Episode 67: How BNY Mellon Supports Employee Wellbeing and Resilience (Interview with Jolen Anderson)
BNY Mellon is America's oldest bank, having been created in 1784, and is currently on a journey of reinvention as it transforms into a digital organisation. The pandemic has accelerated this journey and that is where Jolen Anderson, my guest on this week's episode, comes in. Jolen is a Global Head of Human Resources and with her team, is responsible for translating their business strategy into their workforce strategy and igniting the passion of BNY Mellon's employees. As the business transformation was accelerated by the pandemic Jolen and her team are focused on three key driving principles. First, operational resiliency. Second, service to customers and third, employee wellbeing and safety. These three principles, not only underpin the digital transformation but the bank's culture too.
You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.
In our conversation Jolen and I discuss:
The central role of HR in business transformation
How employee wellbeing was prioritised during the twin pandemics of 2020
How resilience and inclusion are competencies that can be nurtured
The central role of people data and analytics in the work that Jolen and her team are doing
Why it is critical for CHROs to approach people transformation with intentionality right now and how to do this
This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in the role of workforce strategy and business transformation. So that is Business Leaders, Chief HR Officers and anyone in a Strategy, People Analytics, Culture or HR Business Partner role.
Support for this podcast is brought to you by Quantum Workplace. To learn more, visit www.quantumworkplace.com/digitalhr.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Jolen Anderson, Global Head of Human Resources at BNY Mellon, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show Jolen, it is great to have you on. Please can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and your role at BNY Mellon?
Jolen Anderson: Thank you so much, David. I am so excited to be here and appreciate the invitation to share some thoughts with your listeners today.
I am the CHRO at BNY Mellon, as you mentioned, I have spent more than 20 years in the intersection between technology and financial services. I started out my career as an antitrust litigator, actually, working on cases in the payments space before moving on to spend a lot of my time at a payments company. I transitioned to a career in HR, first leading diversity and inclusion, and then doing a number of other things post that. Now I have joined BNY Mellon where I am responsible for helping lead our HR transformation and supporting our people through many of the challenges that we have been facing throughout this year and beyond. I also have responsibility for our ESG, Corporate Philanthropy and Corporate Social Responsibility areas as well.
David Green: It has been quite a year, as you referenced in your introduction Jolen. Can you tell us a bit about the business environment of the bank and how the events of the past 12 to 14 months have disrupted the business?
Jolen Anderson: Yeah, it is a great question and it is a understatement, almost, that it has been a year. I joined BNY Mellon at a time where the organisation was going through a transformation. BNY Mellon is America's oldest bank. We have the privilege of always being at the centre of helping financial services and financial markets really thrive through our operation and our platform, that really operates at scale. Our business strategy has really been a journey of reinvention. It has been thinking about how we take this legacy financial services company and think about how we leverage our platform and push forward a digital agenda, that allows clients and services to perform with excellence and execute in different ways. So it is interesting that on top of that, we have this moment that we are in right now where the virtual environment, the digital agenda, our ability to operate in a virtual form, has been challenged more than ever. And the events of the past year have really accelerated the journey that we were already on. When the pandemic broke out for example, we had to quickly transition the vast majority of our employees from working from home to being fully operational and open for business anywhere in the world. The investments, that thankfully we made in advance of this moment, in our infrastructure, our operating platform and our cyber and information security really did benefit us from being able to make that transition quickly and support a broad scale remote working arrangement. All of the security and controls that you can imagine that are required in a regulated bank, like we are, that govern when we are working inside the office, were fully in effect when we are working remotely as well. So it was fantastic to enable the journey that we have been on up until this moment, that really prepared us for being able to ensure that our operations can continue without pause today.
David Green: It is interesting what you said Jolen, about how the pandemic has accelerated the journey of the transformation that you are on. Certainly when I speak to your peers and other organisations, that is something that really resonates. Last year we spoke to Heather McGowan, on the podcast and she is someone that is really looking at the future of work. She talked about how the pandemic has accelerated the future of work and I think what we are going to be talking about for the rest of our time together is how that is accelerating the work, in some ways, in a good way for our employees and the culture that we are trying to create within our organisations. That leads me on nicely to the next part. What does this transformation, that you are on at the moment, mean for the people side of the business and how has the business’s approach being translated into workforce strategy?
