Episode 205: Digitising HR for 55,000 Employees: Lessons from Standard Bank (Interview with Sharon Taylor & Jaco Van Vuuren)
What does it take to lead one of Africa's largest banks through a transformative HR journey, affecting 55,000 employees across 28 countries?
In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, Sharon Taylor, Chief People and Culture Officer, and Jaco van Vuuren, Chief Operating Officer for Human Capital at Standard Bank Group, reveal the behind-the-scenes journey that’s reshaping how Africa’s largest bank manages its people and drives business success.
Hosted by David Green, this episode dives into how Standard Bank has leveraged digitisation, AI, and people analytics to enhance employee experience, streamline operations, and empower leadership with real-time data insights.
Key topics covered include:
The evolution of HR from support function to strategic business partner
The challenges and rewards of digitising HR for a global workforce
How centralised data and workforce analytics are driving pay equity, enhancing ESG reporting, and improving decision-making
The importance of ethical AI use in shaping the future of HR
This episode is packed with insights for HR leaders navigating digital transformation.
We would also like to take the opportunity to say thank you to Visier for sponsoring this series of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Visier is the people analytics platform for successful HR teams, bridging the gap between HR productivity and business performance, giving managers the insights they need to lead effectively. Learn more at visier.com.
Links to More Resources:
[0:00:00] David Green: Hi, I'm David Green, and welcome to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. As well as hosting this podcast and the work I do at Insight222, I'm also fortunate to speak at events around the world. One of these is UNLEASH World, where I've had the privilege of being MC of the main stage for a number of years. Indeed, I'll be performing this role again in a couple of weeks when 5,000 HR, People Analytics and HR tech professionals will gather in Paris on 16 and 17 October. At last year's UNLEASH World show, I had the pleasure of seeing Sharon Taylor speak about the HR transformation journey at Africa's largest bank, Standard Bank, which operates in 28 countries and has 55,000 employees. Sharon explained how the bank had consolidated over 80 systems into 10, and now had a single source of truth when it came to people data. It was one of the most impressive HR transformation journeys I'd ever heard, so we had to get Sharon onto the podcast. As such, I'm delighted that in this episode, Sharon, who is a Chief People and Culture Officer, is joined by Jaco Van Vuuren, Chief Operating Officer for Human Capital, as they provide a comprehensive overview of the HR transformation journey at Standard Bank.
In our conversation, we discussed the initial drivers behind the transformation, how Standard Bank overcame operational challenges in consolidating their data across 28 countries, the value of a single source of truth for HR data, and the key benefits they've seen as a result of these efforts. Sharon and Jaco also provide insights into how they've maintained data integrity across such a large, distributed organisation, and share their vision for the future of HR at Standard Bank. So without further ado, let's hear from Sharon and Jaco.
Before we get started, please can you share a little bit about your backgrounds, your roles and Standard Bank; and, Sharon, I'll start with you.
[0:02:12] Sharon Taylor: Yeah, thanks so much and thanks so much for having us. It's a real privilege to be with you today. Maybe let's start with the Standard Bank Group and then I'll move on to myself. The Standard Bank Group is what we would call 162 years young this year and it's got a very strong purpose. Africa is our home, we drive her growth. Standard Bank is Africa's largest bank by assets and it operates in over 20 countries on the continent as well as five other global financial centres. It's quite a diversified group, it offers a range of services across different client segments, and the size of the workforce that we're dealing with is just over 55,000, representing 81 different nationalities. We've recently been very proud to be named as the Best Bank in Africa and South Africa by Euromoney, and are also very proud, closer to home in the People and Culture space, to be named by Forbes as one of the world's best employers in 2023.
Moving closer to my role, I'm the Group's Chief People and Culture Officer, and this is a role I've held now for just over ten years. My background and qualifications are an interesting mix of business strategy, finance and psychology, and I've always found financial services to offer a brilliant mandate for the work we do on the people side, which is why I've been with this business for just over 33 years.
[0:03:31] Jaco Van Vuuren: Thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit of our Standard Bank story. I think Sharon gave a good overview of Standard Bank and where we're coming from. So, I'm just going to get straight into it. I'm the Chief Operating Officer for our People and Culture business. And in essence, the role is about how do we enable the People and Culture strategy by digitising an employee experience for 45,000, 50,000 employees across 28 countries; how do we generate the right insights out of that digitalisation journey that we are on; and how do we, on a day-to-day basis, service these employees in a good and comfortable way?
