. So we invested heavily in our workplaces. We want people to leverage those spaces, and we wanted to create this great environment at the office, and we're actually going in the other direction, Much to companies and in a similar situation.

Within a month, our entire workforce was, was virtual. So, yeah, that was it. That was definitely a huge one.

I think, yeah.

I think another one would be another good one to share here.

Well, I guess, if we think about that, that compliance and procurement process, as you start to think about building something, you mentioned earlier, that we had a bit of a mess in terms of, you know, we tried to launch a new product to respond to the needs of our customers. which are really pivoted greatly through through the same scenario.

Screenshot - 2020-08-03T183453.663And by the time we got it through compliance, and contracting, and this, that, and the other, we've missed them off by a number of weeks.

And customers are going and solving the problem in another way.

And so we started the deep dive into that, We started to realize that they listen, there were some, some components that were way too slow to respond to this environment.

And probably, in hindsight, it's just on earth, um, what was always too slow, but it was kind of on the brink, and now it takes kind of put it over the edge.

So we start this status that are really challenged, you know, yes, this is a compliance May, but, you know, how can we interpret that in a different way? Is that, you know, or how can we execute that in a different way?

And I think, working with, you know, companies that do sort of fintech companies that help you with regulatory injections and those sorts of things, Certainly helpful for engaging those.

And, I think, uh, building the relationship between, um, the procurement, risk, compliance side of the shop, and the product, business line kind of shop, that's been a really big change that, no, that was probably not as healthy as needed today to be fast and effective. And, from a relationship perspective, that was a big shift.

Anyone, tell us a little bit about, it? looks like the company was engaging on, donor, on, a, on, a, on a, on a journey of, a, you know, enhancing its culture and, you know, you talk about the motivation, the ability to do change, and the, and the curious about, you talked about the collaborations that was happening, even on bringing people to the office, so that they can collaborate more, effectively. All great recipe. A great recipe for accelerating innovation and excellence. My question is: how have you adapt to, now, to keep that momentum going? In the illness, in industrial setting. And the way that, we're distance that, we're communicating from, means like the ones we're using today, How have you adapted to that new reality choose, to not lose momentum? And keeping that change in your culture, going the right direction.

Yeah, I mean, I think, when we looked around, we realized we actually had a lot more tools available to us, that would have been utilized, That was super effective.

Whether it's SharePoint collaboration, tools, and wikis, and web spaces, internal chat, whether it's the, the whiteboard features and the polling features on some of the web conferencing software, whether all of these things we actually had. But we just weren't utilizing.

And I think, it was, it did definitely took a period of education and adaptation.

But, the beauty of it was that we didn't have to purchase a bunch of new software or build and build a new system to handle all these things.

We had at all, we just weren't really encouraging it to its fullest potential which, which we have gone about. Making sure that now everyone understands the capabilities that we have at our disposal, and the benefits of using them, and how to use them, and those sorts of things in early status, a new way of collaborating emerging from that it's, it's really healthy.

And, you know, when you get into traditional format, to get traditional outcomes, and I think you sort of break the mold, and you get, kind of outcomes that you wouldn't have anticipated. As we as we get into, I'd say that's been, that's been really great.

Very good. Time for one more quick question. Just to wrap up here at the end of the day. one, common theme, recurring theme that we have observed as well, is that organizations are saying that they actually are able to accelerate innovation right now, because they have the biggest constraint in normal times its actual, the availability of the right people to accelerate innovation. And the most organizations right now, there is some of those, right? People have have a little bit more time now.

The perception is that way, anyway, than they did before. Curious if you have experienced that, if the having the right leaders for collaborative leaders in the organization is a main constraint for accelerating innovation for you. And if you have noticed that in, this is in this constant setting, in this current setting if you have if those people have a little bit more availability And, therefore, they can push some of these initiatives forward.

Yeah.

I mean, I think for us, it Boyer that's not been a huge issue in terms of leader availability in particular. But, you know, when you get two hours back of commuting every day, yeah, you got, you're going to have an opportunity to engage a lot more people, more quickly, there's more white spots on the calendar, every party than there ever has been before. So I would imagine it has created a positive impact impact for us, and I can I can say that to say, yeah, But. But we were blessed with a leadership group that's really committed to sort of go into the sauce and being, you know, being down there where the work is done and connecting with our people on a regular basis.

And that's been a sort of a core tenet of our continuous improvement program, but, you know, what, coaching and learning, by seeing and those sorts of things. So it's not a huge shift for us. But I'm absolutely certain that when the availability bases increase, then that's a Greases, the wheels of change, and improvement.

And it speaks volumes to have a leader of excellence and innovation, like you, to take the time and share this, this lessons with the world on behalf of the entire audience. The global audience that's with us today. Thank you so much for sharing this Very insightful presentation and being with us today.

Pleasure, Joseph. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

All right, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes. They chew a financial services live. Tomorrow, we have, let's take a look at what we are going to have tomorrow, another great lineup of thought leaders in banking and financial services globally. We're going to early on in the morning, we're going to have doctor Arthur ..., who is the Senior Leader for Digital Transformation at HSBC and he's gonna talk to us about the customer driven digital transformation that HSBC is undergoing right now.

After, after that, we have Swiss Re, the head of Operational Excellence. For Swiss Re is going to talk to us about building a client centric financial organization and specifically share Swiss Re case studies and lessons learned, and what they're doing. They're on their journey to build a client centric financial organization that's accelerating as a result of the of the global pandemic. And we're gonna wrap up tomorrow with a real treat. We have Peter, late son who is the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of R E royalties. talking about fintech is going to talk about the financing of the Green economy as well, and the impact it's having on the on climate change and the investments in that area. So, a very diverse, global group of thought leaders, we're going to be sharing their experiences and know-how with us.

Excited about that, looking forward to meeting you again, tomorrow here, and sharing all this Lesson's. Again, you can go onto LinkedIn and leave comments there, live questions there. Several of our speakers will log back on later on today, and we'll look at questions and comments and all comment back. Thank you again for joining us on financial Services Live, and we look forward to seeing you back tomorrow. Take care.

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About the Author

more (61)-1Ewan Goddard,
AVP, Improvement Change Leader,
Voya Financial.

Through 15+ years leading as an operations executive, my diverse exposure to many industries, leaders, businesses and teams has armed me with a keen eye for opportunities to improve the overall financial performance of any operation, while sustaining high employee engagement and customer satisfaction.

At the core of my approach is people - fostering the healthy relationships and partnerships required to drive rapid improvement and innovative solutions to help drive the success of the organization. Alignment of people to the culture/behaviors required to drive the goals/mission of the organization is key. Ensuring all facets of improvement are synchronized to accelerate the attainment of desired outcomes helps create an environment that attracts and retains quality people, delivers customer-driven value, leverages competitive advantage and, ultimately, drives long-term sustainable financial health of the organizations I have worked with.

This is both my expertise and passion.
 

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