Jolen Anderson: It is a great question and I think the answer gets back to a word that you mentioned at the beginning, which is really going back to culture. As we have been on this journey at BNY Mellon, as I mentioned, it has been one that has been digital first. So thinking about how we really scale and drive operational resiliency in a way that powers our clients, in a way that ensures that we are bringing the most forward thinking solutions to the way that we do business as a bank. When the pandemic came along and we had to layer on the principles of what would be required in this time, against the transformation that we were going under, in many ways we focused on three things. We focused on ensuring that operational resiliency was in place. We focused on service to our clients and we focused on the wellbeing and health and safety of our employees. That thought of operations, clients and employees, is in some ways, the three principles that you need to ensure that you are enabling any transformation and creating any culture that is going to help power your business for the future.
So one of the first things that we did is we thought about, in addition to of course the health and safety of our employees and all the foundational efforts that we were putting in place to ensure that that was the case.
Be it, supporting wellbeing initiatives, be it supporting resiliency, things we were doing around telemedicine and vaccine support, time off for individuals, caregiver leave, all the things that really just brought forward the connection between this home and work environment and the reality that we needed to support people in their everyday lives, so that they could do their best at work. We also thought about how do we ignite the passion in our employees, because at the end of the day, we are all challenged. Every day there are things that people are facing, be it kids at home, the pressures of work, the pressures of the pandemic. We said to ourselves, how do we ensure that every day as individuals are getting up for work that, that passion for excellence, that passion for delivery, against who BNY Mellon is and the impact that we make in the overall financial markets, is at the centre of what we do. So we used this moment to really think about, how do we reignite that passion? And we made that at the centre of new values that we actually introduced during this time. We thought about a passion for excellence, ensuring a strength in diversity, courage for leadership and integrity, all of that being at the centre of the culture that we were trying to create. And it is interesting enough that each of those aspects were the things that we needed to get through the pandemic in the first place. So we used those two moments, the pandemic and the need to drive our business forward, to make sure that we were making a connection with what we want our culture to look like in the future.
As I mentioned, the safety and wellbeing of our employees also remained a top priority and we wanted to make sure that whatever we did, it was with those things in mind. Then our teams really understood how this moment, how the prioritisation of their own wellbeing, would be the thing that really helped us ensure that we were driving the workforce transformation that aligns with transforming our business at the same time.
David Green: It is interesting that that employee first/employee centric approach has, almost been a feature, I think, of many organisation's response to the pandemic. It is good to see really, it is heartwarming I think, in many respects. I think it is the right thing to do, but also probably long-term it will be interesting to see the research in years to come. Actually, I think it will probably correlate quite nicely with business success as well, as we hopefully, at some point, emerge out of the pandemic.
Maybe before we dive into some of the detail of the people focused initiatives you are currently working on, I know our listeners would be interested to hear how you sustain an effective relationship with the business, which enables you to translate the business strategy into workforce strategy.
I think it is almost the secret source of great HR, in many respects. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
Jolen Anderson: It is a great question and I think I agree with you that you will see the connection between that focus around employee first initiatives and that opportunity to reinforce business strategy.
So to your point, great HR is always in the search of how do we ensure that we are powering our business? How do we really create that connection between people and a business agenda? It really starts with things that sometimes sound a little bit basic, but it is the truth, which is really understanding the business strategy, really staying close to what is trying to be accomplished and what the organisational goals are. And then thinking about how you align the people agenda to that. As I mentioned at the top, we have been undergoing a transformation at BNY Mellon, that says that we need to move from an organisation that has not necessarily always been digital first, that hasn't always been technology enabled, that hasn't always been as agile as we need to be in responding to the moment, to ensure that our Leaders are able to be more technology focused. Be more solutions and process-driven about how they are approaching things. Thinking about how they really leverage the tools and the people around them to drive business outcomes. And so, as we thought about what was happening in our business transformation, we had to think about what was required from a people standpoint and what were all the tools and skills and resources that we would need, to ensure people were enabled and supported to creating those outcomes. There are a number of things that we did to help support that. First, as I mentioned, starting with that culture transformation, really making it clear to Leaders what was expected from them, what are the values and the behaviours that are going to be required to lead in this moment. Then doing skills assessment to make sure that we were supporting individuals, both assessing what we had in the individuals and providing the resources that would allow Leaders to get the skills that they need, to drive our new business agenda. I think the last piece of it is thinking about that entire employee experience, as individuals are in BNY Mellon every day, how are we making it easy for work to get done, so that they can meet increasing demands and needs and expectations of our clients.
