Mark Edgar of RSA Group on the Future of Work
Mark Edgar, SVP Human Resources at RSA Group, expands on the future of work and how performance management is evolving. He discusses the importance of shifting behaviours, getting senior-level buy-in and the need for keeping things simple.
In this interview, we explore:
- The value of focusing on the relationship between leader and employee.
- How his organization is sustaining coach-like behaviours.
- The movement toward ongoing feedback, as well as feedback from multiple stakeholders.
Also mentioned in this podcast:
- future foHRward
- RSA’s program Coaching for Leaders
Full Transcript
Michael: Yes, you are indeed listening to the Performance Management Stories Podcast. This is where I get to find out from real practitioners, senior people who are thinking, worrying, working their performance management process to find out what’s really going on in this alleged performance management revolution. And my guest today, I’m excited about this, a fellow Torontonian who also has an exotic accent. It is Mark Edgar. He is the SVP for HR for RSA, who is in fact a three hundred year old property and causality insurer. Is that how I say it? Causality? Is that right, Mark?
Mark Edgar: Casualty, actually Michael.
Michael: There you go. You can tell I have a Master’s in English Literature by my inability to read. So as you can hear from his accent, he is originally from the UK and because I’m originally from Australia, I suspect I’ll mock him at some stage during this interview because it’s traditional, but he’s been in Canada for coming up to seven years now and has actually had over twenty-five years across the board in various forms of HR experience.
So I know Mark is passionate about the future of work and the unique opportunity it presents for HR and he’s in fact the founder of Future Fohrward. So there’s a pun in there: f, o, h, r, w a r, d, which is a community of HR professionals interested in learning more about the future of work. And in some ways this performance management approaches one aspect of that: What is the future of work? So Mark, welcome.
Mark Edgar: Thank you Michael. Good to be with you.
Michael: Yeah. Lovely to have you here too. And, you know, we talked about RSA being a three hundred year old company, but give us a sense of what that means. What is it now, how big is it, how global is it, how many people are involved?
Mark Edgar: Sure. So obviously I have responsibility for our Canadian business, which has a little over 3000 people literally coast to coast from Vancouver all the way through to see St John’s Newfoundland and we are in the property and casualty business, which essentially involves both home or auto insurance for our, what we call our personal customers. But also we would deal with a whole range of commercial customers as well. He will be involved in looking at RSA as an insurer to protect them in their business, and allowing people to fulfill their own personal dreams and ambitions as well. Insurance, while for many it would be seen as a bit of a grudge purchase is a real enabler for people to do the things they want to do.
Michael: Right. So is your perspective kind of from the Canadian business or has RSA you’ve thought about performance management kind of had a more global experience of playing around with it and seeing how to change it for the better?
Mark Edgar: We’ve done a bit of both, to be honest, Michael. We would have a look at, in Canada we have an appropriate level of autonomy here in the Canadian business, but I also sit as part of the group HR leadership team as well and we would have discussed performance management at that level as well. So probably both.
Michael: So how have things been changing, if at all, around how you’ve been thinking about performance management at RSA?
Mark Edgar: To be honest, I think they’ve changed in a very kind of gradual way. I think we’ve not, we’d been watching from the sidelines some of the slightly bolder changes that organizations have made to their performance management systems and a somewhat maybe traditionally as an organization we’ve been really focusing on ensuring that the true value of performance management, which we see very much being around the relationship between the leader and the employee in their team, that that’s something that we really focus on ensuring is as effective as possible. So that’s really been our off focus has been in embedding that relationship and the value of that relationship rather than perhaps focusing too much on the process, which I think sometimes then loses that important element of the whole activity, if you like.
Michael: So how have you gone about helping to build that bond, that relationship between leader and the people on their team that they might be leading?
Mark Edgar: Probably the big investment we made was what we called internally our Coaching for Leaders Program. So we actually have rolled out situational leadership as a discipline with all of our leaders, again literally coast to coast to equip them with a set of skills and a really kind of common framework to ensure they’re getting the most value from that team. So whilst that’s been applicable to all sorts of interactions that a leader would have with their team, one of the main benefits we were trying to get from that program is really ensuring that the performance management elements of their role were much more effective.
Michael: When you say leaders, is that, I’m just kind of technically curious as to how you use that term? Is that like all people managers is kind of the c-suite only. How do you, how do you think about leaders?
