Workshop A - Session 2

Title: Employability and Competitiveness - Learning Organisations Chair: Sarah Perman, Trades Union Congress, UK Ian Hornby, Lombard North Central PLC, UK

Ian Hornby is Head of Group Human Resource Development for Lombard North Central, a financial institution which is wholly owned by NatWest in the UK. It employs 6000 people mainly in the UK and also in a range of other European countries. Part of Lombard is a major developer of credit cards for shops and stores and was the first non-UK overseas organisation to achieve Investors in People in 1996.

Lombard is Europe's largest finance company. I have been in the industry 30 odd years and, when I joined, financial services provided you with a job for life. You came in at 16 or 18 and you stayed for 40 years and you got a pension at the end of it. If you thought about leaving the organisation at any time during that time, you were seen as totally disloyal and it would be very unusual for anyone to have been recruited into the organisation in mid-career, so everyone had been there forever or so it seemed. You would never leave the organisation involuntarily: the only way you would do that was if you stole money. Incompetence was never reason to get rid of anyone and so if you came in at 16 and behaved yourself you would still be there 40 years later and pick up your pension, and it was index-linked as well.

With that kind of background, around ten years ago the financial services industry had something of a shock. A lot of young competitors came into the market place and it meant that the organisation had to change. We heard the word 'redundancy' in the banking industry for the first time ever. We had never seen people made redundant. We did not know what it felt like to make people redundant. Ten years ago when, for the first time ever, as an Area Personnel Manager with NatWest, I did make people redundant it was totally unfamiliar territory for us.

Major Change Needed

We found that most of the people who worked for us were provided with training, but it was not for everybody, and so many of those people who we were making redundant had nothing to fall back on. We had actually trained them to be good bankers; we had not actually done very much to make them employable, because we never thought we would have had to. And so ten years ago, there was a major need to change our culture. We in Lombard felt that just changing culture was not as easy as all that. You cannot just send a circular round to all the staff and say 'as from next Monday there is a new culture'. You have to create an environment which allows people to work in a different way and requires managers to manage in a different way.

Over the last ten years, we have gone through some major changes. We have moved away very much from an organisation that was dependent on command, dependent on rules, dependent on people doing as they were told, and we are moving now to an organisation where people are taking much more ownership for their own careers and for their own training and development. You might say that we are moving from a training organisation to a learning organisation. Now that sounds very much a cliché, but it is the way we think about things. Training and development now is not something that the organisation does to you, it is something that you actually generate for yourself.

Framework

Around four years ago we looked at the Investors in People standard. We felt that for us that would provide us with a framework around which to undertake further work on changing this culture. At that time I was responsible for our businesses in Holland and Belgium - Comfort Card. We had some thoughts about whether this standard would actually fit a Dutch business and when we went to talk to them of course the issues are all the same. It is about getting competent people competently managed and that is all. Really in many ways what the standard does is to provide a framework to allow organisations to maximise the potential of their people. Certainly we have found in Holland, where we were going through a period of major structural and cultural changes in our business, that the standard created for us and for that business exactly the right environment in which it can develop. The business, not long after we got the standard, went through a fairly traumatic time and has come through that. We believe that was largely as a result of applying these principles that are set down in this Investors in People standard.

To summarise finally, our views are that first of all, if you want to change the culture of your organisations, it takes time. You cannot do it overnight. Secondly, you have to be active in doing it. It is no use just setting the wheels in motion and stepping away from it; management have to take a very active part. You have to remove suspicion from your employees, because they will think, if you say to them, 'You are now responsible for your own development', that you are opting-out as an organisation. So you have to do that and you have to keep doing it. It is an issue of continuous improvement, continuous change, and if you have the right framework and the right culture in place, it works.

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