So I think to your point, aligning that people agenda to that business transformation agenda, really starts with a deep understanding of what is required in that moment and ensuring that your people strategy matches up against that as well.
David Green: And of course if you don't align the people strategy with the business transformation, it is not likely you are going to succeed with the business transformation, at the end of the day.
Jolen Anderson: A hundred percent, a hundred percent. As we know, that people initiative, that people agenda, it is the most important thing and I think we kept that in mind in that moment. It is funny that we were so focused, as I mentioned, during the pandemic that one of our principles was around operational resiliency and I think we came to learn that that concept of resiliency was required from a people perspective as well.
David Green: Yeah and actually I think we are going to talk about that now, actually. It would be great to go into some of the initiatives that you have highlighted, so that let's do that. Let's talk about employee wellbeing and resilience. Firstly, what do these terms mean to you? Why are they critical to address now? Apart from the obvious, obviously. What are you doing to address them?
Jolen Anderson: We talked about the concept of employee wellbeing and resiliency and it was always going to be central to our people agenda. We wanted to make sure that we were creating a space where culturally people felt like they could truly bring their best to work. That they felt that they were enabled to really be focused on the needs of our clients and the needs of our business. And in this moment, I think the concept of resiliency was highlighted more than ever and for me, the concept of resiliency is really a competency. It is really a skill that we need to think about ensuring that we both assess, but also support our Leaders for being able to demonstrate that skill in the future. One of the things that we always talk about is that change is constant, we know that, so how are we equipping our workforce to really manage and navigate that change? I think the experiences of the pandemic demonstrated to us that, more now than ever that personal resiliency, that ability to adapt and navigate through both challenges and change was going to be important and was THE skill, in fact I am claiming it as, THE skill of the future because it is what Leaders need in this moment to help ensure that they are enabling their workforce for success. If we think about resiliency as a competency, then we can get to good old fashioned HR, tried and true ways to build skill and competency in an organisation and we can think about all the interventions that we can put in place to help ensure that we are enabling that competency. Be it learning and development initiatives, be it engagement with our Managers, be it again, assessments and measuring how Leaders are thinking about resiliency, bringing digital tools to help ensure that we are supporting individuals in the moment.
We were able to really think about it in that way and bring all of those things to bear. So we did things around managing and remote workforces. We did things around assessing personal resiliency. We brought digital tools, where individuals could assess how they were feeling in that moment and giving them some real time interventions to help grow and address the stress that they might be feeling. We also thought about, what are the other tools that we could bring to place, that would help that resiliency. So if you think about again, the whole person, it is not just in that moment of, what do I need from a Manager and a Leadership perspective, but it is also thinking about what is happening in a personal environment. We are all in each other's homes today, we are all in this moment and connected together and now more than ever, that you saw this connection between work and home. So how could you ignore the needs of your employees in that moment. We had to also think about caregiver leave, we had to think about childcare opportunities, we had to think about virtual summer camps for individuals who may have been struggling to determine what they were doing with their kids when their childcare needs fell through. Again, we had to think about things like telemedicine, things that would help individuals assess their sleep, daytime interruptions to go take a break, take a stretch, take a walk, take a pause to just reclaim a bit of your time. All of those things were real solutions and tools that we had to bring in place to really grow this concept of resilience being a competency and then how are the interventions that you could design, from a HR ecosystem standpoint, to really help ensure individuals were enabled to grow that skill and that competency.
David Green: Yes as you said, it is one of the skills or competencies that has really come to the forefront in the last 12 months. We were talking before we started the recording that you have spoken recently with Arianna Huffington and Arianna and Donna Morris were on the podcast a few weeks ago and actually we talked about resiliency. We also talked about vulnerability and how it is so important that Leaders, number one, show vulnerability and show that they are vulnerable. It is actually not a weakness, it is actually a strength, particularly in situations where change is constant and we are dealing with things that maybe we haven't dealt with before, in our professional lives. The other thing that we talked about was the actually having Leaders setting an example around things like wellbeing as well. I don't know if you would like to say anything about those two areas?