I've got a little bit of a double-edged role, where I'm also the CIO for our People and Culture organisation which makes decision making a little bit easier between business and IT, which I know has always been a challenge in the past. I've had the pleasure of being in this role for almost probably a good seven-odd years, but being with the Standard Bank organisation now for quite a while, since the start of our digitalisation journey in early 2000. So, I've been with the organisation for about 20 years now.
[0:04:42] David Green: Well, thank you both for being on the show. And before we get into the transformation journey at Standard Bank, Sharon, I'd love you to talk really to listeners about what you've seen as the main changes maybe in the HR or People and Culture space over the last ten years, from your perspective, as someone that leads that function.
[0:05:02] Sharon Taylor: David, thank you. I would absolutely agree with your observation. If I think about what I was busy with when I came into this role ten years ago and what I'm busy with now, it's actually very different. If I look over that time period, I think your observations were spot on, in that for people and functions that are willing and able to step into it, I think the role of HR, as it was traditionally called, is probably one of the most exciting jobs you can be in, in an organisation today. When I started, it'll give away my age a little bit, but when I was studying, it was still called Personnel Management. So, that's really when you were dealing with very basic transactional processes, and actually you were lucky if your organisation trusted you with the payroll, because typically the more finance-related functions of HR sat with the finance division. People didn't really trust that HR could do maths.
So, it really has been an evolution over time, where this wasn't really a career actually. It was a place where many people kind of went and did more administrative tasks. It then moved on to almost more people who were interested in the social side of the business, so very much kind of focused on what we would almost fondly refer to as the Tea and Tissue Brigade, you know, HR is a place you came for counselling or advice or help on many of the softer things. And I don't think that any of those roles have necessarily gone away, it's just been built on over time. Now, if you're in People and Culture, and it's certainly one of the things that I insist on in terms of people that join my team, you need to come with a delicate balance of the social sciences and understanding behaviour, behavioural economics, the social pieces, and understanding the essence of human behaviour.
But we marry that very much with, when you work in a bank like we do, you've got to understand the commercial side of the business. And I think it's probably one of the reasons I've never left financial services. I think we are fortunate in the leadership with it we have. And I think much of what HR can achieve comes down to leadership, David. It's what mandates is this function given by leaders? Because we don't lead people in the organisation, leaders do. But then they need to be open to partnering a function such as ourselves, which goes way beyond the basics now and can add real commercial value.
I think there's a very important trio of people that advise any Chief Executive Officer nowadays. The one is the CFO, the one is the CHRO, and the third often is the Chief Strategy Officer. Because together they really are looking at where is the firm going ten years into the future, and do you have the resources, both capital and people, to deliver against that? And if I just reflect on my own role, ten years ago when I came in, I was fixing what I would call broken basics. And ten years on, I mean the last five years in and of itself, we have dealt with three major operating model pivots as an organisation; we've kept a 55,000 person workforce safe in COVID, a black swan event that none of us had a playbook for navigating; and so, I've been very interested to watch this evolution of the great resignation, people talking about toxic culture. All of this has come to the fore in understanding whether firms really value their people or not.
So, in a nutshell, if I look at the work we're busy with now, which is as I say, operating model change, what I would call working on the skeleton of the business; how's it set up properly to compete, we've just done an integration of one of the big insurers that we were a large shareholder in; succession planning, one of the key factors of organisational sustainability long term has got to be one of the biggest issues HR professionals are kind of really applying their minds to. And the whole question of if you're working on the skeleton, which is the structure, what about the nervous system, which is all the behaviours that keep an organisation functioning, the culture that needs to be healthy that allows people to work at their best?
[0:09:15] David Green: Thank you, Sharon, I mean it's really good to hear your view again on how HR has shifted and why HR is needed to shift as well in the context of Standard Bank. Now, listeners may know, I mean as well as being the host of this podcast and work I do at Insight222, I'm also fortunate to speak at conferences around the world, and I've hosted the UNLEASH Conference on the main stage for I think the last four years and will be doing so again in a couple of weeks in Paris. And last year, I had the pleasure of seeing Sharon on the main stage at UNLEASH. And, Sharon, you probably remember, you spoke about the HR transformation journey at Standard Bank and I was super, super-impressed, because just like you've just done in the last answer there, you really tied it to what the business was doing, number one, and I think you articulated so well how technology is the key to employee experience.