Mark Edgar: Yeah, we probably have a slightly more inclusive view, so it would be the former. So literally thinking about anybody who has responsibility for another colleague or employee would be our definition of leaders.
Michael: So part of the challenge I’ve seen in the kind of the change management challenge with training is that you can run a fantastic program, have people walk away going, I’m enlightened and empowered and excited and all of that. But if the systems around them don’t change, it’s very hard to sometimes put those new behaviors into play because the systemic status quo crushes that new initiative, those green buds of new behavior. So I’m curious to know how you found ways of helping to sustain this shift of behavior that you’re looking for.
Mark Edgar: I agree with you a hundred percent. And I think our intention was very much to do everything we could to mitigate that risk. Because I think… I agree with you, I think that’s quite common. I would suggest at this stage we made some good progress and I think as an organization there’s still a long way for us to go to to truly embed that in the organization. Something we did were really ensuring that from, you mentioned the c-suite earlier, that from the top of the organization down through the organization the new kind of way of doing things and the new leadership expectations were kind of embedded by their own leader. So to kind of push some of that accountability through. And I would say that we had some success with that, but it was particularly in those areas who are real champions of working in that different way and really embraced it holistically; and that was, I would suggest, a few leaders who would have had a bit of a light bulb moment during the program, um, but then also probably in more cases, leaders who, who would already be in the camp of being very effective leaders. And so we were, we had those, either of those two situations where I think we got much more traction than in other cases. So that was just one example that we’re trying to use to sustain it.
Michael: Let me be curious about this and this is maybe going too far and you may not want to kind of dive into this, but it’s so tricky to get the C-Suite or that senior leadership group, sometimes anyway, involved in opportunities like this because they’re like, I’ve got a job, I’ve got metrics, I’ve got KPIs and, you know, Mark’s got this. It’s an HR type thing. You pointed to what worked. One is people who are already kind of champions of people-centered leadership, others who might have had an a-ha in the program itself and gone, “I’ve seen the light.” With the people who fell outside those two categories, did you push hard? Did you just kind of go they’re too difficult and we’ll just not choose to fight that particular battle? How did you manage the more recalcitrant senior leaders?
Mark Edgar: I think to be honest, the leaders that we would have been more challenged with would have been at all parts of the organization. I think the, the challenge in terms of sustaining this though is I think the point you’re hinting at, which is very much if you don’t get buy in at the most senior level of the organization. So we would have perhaps been slightly unintentionally, maybe subconsciously it might be, say, polite about this whole process. So we invited our executive leaders to attend what was otherwise a two day program, you know, we’ll give you a half day program, which either assumes that the C-Suite leaders were all amazing at this or, probably more realistically, avoids us kind of really challenging them to learn and therefore embed this important new set behaviors. So, you know, I think hindsight’s a wonderful thing, but I would suggest that it probably was one of the things that we learned and something that we would do differently next time would be to kind of insist on greater alignment around the program and people’s participation in it. I think it was easy to do some of the, you know, very obvious things around kicking off a program and writing a story about it in our online community, et cetera. But to truly embed it, I feel we should have ensured that there was the investment from our senior leaders to really put that leadership training into practice.
Michael: Yeah. And I appreciate you sharing that. Thank you.
Box of Crayons, February 2018, we’re finally releasing this piece of research we did around performance management and you were kind enough to contribute to that research. So thank you. And part of why I wanted to talk to you is actually you were one of like the most enthusiastic people around the effectiveness and the way your performance management process works. So what else are you excited about in terms of RSA’s approach to performance management?
Mark Edgar: I think, to be honest, I think it’s not rocket science. I think we keep it quite simple. We don’t over, we try not to over complicate it. I think we’re clear with people on their accountabilities as leaders and we’re clear with individuals on their accountabilities as colleagues. And there’s a kind of process that is, you know, when I compare it to other organizations, is well understood. It’s kind of embedded in our kind of corporate calendar as something that we will do. And it drives action. It drives action around the people that we recognize and develop and reward and progress as well as driving decisions about identifying those individuals who perhaps aren’t performing so well. I think there’s always things we can do to improve, but I think the actual kind of foundation of our approach is pretty solid. And I think in some ways that’s why we’ve not been as, we’ve not been as interested, let’s say, or we haven’t seen it’s relevance to really move away from the program at this stage in terms of, you know, moving to no ratings or to moving to kind of more frequent reviews. I think we feel that we, that those are things that we will continue to discuss, but at this moment in time it’s fulfilling a purpose and there’s obviously things we can do to improve it, but we’re pretty good with how it works based on what it is, in a way.