Jolen Anderson: I could not agree with that more and as you mentioned, we also had a chance to speak with Arianna and share some of her thoughts with our workplace. I think she does such a great job of modelling that Leadership vulnerability. One of the things that we did at the time was, we wanted to create a connection for our employees to, in some way, say that we were all in this together. And to your point, everyone was experiencing challenges with navigating this environment. So we put together something that we call, The Working Together Pledge and it just said to Leaders that they were committing, in this moment, to share their experiences, to admit that they did not necessarily have it all figured out, to take time away from the video if they needed to, to check in on colleagues to see how they were doing. It was just an opportunity to say, listen, we are in this collective community together. We are all trying to navigate this and not everyone has it figured out. So how do we create these supportive environments where people feel comfortable, where they feel permission expressing that vulnerability. It is funny because it is that vulnerability, it is that expression of empathy, that is required from our Leaders today, so that people know in that moment that they can take a break and that it is okay, in some ways to not be okay. And that if you need to, raise your hand and ask for help, we have repeated that message throughout our organisation, from our CEO to our entire Executive Committee. Making sure that we are on this steady drum beat of messages to our organisation over and over and over and over again, repeating this message of, here are all the resources and the tools available to you, here are all the ways in which we are trying to role model the support that might be out there. Here is how we create that safe space for you, to raise your hand and access some of these tools and take advantage of the things that are being out there. Demonstrating that, Leaders themselves are role modelling that and having to express more comfort around the vulnerability that we are all feeling, about navigating this moment together.
David Green: As a Leader or as a Manager, it is a new experience in many respects. You are managing people virtually in zoom and clearly we need to be intentional about our employee wellbeing, but also think about Managers suddenly having to manage a completely remote team. Many have no experience of doing that before and if we don't help the Managers, then they can't help their people. So you have got to enable the Managers as well.
Jolen Anderson: I one hundred percent agree with that. And to your point, it isn't easy and in many ways, individuals are being challenged in ways that they have not been in the past.
As we have always talked about, particularly Managers are at the centre of that little bit of that pressure. There are more demands on them to deliver, to contribute to the organisation's bottom line, but also to lead in this moment, to pull the best out of their teams. And so how do we ensure that we are supporting our Managers through that? One of the things that we did was we have constant surveying, that we are doing to our organisation, to take a pulse on what may be happening on a particular team or with a particular Manager. There is data and analytics that we can use, to understand what might be happening in a team, whether or not a team is undergoing particular pressure or stress or maybe a Manager in crisis, in some ways.
So by using data and digital tools, to be able to pinpoint that, we can actually identify specific interventions that we can then have with that Manager to say, we noticed that this is a moment in which you may need help. Again, we want to make sure that you are aware of the resources that are available to you. If you need to phone a friend, someone from our HR hotline or from our HR tools who can help coach you through this moment, we want to provide that on-demand coaching for you because our data is telling you that your team is vulnerable right now to perhaps operational failures. Again, it gets back to our business. If teams aren't operating effectively, if they are not taking those moments to recharge, it is going to impact your business. So this is all a part of ensuring that we are, at the end of the day, delivering for our clients because we have to have healthy teams, healthy managers, able to operate in this moment, to really ensure that they have what they need to deliver business results. So it is very much all connected to the same moment.
David Green: I know we are going to talk a little bit more about the data and analytics part later, but certainly a lot of the big companies we have worked with at Insight222, there is more regular surveying going on, looking at other types of data as well. You can start to understand things about working hours, what hours are people working, how many meetings they are attending, how much gaps are they getting, how much focus time are they getting. Then those great insights and nudges that you can give to people around, for example, the importance of focus time and how that supports wellbeing, burnout and productivity, I guess as well. It is a fascinating topic. Another big crisis I would say of last year, and let's be honest it didn't just happen last year it has been going on forever, you will know this from your experience as you said at the start, that you have be working in diversity and inclusion for a long time. The urgency for organisations to address diversity and inclusion has arguably, never been stronger. The events of last year really brought that through. Let's talk a bit about that. What are some of the initiatives that you are focused on at the bank and how are they going? What results and outcomes have you seen so far?