So, maybe for the benefit of listeners who weren't in Paris, can you give us an overview of the HR transformation journey at Standard Bank? What were the initial drivers for embarking on this transformation, for example?
[0:10:24] Sharon Taylor: Yeah, of course, David, thank you. And I mean, I speak for both Jaco and myself, we have very fond memories of our time in Paris last year, lots of it which had to do with UNLEASH, lots of it also had to do with South Africa winning the Rugby World Cup! We were privileged enough to see South Africa knock France out in the quarterfinal. We were the least popular people at UNLEASH, as you can imagine, as a result of that. Thank you for your reflection about how impressed you were by our story. I must say that before we were invited to speak at UNLEASH, we probably didn't realise how rare it was for companies to achieve what we have over the course of our journey. Being where we are in the world, we kind of think, "Well, the northern hemisphere's got to be doing stuff that is bigger and better than what we're focusing on", and we tend to do things not outward-looking, looking at best practice. We kind of start with what does the bank need and what does this group of companies need, and then we build on that. So, it was actually quite humbling to come to UNLEASH and have so many people approach us to say, gosh, the level of integration that we've achieved at a global scale is not something many have done. But as I say, that was a new reflection for us.
So, maybe just to give you a sense of the journey and where we started, I would start by saying to your listeners, this is not an overnight success, by any stretch of the imagination, and Jaco will back that up. I've been in my role, as I say, for ten years now. I came from the Investment Banking division of Standard Bank. So, that's much smaller. And so, coming into Group, I think one of the biggest challenges I had to navigate initially was this shift in getting excellence right, but getting it right at scale. Because in an investment bank, you're very focused on the people. They make the difference to your business, particularly your rainmakers. But I found that that rigor and that excellence in people focus wasn't necessarily there across the entire group. But getting something right for 3,000, which is what the investment bank would have been at the time, to scaling that massively was, as I say, my first big challenge.
I've spoken about the profound ability I think HR has to make a difference to the business if you get it right. But my reflection, David, is that if you come in and you're battling to get the basics right, your strategic advice isn't going to be taken seriously. So, I remember in one or two of my first meetings in my new role, I was being asked to present really crucial data to the group EXCO that was ultimately going to the board, and I was finding errors in that data all over the place.
[0:13:26] David Green: Jaco, turning to you now a little bit on this, I'd love to hear from an operational perspective, what were the main challenges you faced in consolidating these processes and systems, which weren't necessarily globally, deployed across these 80 systems, across 28 countries, across 50,000, 55,000 people as well.
[0:14:32] Jaco Van Vuuren: I think you can imagine getting multiple stakeholders across 28 jurisdictions that actually believes that the way they're doing things today or yesterday is actually the best way of doing it, to get them all to agree to one of our principles, "One thing once", and do that in a very consistent way, was most probably one the biggest consulting job, and this was the piece that we had to do way up front. We actually didn't make technology decisions, we actually started off with process consolidation. That, for us, was understanding that to book leave in 27 different ways is impossible. You either book leave or you don't book leave, so it's one process. But believe you me, there's multiple ways that people do think about it. And so, from the most simple process all the way through to really complex processes, we really went into deep consultation.
I think parts that made us successful here was executive buy-in. So, one of those things that if you, at scale, want to shift the organisation to think differently about their efficiency, how we do things and how we create a better employee experience for everybody, all employees inside Standard Bank, irrespective of the jurisdiction or country you operate in, then you need that strong executive buy-in. And that executive buy-in, it does not just sit with your senior CEO or central group functions, that actually sits in country as well. So, we spent a lot of time talking to our country Chief Executives and their senior leadership groupings, making sure that everybody's on the same page and create the right context. I do think we also ran quite a big and very structured project approach, but most probably the piece that brought us to the right end game on process consolidation was a good set of principles.
