Sarah Sambidge

Hello everyone, and welcome to "And the Ways of Working Award Goes To..." I'm Sarah Sambidge, the Ways of Working Enablement Engagement Lead at Nationwide Building Society, and I'm joined today by Zsolt Berend and Paul Blackler, two of Nationwide's enablement specialists.

Hello.

Hello.

We're the UK's largest building society with more than 16 million members, and we take mutuality very seriously. We hold our reputation very dear and are always looking for ways to make our mutual voice heard way beyond our day-to-day business.

We aim to put members at the heart of every decision we make, and you can see that in our most recent interim results last September, we were voted Which Banking Brand of the Year for the fourth year running, and we were accountable for being the first choice for one in six new mortgages in the UK.

But we know that member expectations are always increasing, and in a year like no other, we need to understand and be ready to meet the changing needs of our members more than ever.

Last year, we set up a Ways of Working Enablement Centre as part of our response to helping to create a more agile environment and to help support our operating model of pivoting to long-lived cross-functional teams.

In fact, if you were at DOES 2020, you may well have seen Patrick Eldridge, our chief operating officer, talking about the opportunities facing us and the chance to simplify not only our processes to help achieve our outcomes and strategic objectives, but also to focus more on the culture and the behaviours that we want to see more of at Nationwide.

Now, my role in all of this is to help share that story, to help colleagues hear from their peers and from each other how a culture of experimentation and continuous learning can really make a difference, to be inspired and to go out and have a go themselves.

At the start of this year, we created a week-long learning virtual event where we invited colleagues from across the society to find out more about new ways of working, and it's fair to say we were amazed by the response.

More than 2,000 colleagues joined us across the week to hear about a range of topics from DevOps to lean portfolio management to collaboration tips, and even taking part in our very own Nationwide book club.

But without a doubt, one of the highlights of the week was our first ever Ways of Working Awards. Now, yes, we held awards to call out and celebrate all the great work that colleagues are making in adopting new ways of working at Nationwide and doing things differently. But it was genuinely about much more than that.

So I'm going to hand over now to Zsolt, who's going to tell you a lot more.

Zsolt Berend

Thank you, Sarah.

Before I go talking about the awards in detail, I would like to take one step back and focus on the why. Why in the first place did we think that establishing and running an award was going to be good for the organization?

The underlying reason, what we experienced and witnessed, was that information and knowledge is in isolated, disconnected bubbles within the organization.

Whether it's a siloed team, with analysts working as one team and then handing over to devs, handing over to testers, working in silos and isolated teams, or whether it's a small agile team, a small cross-functional team, or team of teams, or even various teams, with all the positive behaviour patterns, they all share some undesired effects, which we call the bubble effect. The bubble effect is around, first of all, that members of these teams develop silo mentality, not having the desire, not wanting to share information outside their information learning bubbles, outside their teams. This leads to limited discoverability of knowledge across the organization.

Also, it leads to poor learning retention, because when people are leaving, knowledge is lost forever. And what we see is, because of that, there is lots of duplication of work and lots of inefficiencies. So what do we do about that? How do we turn this around? How do we create deeper connectedness within the organization? How do we foster a culture of learning and sharing within the organization? So how do we pop these bubbles?

I will share some of these patterns we've seen working.

So one of the strong enablers is the creation of communities of practice. This is having a common team. So colleagues are joining based on invitation, and they co-create knowledge, co-create learning together.

There are conferences. So Sarah mentioned the week-long learning event, which is a conference, but also there are unconferences, a great collaboration platform where the agenda is not set. Colleagues are coming together based on invitation, and they co-create knowledge together. That could be a Lean Coffee or an open space session.

Internal mobility, this is a great enabler, which I've seen working with many organizations, where teams, team members, engineers can go join other teams, upskill themselves, and upskill the teams they're working with. So this leads to a positive, accelerated chain reaction of cross-pollination of knowledge.

You have the colleague-to-colleague programme experiment we are running, which Paul is going to talk more about.

And as Sarah mentioned, Ways of Working enablement team. So we have the central Ways of Working enablement team, but also like a fractal, we have per value stream, per missions in our case.

And one of the biggest enablers is actually establishing and running a Ways of Working Award. So pivoting from collecting success stories from the isolated, disconnected teams and trying to pull it together and share it with the organization, which has proven to be hard, we created an environment where there is intrinsic motivation from teams to actually apply to get an award, and this is what we did.

So we opened for nomination for two weeks, and we had an amazing number: 42 nominations across the organization. Really rich and diverse. So whether IT or non-IT teams or whether it's a small team or team of teams or large teams, we got nominations agnostic to the background.

We had a diverse judging panel, and so we shortlisted 16 teams, and we awarded six teams. We had award winners, we had runners-up, and we had special categories of flow, culture, and value. So what we asked from the teams was to show their improvements, their improvements in terms of quality, improvements in terms of flow and behaviour patterns, so improvements on outcomes: better value, sooner, safer, happier.

And then we had a great celebration event hosted by Patrick Eldridge, the chief operating officer, and Richard James, the head of Ways of Working.