Jolen Anderson: Great question and to your point, I very much also think about it as two pandemics, two big moments of 2020, that HR and workforces were challenged by. Definitively what we saw with COVID-19, but also the movement around social justice and equality and how D&I and equity being at the forefront of these conversations, was brought together more than ever in the workplaces. It was a moment for us, I think, to accelerate the transformation in many ways, as we have been previously talking about that the COVID-19 pandemic provided to us. Listen, to your point, D&I has been something that we have been focused on at BNY Mellon for some time and we are proud of the progress that we have been able to make. 40% of our new hires are women. 45% of our new hires come from diverse backgrounds. We have one of the most diverse boards on the street, out of our 12 board members, 3 are women and 4 represent diverse ethnicity backgrounds including three black directors. We have been focused around really ensuring that the work that we do around equality, that we kind of put our money where our mouth is. So we have been really focused on, from a philanthropy and from a skill-building perspective, thinking about how we do work in diverse communities. So while all of that was going on as a backdrop, I still think we, like many other companies, were challenged in the moment that we saw in mid 2020 around how do we support our workforce through this moment and what we wanted to do. It goes back to one of my things, it is always about competency because just like resiliency is a competency, I think inclusion is a competency too. I think it is a skill that Leaders can be held accountable for, that they can be supported to develop and that they can be assessed for, in order to think about what are those leadership qualities and profiles that are going to help get the best out of a workforce in the future. And inclusion has to be one of those.
So in the moment we thought about how can we create connections? How can we support our Managers? Making sure that they had the tools and the resources that they needed, to have conversations with their Employees, to express that vulnerability that we have been speaking about to sometimes say, I don't have all the answers but I am willing to learn, I am willing to demonstrate a growth mindset and to create a safe space for individuals on my team to have these dialogues about what different communities might be experiencing. So we went through a whole series of effort to first have some of those courageous conversations, again modelling it at the top. So it is a little bit of a formula, right, you think about what is the competency that you want to build? How do you model it from a Leadership perspective? How do you get the resources to your Manager? And then, how do you build scale tools and interventions that can then affect broader populations? While we thought about that from the pandemic and all of the things that we did around resiliency and COVID-19, we also thought about that with inclusion, with our own CEO and our own Executive team, we had those tough conversations.
We were able to talk about what the different experiences were across the Leadership team. We then pushed out that same model for our Managers to say, you now need to go do this with your teams. We gave Leaders some tips and trainings about how to have those conversations. And now we have built scaled solutions, that give our individuals a resource to access. Things like unconscious bias training, things like inclusion as a Leadership skill and competency. Things like, how to ensure that you can pursue your own learning path around being exposed to different diverse communities. So it became a real intentional effort to make sure that we are supporting our organisation through this moment. We also wanted to assess where we thought we had more work to do, as an organisation, because like everyone else it is never perfect and we have things that we need to still solve for. So we set goals for ourselves, to hold ourselves accountable, towards making progress in this space. We have set three year aspirations for where we want the diversity of our workforce to grow and to be.
But we are going to ensure that we are supporting that diversity of our workforce and representation, with how are we measuring our inclusive culture and the experience of how individuals are feeling about the ability to be welcomed in our environment, no matter the background and differences that you might bring to the table.
David Green: I haven't looked at the data, but I imagine that you have one of the most diverse boards in your industry. I hypothesise that it is probably “easier” to take the steps that you have taken, because you already have a diverse board so you have got those different experiences that you can bring to those Leadership conversations. That leads on quite nicely to the next question, which is what role did data analytics play throughout these initiatives? Or what role is data analytics playing in the three-year aspiration plan?
How are you measuring and tracking this?