I started to mention one or two of them, "One thing once", we just can't duplicate. So, one process and therefore translates into, can only do it in one system, and that one process and system are deployed globally. And the only way to do that is to actually do these things in the cloud. And we've had a very strong software as a service strategy in saying, "It's not just about the underlying process, but also the tech and it must work". And what you can't do is build these big underlying technology teams. And so, I think what we've achieved, consistent employee experience, one thing once, we've had a very strong challenge on saying, "Can you digitise? Can you automate this process? If it can't be automated through core applications, can you automate it through a little app on the side?" So, strong focus on digitisation. And then for what outcome? And that is, "Can we create a single view of an employee? Can we bring our data into one place?" And that was such a big part of outcome objectives for us as part of this journey.
So, we effectively halved the number of processes we ran for employees right across the organisation. We brought our 80 applications down to less than 10 core applications that we run the whole Standard Bank Group on in a consistent way on a day-to-day basis.
[0:18:04] David Green: You mentioned some of the benefits, how have you measured success?
[0:18:08] Jaco Van Vuuren: That is most probably the holy grail. So, how do you look at success? I do think one of the lessons learned is, if you're going down a journey and you want to measure success right at the end, then you need to baseline yourself right at the beginning. We didn't necessarily spend too much time doing the baselining, but we did track on what we have and so therefore what we're saving and/or creating efficiencies on. So I think in consolidating process, you immediately have the ability to consolidate system. So, for us, very clear, we took 20 payrolls and made it one payroll and one set of infrastructure. You just save overnight by doing that. If you consolidate payroll and you run that payroll centrally, we've saved round about 50 jobs in country of not needing to run the payroll in country, but you've actually centralised that as one payroll team for the organisation.
We've had 11 learning applications right across the stack that we consolidated into one, and you can just imagine the immediate overnight saving. And so, you would get a whole lot of countries being very excited about the saving in country, and yes, you incur the cost therefore centrally. But as an organisation, for us very clear that those were some of the really big -- so I'm just mentioning one or two of the really big ones. For us, bringing our data into one place has most probably been our biggest win, because it's not just about the centralised system, one process; but if you have quality data and you can actually start using that data in different ways, it's most probably one of the biggest benefits.
One thing about our journey is that it's a little bit of a maturity journey and every level of maturity, you need to re-challenge yourself on what's important at that level of maturity. So, I think the last part is, the moment you've got all of these centralised applications, you can actually make them all talk to each other. And so, that for us was such a big win that we could get out of doing point-to-point or data provisioning into different systems in a manual way, and that we could actually automate a lot of that. So, it really took us to a place of, whatever happens this morning is live and visible in any of our software as a service of cloud and or/insights.
[0:20:42] David Green: So, Sharon, turning to you, how has this single source of truth, this single source of data, helped your People and Culture team, and you as Chief People Officer, add value to the business beyond just providing numbers?
[0:21:47] Sharon Taylor: The value that it's added has been exponential. And I remember when we started the journey, a lot of the providers we were speaking to were talking to us about how your ultimate experience, if you get this right, is really like shining a light on your information. All businesses are being pushed. There's this lovely saying, "Data is the new oil", and so many businesses are being pushed to monetise data. So, we were really looking to see what value we could get out of it. So, maybe I'll answer your question in two ways by giving you a sense of how it's changed roles, but then also some of the tangible examples of the benefit we've got.
Interestingly, productivity is such an elusive thing, isn't it? Everyone's kind of after the holy grail of how do you really think about productivity. And funnily enough, one of the things that we've been able to see in putting this tech stack in and in working with the data, it gives many, many people the gift of time. So, what you're able to take out is what I would call heavy listing, as well as loads of time spent. You heard me call people spreadsheet jockeys at one stage. Instead of spending your time doing that, you can really spend your time on the meaningful work associated with data, rather than the crunching out of data in and of itself. So, there's a benefit there for me which is really, really around gift of time. And we've put the insights into the hands of leaders, which for me has just exponentially grown the level of ownership that we've seen leaders take for their people-related issues in the organisation.
We've seen exponential growth in people's curiosity around the elements of people in the business. And Jaco has spoken about how when you get this right, you're able to overlay different data sets. And so now, you can start looking at cause and effect and all sorts of different things. But just last year, we saw about 4,000 new types of analysis generated by curious people in relation to, "What is the data telling us about the things that we need to be thinking about in the people space?" So, it's been exponential in getting people to ask very different business-related questions that have a people angle, and trying to understand and grapple with those answers.