Next, we will show you some of the interviews we did with the teams, with the host and with the judges, as well as a peek into the celebration event itself.

Award Interviews

The first winners for the Ways of Working Flow Award are the Technology Management Office. So congratulations.

How can technology governance be effective in a DevOps environment? Or put another way, how can we get the right balance between safety and speed?

At Nationwide, we decided the key to improving our technology governance was to give ownership of the process to the team who used to support the old dinosaur governance meetings, and actually empower them to improve governance themselves rather than wait for the big bosses to tell us what to do.

So the team looked at the old processes and decided that technology governance needed to change from being something that was an impediment to flow, and instead actually help remove impediments to flow by providing the right governance at the right time.

So we threw away the big PowerPoint decks and the rigid agendas. And instead, we used collaborative technologies such as Jira, Confluence, and Teams to completely re-engineer our governance product.

I decided to nominate the team for a Ways of Working Award, even though our work is not directly related to the delivery of working software.

And we were really excited and energized when we won the Flow Award. It really helped the team to see the value of their work in the wider organization and has given them an even greater drive to keep delivering value through governance by embracing the servant governance pattern, which has now been adopted by other teams at Nationwide.

The people in the team now really feel as if they own the process, and they see the benefits of applying the right governance at the right time. And it's just changed the way they think about the work they do.

Thank you.

Now, next up is the award for culture. And the winner is Operational Resilience. So hopefully they'll be able to join us.

I'm Jim Chapman. I'm the delivery lead of Operational Resilience Change within Nationwide Building Society.

Earlier on this year, I was honoured and privileged to receive, on behalf of the whole of the value stream, an award from our Ways of Working colleagues based on the culture and our approach to change over the last 18 months.

So for some context, Operational Resilience is about 70 people, and we provide thought leadership and integration across the society on anything to do with operational resilience. We're not what you'd think of as a traditional agile team working in DevOps with T-shaped engineers and testers, etc. We are a series of architects and engineers that are facing into complex problems that are quite often out of our control and have a lot of dependencies wider. However, we've been on a journey to go from a waterfall, siloed project approach to a more integrated scaled agile framework where we've tried to empower the teams and devolve as much of the leadership and the decision-making as possible.

We used scaled agile framework as the methodology and as that network to provide us a series of ceremonies and functions. However, we used it on an initiative basis and lots of feedback on how it made people feel, how the decisions were getting made, and how effective we were on that process.

What I can say is it was a wonderful journey. Everybody really took it in the right spirit. Teams really took the empowerment the right way. They made decisions with accountability. They've shown due diligence in the work that they're doing, and they passionately communicated that across the society.

When we won the award, it was a brilliant recognition for the team, but also it enabled us to start a new conversation with our colleagues across the wider society. We've been able to run learning sessions, either videos or getting people to come along. We've been able to use real worked examples as to what failed, what worked, what documentation we've used, how that helped us, what ceremonies, and how we've adapted things.

We've opened it up on individual-level conversations one-to-one, or we've had large multiple team conversations over how this can be brought about.

The awards service and the publicity it brought gave us confidence, but also, as I say, it's enabling us to help everybody else step forward and understand really what does culture mean to us, and how can we use processes to really evolve that culture and make it a brilliant and effective place to work.

Next up, it's the Value Award, and this goes to the Banking and Savings Operations team. Congratulations, all of you. Get ready to join. Yay.

Banking and Savings Operations have been on an incredible journey over the past 18 months. We started with people working in a very fixed way. Hours were 9:00 till 5:00, Monday to Friday, with bums on seats in four fixed sites, each site running locally, not really feeling or acting as one operation.

Fast-forward to today, we are now a fully flexible workforce with individuals working as part of one large team, regardless of location, working contracted hours when they're at their best to meet the business need and deliver first-class member service.

Typically, we have 80% of people working from home on any given day, and 20% of people working from an office across one of those four sites.

We started with the management team, developing their leadership skills, changing their behaviours, and ensuring they were leading together as one team with one vision and one consistent voice for our people. Getting them to ask questions and focus on people rather than obsess about MI and numbers, to really empower our teams to get it right first time, every time. If the process didn't allow it, we asked the teams, with the help of the leaders, to change it. We gave them the trust and the remit to challenge anything that did not benefit a member.

A key point in our journey was busting those myths, unspoken rules, and our people's perception of what would be rules, particularly those that had been around for far too long, to bring the culture right up to date.

We were making fantastic progress, and COVID came along and accelerated it again for us. I'm not sure I would've convinced my senior leaders to give me laptops for the whole of the back office operation so they could work from home, no matter how brilliant my business case was. Other priorities would've blocked it.

But I truly believe we have jumped forward five years in five months with the ability to give our back office teams their laptops. Suddenly, we had the tech to match the newfound culture, and our teams really could work with each other, regardless of geography.

We did side-by-side training across sites. We upskilled more people on critical services than ever before and saw our engagement go up again. They got to know each other more, know the people behind the screens. They grew together, learnt together, and as a result, we saw service and quality rise. Absence and sickness levels are at an all-time low.

I am so proud of the operation. At times, we all felt uncomfortable, but we pushed through, supported each other, and embraced the change.