Michael: You’re right in pointing to the two things that people seem to be most playing around with. One is more frequency in terms of the reviews and one is playing around with ratings. So just out of curiosity, how frequent is your cycle? Is it once a year or twice a year or something else?
Mark Edgar: So we have a twice a year process in terms of the formal process, which is where we as an HR team would reach out to leaders and there’d be a level of structure around it. I think like any of that kind of thing though, you know, the expectation would be that that leaders are checking in with our employees on a much more frequent basis. So we haven’t necessarily labeled it in that way. And I’d suggest therefore we’re probably not getting the consistency around that that perhaps we could, but I know either as a leader or a leader of leaders that that does happen in many cases.
Michael: Right. And that kind of connects us back to the investment you’ve made around in those so called soft skill training around being more coach-like, which was terrific. Yeah. Do you have –and I’m putting you on the spot a little bit, but only because this is something I wrestle with so I’m just, I want to know what the answer is myself here, or do you have a way of measuring or helping people track those more informal conversations?
Mark Edgar: Well, I think we do in a sense in terms of sort of tracking of overall progress. That’s not something that we would do at a kind of a macro enterprise wide level, but certainly as a leader, I think that gives them the opportunity to track progress. We would have a couple of measures that we would use to track the overall effectiveness of our performance management process with employees through what was typically an annual engagement survey, fairly classic annual engagement survey that we just started to switch into being more of a quarterly pulse with are our employees. So that gives us the opportunity to get, you know, more constant feedback. And within there we can certainly start to track some progress in terms of people’s overall views, which I think will be helpful. We’ve only just started that to be fair.
Michael: Again, not wanting you to reveal anything that you feel is proprietary or confidential, but that shift to poll surveys is definitely something that we’re seeing more of particularly as the technology, the cloud technology enables that to be a faster, easier process. And you know, traditional once a year employee surveys are anywhere between forty and eighty questions. I’m curious with the poll surveys are kind of still that that depth or are you working on a much more limited number of questions?
Mark Edgar: Yeah, so we’d have a, we’re going to continue with our annual survey, which is a kind of group driven survey which we have a lot of, again is a kind of big part of our overall kind of organizational effectiveness and the way things get done at RSA. So that will continue. What we’ve done is taken nine questions from that survey and we ask those as part of the pulse and then we have a 10th question and — those nine are constant — and then we have a 10th question which will vary from quarter to quarter depending on the particular area that we want to delve into at that particular time.
Michael: Beautiful. Yeah, that’s really useful to hear. So Mark, what I’m hearing is you’ve thought about this. There’s not much want to change because you’re watching what’s going on, but actually going, you know what, our system works pretty well at the moment. We haven’t had to tinker with too much other than this investment in helping all your leaders or your people managers be better at coaching and better at their kind of daily interactions like that. Any final comments about what you see as maybe the future or kind of lessons learned from where you’ve got to so far?
Mark Edgar: I think for RSA, I’m sure we will evolve to have much more formality around the more frequent reviews. I think that will happen. I think also as individuals shift they’re kind of ways of working to much more agile teams the importance of getting ongoing feedback and feedback from multiple stakeholders will be critical. And I think that, you know, regardless of whether somebody is a full time employee or a contractor or a part of the infamous gig economy, I think there’ll be an expectation that we’ll still need to be thinking about their performance in the same way we have our traditional employees. So I think that will be another shift. But I think at the end of the day it will be, you know, for me perhaps, and I’m from the UK and maybe not very smart. So I think at the end of the day to keep things simple, I think it’s all around the role of the leader. I think the more that we can equip the leader to deal with all the disruption that’s going on in the marketplace that makes their jobs 1) increasingly difficult but 2) increasingly challenging, but I would also suggest much more fulfilling is really where I think our focus should be. And you can only do so many things. So if there’s one big area of focus for us, you know, I believe that it has to be around building the capability of our leaders.
Michael: OK. Mark of RSA Canada. It’s been wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much for sharing your insights today. Super-Helpful.
Mark Edgar: Thank you, Michael. Always a pleasure. Speak to you soon.