Two very visible examples where we've been able to shift the dial that I'm happy to share, one is on pay equity. Now around the world, pay equity has become an enormously hot topic, and Standard Bank I think has always held the principle of equal pay for work of equal value at its heart. But again, without the data and without understanding what's driving some of the decision-making, particularly in your big remuneration processes, you don't have the ability to influence decisions that are being made as they're being made. You look at them after the fact and you reflect back and it's a while before you can influence. And really through the journey that we've walked, we've been able to achieve pay equity in Standard Bank over a period of time. And all our public reporting tells shareholders and other interested parties that we have, through our analysis, no obvious signs of pay discrimination in the organisation across any of our environments. But I think the data has given us the insight, both to uncover whether there was unconscious bias, but much more importantly, figure out what is it that you're going to do about it.
The other example I would quote is on ESG. And obviously, all companies are focusing on sustainability, where they sit, for example, in ESG rankings, and Standard Bank has always done a good job of -- we're part of many indices, Dow Jones, Bloomberg, we participate in all of those. But I think, David, we saw an exponential difference in the data and the storytelling we were able to do for these big ratings agencies. Just by having as much data as we did, we were able to shed light on questions that we previously hadn't been able to answer. And I know in the last reporting cycle, the group's entire shift on social dimensions that were measured came from the people data and the different aspects that we were able to add value to and the stories we were able to tell. And that got Standard Bank rated in the top 10% of companies that were being indexed on sustainability. Now that's purely as a result of working hard, as Jaco said, on data, data governance, data accuracy, but then being able to use your data. And we can use it now at an individual level for leaders, and at an organisational level for organisational benefits. So, it's really been an incredible story.
[0:26:58] David Green: So, this brings me to the question around data integrity. Could you elaborate on how you handle that continuous investment in data integration and management to ensure that data integrity and support the enterprise data strategy?
[0:27:15] Jaco Van Vuuren: That's a very good question, David, and we find the same. Your HR data, your people data, are most probably the most used across organisation. And so, we go out from the first principle of saying, employee data is not HR data's ownership. It's not our people-and-culture-only data. It's actually data we are the custodians of in order to enable the organisation. So first principle, and I think that's quite an important principle for us. But with that responsibility of custodianship comes a few things that says, "As you bring this sensitive data into one place, can you make sure that it's secure? Can you make sure that the quality of it is at the right level?" And I do think the fact that it is sitting in one place for us is most probably making it easier to bring all the security together, giving the right people access to the right sets of data. And that is a real big challenge for, I think, quite a number of organisations out there.
I've got a dedicated person that actually looks only after access and security across this quite sensitive data set. So, the right people see the right stuff, but we make sure that it's secured in the right way. It's such an important and critical piece for us. We do hold our partners, Visier, and every one of the other software-as-a-service partners that we work with, accountable for their accountability in security and data security. So, there we are quite firm and we're having those conversations with them on a regular basis. But I do think the centralised approach makes it a whole lot easier to manage your security and confidentiality in the right way.
I think the integration part of your question is a very interesting one, because if you start thinking about, and Sharon mentioned it, best of breed versus best of suite, the strategy that I call best fit for Standard Bank, so we're not necessarily going to the best of, but what fits our process the best does bring an integration question to the fore. And the integration has been costing us a lot, especially if you do that manually, if you do it with teams of people sitting around, it'll cost you a lot of money. What we have done is that, yeah, we've again partnered with a cloud provider to, as software as a service, run our integration, especially between our People and Culture services and applications. And there, we've seen huge benefits in cost, even halving our costs for integration, but also creating visibility around it. So, I think there's a lot of really, especially in the People and Culture HR world, there's a lot of these providers that's actually specialising in this, and it's not necessarily something you need to do permanently yourself. So, we've had a very strong, again, software-as-a-service approach here where we've got a partner that actually helps us to do this.
The big challenge that I do think we faced a while ago, and we're solving this with our integration partner, Flexspring, is everybody wants data from People and Culture, from HR, and then we need to build it. We need to do the heavy lifting and putting the data together, passing it on, giving it to other people. So, we've changed that strategy dramatically where we're actually putting the data down and giving the right people any request of data, the API, which says, "You come and fetch the data". And therefore, you do the heavy lifting once, you do it on a daily basis, and we're actually passing on what we would call that big teams of people that need to sit down and build integrations. You give them the freedom to actually look at the right APIs. And through that, we actually manage and govern a lot of access to People and Culture data right across the organisation. So, it's quite a good outcome for us, and we're in the last throes of that journey as we speak.