Jolen Anderson: Data Analytics always has to play a part in any Leadership or any initiatives that you are going to bring to your organisation. Particularly something I know you can relate to and be passionate about, when you are trying to lead good people practices, it has to start with an understanding of your data and what is it telling you about the organisation and what might be required. As we pursued all the initiatives that we brought to bear, both from our transformation as well as the acceleration of using COVID and diversity and all these moments to accelerate the change. We have continuously used data to help both tell us where we need to design the interventions, but also what was working, what wasn't, how we could pivot, how we could be agile, what was the story and the impact that we were trying to have, for what we were bringing to bear. So I mentioned one example, which was staying close to our Workforce and our Managers and be able to say we have used a bunch of indicators to tell us that this is a team that requires an intervention. So we are going to go off and have specific conversations with that Manager so that we can do targeted solutions, that will really help ensure the individual is able to achieve what they want. We look at the diversity of our organisation to tell us what is happening in our pipeline, both from a recruiting standpoint, a promotion standpoint, a compensation standpoint. How can we look at those things to determine, are we getting the outcomes that we want? Are we ensuring that we are truly meeting the goals that we have set for ourselves? And if we have some indication that our promotion process is perhaps not as fair or equitable or driving the outcomes that we want, our recruiting practices aren't bringing the diversity of pipeline, that will then enable us to ensure that we are growing our representation. Where can we develop solutions to help create and close those gaps and ensure that we are aligning to our goals. So that becomes a second piece of data. We take something as tactical as on-boarding and we are also able to say, how does that impact engagement with our long-term employees? When we are looking at engagement, for example, we were able to look at data and say something as simple as making sure you have the right tools on day one, no surprise, can ensure that you have a more engaged worker right away. When we have closed the gap with either making a certain tool available or pushing out a certain solution, we have seen the engagement of that Employee grow. Those are real indicators that tell you the success of the story, it tells you your investments are worth it and that you are continuing to really, again as has been a theme through our conversation, supporting the underlying business goals. Because now you have Employees who are more effective, more engaged, delivering higher output and really helping support an organisation in the time when it is a most critical need.
David Green: Yeah. I love what you are saying there. I mean, I have loved pretty much all of what you have been saying throughout our conversation, but you have talked about the need for us as HR Leaders/HR Professionals, to understand the business strategy and to tie what we are trying to do on the people side to the business strategy. And then that lovely comment there about, if we want to achieve anything, we always need to bring data and analytics to the conversation. So yeah, that is definitely music to my ears and I am sure our listeners too. Jolen, unfortunately we are approaching the end of our discussion, I could happily carry on for a long time, but our Producer who always moans about me mentioning his name, will cut us off.
You have mentioned previously the importance of using the pandemic as a mandate for change and the intentionality that is required to sustain that change. Why is it so critical for Chief HR Officers to approach people transformation with intention right now? And how can they do this?
Jolen Anderson: I think that intentionality is another thing that is really important and that word is important. One of the things that I think was fortunate for BNY Mellon was that we were very clear that we were on a change and transformation journey. We were also clear what the people strategy would be required, to support us on that journey. And so, because of that clarity, because of that vision, we were able to use these acceleration moments to intentionally drive us down the path and the change that we knew would align with our future state. In other words, many of the changes that I mentioned with respect to wellbeing, the investments that we made in mental health, the investments that we made in our healthcare plan, we didn't just do that for COVID, we did that on a permanent basis. We made sure that those were embedded in the ways in which we would be supporting our Employees on an ongoing basis, the ways in which we have pivoted and responded to D&I, again, it wasn't accidental. It was accelerated, it was sort of three years of work in a 12 month period, but it was change that we knew was going to be required anyway, it was priorities that we were required to set for the organisation, anyway. So all the things that we have done, they haven't just been for that moment or in response to something that we were seeing, they took us further on the journey that we were already undergoing and became permanent parts of the culture that we are trying to establish in the organisation, on a go-forward basis.
So I think if you don't have that intentionality, if you don't have that clarity of vision and strategy, if you don't understand that business connection and what is going to be required from a people perspective, you are going to be much more responsive, much more reactive and you can't be as sure about the changes that you are making today.
And listen, we don't all have it figured out. As we talked about, change is constant, so we don't have all the facts today. We are going to have to figure out something new and pivot, but if you have those principles, if you have that foundation of, this is what is important to our organisation, these are our values, these are the culture that we are trying to bring. As you are facing those changes, as you are making those decisions, you have this consistent thing to come back to, that allows you to be very intentional in the strategies and the solutions that you embed and that you approach.
While we haven't had all the facts and while we have, like many, still been navigating what is the future of work? When are we going to be ready to come back to the office? Is social distance required yes or no? Are people going to have to wear masks? All of those things are things that we don't have answers to, but we are clear that we want to create a culture where Employees are prioritised, where well being is important, where inclusion is part of who we are, where passion is at our core, where client excellence is at our core, where having the courage to lead is at our core and being clear on those things, allows us to then embed solutions that support them and really can sustain our organisation for the long term.