[0:31:43] David Green: So, let's start with the HR transformation itself or People and Culture transformation, as I should probably call it. Where do you think that People and Culture transformation is going to go next, or where is it going next?
[0:31:55] Sharon Taylor: David, I mean I think that particularly when we look globally, we can see that we are actually quite a sophisticated environment. But I think the biggest test for me is whether that's fit for purpose for the organisation. So, we'll always continue to use that as our guiding light. Are things going to continue to transform? Yes, of course they will. If I look at what I think the next big frontiers are, there's one on the tech horizon which everybody's concerned about, which is obviously the impact of artificial intelligence. Now, what is interesting is, as Standard Bank Group, we've chosen not to be at the cutting edge or the bleeding edge of AI experimentation, but that doesn't mean that we're not very focused on it. And I think our biggest use, or our biggest challenge in fact is ethical use of artificial intelligence. It's not that you aren't going to use it, it's a question of how do you use it and where do you use it. And in a financial services institution, integrity and high standards of ethical behaviour are right at the core of what you do, because if you lose trust, I would argue, of your customers or your employees, it's in my mind game over. So, you need to think really very carefully about this.
I think one of the complexities that we face is, the AI that we're consuming or trying to benefit from is actually built into the software as a service that we're leveraging. So, we've got to work very closely with our partners to understand that, because if you've got a partner whose AI application is giving you an unintended outcome, the reputational consequence of that is for you to deal. You're not going to be able to say, "Well, look, this is a third-party partner or provider and it's embedded in somebody else's technology". So, that's going to be a frontier, I think, that we have to think about. AI will bring different challenges as we think about how a workforce evolves, and the kinds of skills that are needed. So, beyond just the People and Culture or HR domain, the next wave of technological advancement, I think, is going to challenge our thinking about work and what work is.
I'm always fascinated that most people's reaction to this type of change is one of fear versus one of opportunity, thinking beyond the process. I think what many HR people do really well, and I see it when I interview people to come into Standard Bank, is you've got people that do HR process very well, whether that's a business partner or a centre of excellence. And I think going forward, the roles of the real proper practitioners in the future are going to be linked to whether the people strategy aligns to business and really how you are maximising the commercial elements of that, and then quite frankly, whether you're creating an environment that brings out the best in your people. And that's deeply about understanding human behaviour. Clearly, you must have all the processes in the background, but the processes, you know, where at one stage the payroll was the table stake and the processes were the kind of up the curve challenge, I think most of your stock standard HR processes now are very much the ticket to the game. And it's this enhanced kind of layer of value add that I think will come. My business partners already are key advisors to their Chief Executives, as am I to the Group's Chief Executives, so I think we're well entrenched down that road. And I think more and more, my senior people will be focusing on the elements that drive long-term sustainability in the business.
[0:36:15] David Green: We've touched a little bit on this today, both you and Jaco have, so it might give you an opportunity to either share a different example or maybe summarise some of the things that you've already said. How can workforce analytics or people analytics enhance HR decision making and drive business success?
[0:36:35] Sharon Taylor: One of the biggest things that I think people have to get clear in their minds is what's rearview mirror versus what's forward-looking. So, a lot of HR data is what I would call rearview mirror; it's what happened yesterday, and it's interesting and it's important to know. But the question you're asking in my mind, which is about analytics, takes you into how can you use the data that you have today? Of course, it must be rich and accurate, so that's a starting point. Otherwise, you're into the garbage in/garbage out scenario that maybe we found ourselves in ten years ago. But analytics really adds value if you can start connecting things, if you can start getting predictive and using the data to give you a sense of trends and how those trends are going to shape decisions that you make into the future. And you might not always be right, because clearly there's some assumptions that underlie that, and often what you're doing in predictive data or predictive analytics is you're making the assumption that your past trends will continue into future. So, you sometimes get it wrong, but it allows you to paint a picture and deal with a trend over time, where lots of backward-looking data just gives you a sense of kind of what were you solving for yesterday. So, that's the one piece.