David Green: I love what you said there, all the work that you have been doing at the bank and other organisations have been doing, the focus on the Employee wellbeing and putting the Employee at the centre, it is not temporary, it is there hopefully for good now. We will start to see the benefit of that in our business results as well. But it is still that, change is constant, that uncertainty that you talked about around, when do we go back to the workplace? Because let's be honest people call it “return to work” but no no we have still been working, we are probably working harder than we have ever worked. But when we can actually go back to the workplace, what does that mean in terms of social distancing? What does that mean in terms of what the office is going to used for, is it going to be used for more innovative and collaborative work and we are going to do the individual stuff more from home, who knows? There is not one answer is there, it depends on the organisation, it depends in many respects on the Employee themselves as well. So really interesting stuff.
As we move to the final question now, we are asking everyone this question on the series and maybe it is very resonant with what we have talked about throughout, really.
Many companies have done away with their annual performance management cycle over the last few years, but we haven't really seen a new, consistent, model replace it as quickly as everyone expected. How do you think companies should approach performance management in the future? Maybe is it something that you are looking at as part of your transformation process?
Jolen Anderson: It is a great question. Performance Management, what the best system should be, has been one of those age old HR debates and we have seen lots of shifts over time of what is best in class. Moving from either no ratings to distributed guidelines, to lots of different things in between.
But I think one of the things that is constant in the way that we are thinking about it, as we reshape this for the future for us, because it is something that we are undertaking right now is, how do we shift the focus to really be one on people rather than just metrics. How do we ensure that at the end of the day, people are getting the information they need to both assess their performance against the goals that have been established, but also think about their own development. Those have to be real conversations that are based on feedback, which is another thing that we are trying to enable and create is ensuring that there is lots of open mechanisms for feedback. That development is prioritised in that conversation and again, there are clear business goals. I think, any performance management conversation has to start with the goals that you set at the beginning and I don't think there has always been enough focus upstream, we kind of get to the end and we want to assess individuals against what they accomplished but without being clear on what we asked them to do in the first instance.
So I think, we are spending a lot more time speaking with our organisation about, what does goal setting mean? How do you set clear goals? How do you measure that? Making sure that feedback is a clear part of that and creating lots of open mechanisms where individuals can get that 360 view of measuring their performance and then also saying, this is not just about an assessment, but it is also about development, so what is next for you? Those have to be the three components of any good performance management system, in our point of view and the design that we are pursuing are ones that are going to allow us to prioritise each of those things.
David Green: And as you said, it is linking that performance against clear business goals, development and then maybe also mobility as well. So it is bringing some of these traditional siloed HR programs together, looking at it across.
Jolen Anderson: Exactly, but no easy feat for sure. I think it is something we will continue to develop and be agile around and make sure that we have best practices where we can and continue to learn from each other in the industry. Because that is what we do, as you started from the beginning, change is constant and this will be another one we will have to adapt depending upon what the needs of our organisation may be in the future.
David Green: I have really, thoroughly, enjoyed this conversation and it is great that it is on the day that your kids are finally going back to school as well. So that is something to remember it by.
Jolen Anderson: That is correct, I have appreciated the focus time, normally I would hear some child ready to run through at any given moment. I would hear steps along from the roof, with my kids running across the floor so it has almost been a little bit of a shift, to be able to focus a hundred percent on this conversation and share this time with you and your listeners as we continue to navigate this time that we are all in. It is constant and it is changing, but it is really great to take the moment to have this dialogue.
David Green: Thank you very much, Jolen. Last question, how can people stay in touch with you and follow you on social media?
Jolen Anderson: I am active on LinkedIn, so please let me know. I would love to get a personal connection from anyone who would like to stay in touch. I really enjoy engaging with individuals who may share best practices, tips and ideas. I also like really sharing content, things that I am seeing in the industry, things that I am learning through my space. So please find me on LinkedIn, I would love to be connected.
David Green: Well, Jolen, It has been wonderful to talk to you and thank you very much for your time and sharing the brilliant work that you and the team are doing at BNY Mellon with our listeners.
Jolen Anderson: Thank you, it’s really great to be here. I have very much enjoyed the conversation. Appreciate you making the time.