I think the second piece for me is that it really helps you move from what I would call an obsession with symptoms to an obsession with root causes. Because Jaco's told the story of how you can overlay different data sets. If you get this right and your analytics are strong enough, you can start seeing connections between things or you can start investigating connections between things. And so, you can start asking yourself very different questions around why you're seeing certain outcomes you're seeing, and then try and track back to what actually is causing that. And if you get to the answer of what's causing that, you can clearly do something different. Now, that might be in something that's manifesting in business, but it also might be in the way you run your own environment.
An example that I'm sure Jaco would give is that, in our shared services environment, we take a tremendous number of calls. So, if you can understand what are those calls coming in for, what really is at the heart of what people are asking, you might find you've got a broken process somewhere or you've got something that's not working optimally, and then you can go and fix that and you're going to take out that core volume. So, I think there are multiple layers of impact that you can have in the way you function as an HR function, but ultimately on the way you show up as a business.
We were doing an interesting piece of work. One of our partners is MIT. We were working with them at some point on the bank's digitisation journey. And we started to experiment with the correlation between employee engagement and branch-level productivity, if you like. So, we were looking at our retail branches and we were quite easily able to correlate branch profitability with a couple of key things. And we found something very interesting, that we measure employee engagement. So again, this is a question of what you measure, but we do do quite a strong measure of our environment and employee engagement. And we were able to see quite clearly that there was a direct positive correlation between branches that had high levels of employee engagement and had good spend on core upskilling of their branch staff, so investment in people and branch profitability.
Productivity, in my mind, I touched on it earlier, but everyone's trying to measure productivity and say, "How do you think about productivity in the modern world?" Lots of that's linked to hybrid ways of working and what is the best balance to find now in hybrid. And there's been a very interesting argument, I would say, between CFOs and CHROs around the impact of hybrid working on productivity and whether visibility in the office is at all linked or directly correlated to staff producing outcomes. So, I think that's a very interesting dilemma to try and solve. But the more you get access to data like this, the more you can start applying your mind to what is real productivity versus presenteeism, because most people are obsessed with activity rather than outcome. So, I think that's another big benefit that it gives you.
Then for me personally, if I look at the work that I'm doing with our Chief Executive, with our CFO and our Chief Strategy Officer, we're working with the board now on the strategy to 2030 and beyond.
[0:41:34] David Green: Sharon, thank you so much. You've had one of the most compelling arguments for companies to invest in people analytics. Before we part, can you both share how people can find you on social media and maybe find out more about the great work that you're doing? So, Jaco, I'll start with you.
[0:41:51] Jaco Van Vuuren: Cool. Perfect, David. Firstly, thank you for the opportunity. It was lovely having this conversation. We don't often sit back and reflect on long journeys that have gone over so many years. And so, I think just having this conversation does take you back a little bit in thinking about the journey that we've walked and some of the maturity and where we're at. So, the devil here sits in the details. So, we don't publish our journey anywhere on our websites. So, people are so welcome to reach out. I think LinkedIn is most probably the easiest way of getting hold of me. And then, Standard Bank Directory onto the Standard Bank website. Reach out, more than welcome, and this is really in the conversation. We are keen to share but we are also keen to learn. So, people are so welcome to reach out and have the right conversations. Thank you, David.
[0:42:47] David Green: Thank you, Jaco. And Sharon, similarly, I guess probably people can get in touch with you on LinkedIn?
[0:42:52] Sharon Taylor: Yeah, David, it's the easiest place to find us. To Jaco's point, Standard Bank actually just culturally is an environment of humility, so we don't seek a public stage. So, as Jaco says, you won't find our stuff out there. People can find me on LinkedIn. Some of our biggest ability has been through connecting with others, so we're very happy to share our story. Our story is right for us, it might not be right for others, and so that's also what I'm conscious of. To Jaco's point, we don't always get everything right either, so we are on a learning journey constantly. We prefer to engage. We're very happy to help environments. We've had the privilege of other environments helping us, and we're very comfortable to get into dialogue around that. That's probably the best way for us to engage.
[0:43:47] David Green: Well, Jaco, Sharon, thank you so much for sharing the story with listeners of the Digital HR Leaders podcast today. I know that our listeners will be able to take a lot away from the conversation, and yes, you're right, every organisation has different challenges and different objectives, but I think what you shared today, a lot of companies would love to be able to connect people and business as well as you're doing at Standard Bank. So, thank you very much.
[0:44:14] Sharon Taylor: Thanks for having us.