Let me announce winner number one first, in no particular order, which is the Everyday Banking team. Very well done. Hopefully, one of you will join me shortly.

Hi, I'm Dan King. I'm the Chief Product Owner for the Hassle Free Money Digital Hub.

In the hub, we've been asked to digitally re-engineer our opening journeys across our banking product range.

We've been asked to do a number of things as we did that. Firstly, we've been asked to look at re-engineering those journeys, so changing the way that they work and operate for our members and release as much value as we can for the business in the process.

At the same time, we've been asked to move from legacy on-prem infrastructure to the cloud. We've also been asked to set up a DevOps environment where our engineers are the ones that own the code on an ongoing basis, move from waterfall projects to an agile way of working, and start to recreate internal capability that we previously outsourced, particularly in the engineering space. But also create new capabilities, such as product owners and business designers. And so, the team have been asked to do a number of things, and it's absolutely fantastic then that they've been recognized for the progress that we've made.

Hi, I'm Carlo. I'm the Delivery Lead for the Hassle Free Money Digital Hub.

It was really important for us to win this award. Firstly, a number of us that have been working in the team for a number of years, we had to adapt to new ways of working, and in the early days, we had to overcome quite a few challenges as the organization was set up to work in a different way and deal with projects. So for us, it's a great award.

And for the team, it's been fantastic because it's an acknowledgement by the judges of the achievements that we were proud of. But more importantly, not just the deliveries that we've had, it's acknowledgement that the way we've set the team up and the culture is the way that Nationwide wants to go. So it's been fantastic.

Our second winners of the Ways of Working 2020 Awards is the AML Regulatory Screening team, Team ARREST. Congratulations. And I hope to see you both now.

What we did to be the overall Ways of Working Award winners was, over the course of the last 18 months as the AML Regulatory Screening team, we evolved our ways of working to improve our anti-money laundering performance, to delivering change much more frequently and safely.

We moved from releasing change once in every eight weeks to releasing fortnightly, and used automation to increase quality and save time, reducing some of our key testing activities from 25 minutes to three, and reduced the time for a regular data load from four hours to 40 minutes. This enabled releasing smaller, safer changes with more effective and regular governance processes.

We achieved all of this by increased customer centricity, fostering a culture built around flexibility to respond to changing business priorities, and curiosity about how to continuously improve working effectively with the business, our governance framework, and application support colleagues on and offshore.

Winning the award has been liberating. It has helped us to demonstrate that we have clarity on why we are making the change, and what we are doing. This has led to empowering the team to use their skills and teamwork to develop how we're going to make the change.

The benefit of sharing our story with others has helped to raise the risk around across Nationwide, and has helped us prove that as an area such as risk, which can be perceived as having to do things in a certain way because of regulation, we can embrace new ways of working, and we have shown we can change our mindset.

It was an absolute pleasure and delight to be asked to be one of the judges on our first Ways of Working Awards. It was a great opportunity for the teams to really showcase their work and demonstrate the innovation that they're taking on board.

I couldn't believe the amount of passion and energy that some of the teams came through with. But what was even better was some of the lessons that they'd learned through failing fast, and embedded those through iterative learning into the way that they wanted to take the solutions forward.

It was a real opportunity, again, to share some great successes and congratulate each other across a range of different areas.

So I think that we've set a marker down now, seen some really great work. I think that the momentum is building, and I expect lots more to come.

Hello, everyone. I'd like to share with you my perspectives as a judge here at the Ways of Working Awards at Nationwide.

Firstly, grassroots adoption is very important. Setting the vision and the context is a good first step, but seeing it in action is what's going to motivate everybody to have a go.

Secondly, looking at a diverse set of problem spaces, services, architectures, team compositions. It is very important for people to relate to the problem and understand that improvement is possible in many different situations.

And finally, having a data-driven approach to continuous improvement is really important. Having that discipline of knowing where and how the team is progressing is very motivating, not just for the team, but for the entire society. So thank you very much for inviting me to be a judge in the competition.

So I'd say it was a genuine pleasure to co-present the inaugural Ways of Working Awards.

I was in awe, as a judge, of the breadth of nominations and the excitement, the enthusiasm, and you really felt it actually in the awards ceremony itself.

I think over the last 12 months, it's definitely been a sort of high point for me in terms of energy and kind of appreciation, respect in the room, and that sort of genuine love of learning and enjoyment of others' progress, sort of idea-generating for colleagues of all areas of the society.

What I think I've appreciated then beyond the awards itself is that emergence of sort of colleague-to-colleague learning, the opportunity to take those patterns, to take those things that have been seen to have had such a positive impact on some teams, and to reflect those across the society.

Definitely starting to see that sort of learning network and ecosystem of colleagues supporting colleagues, both with content as well as in the adoption of these patterns.

What I would say ongoing is, watch this space for the colleague-to-colleague, and please do, if you have the opportunity to celebrate Ways of Working progress, it is absolutely of critical importance to helping explore and progress learning.

Paul Blackler

Really great to watch that back. So following the Ways of Working event and the Ways of Working Awards, we really wanted to bottle the energy. We looked for ways to capture and scale the positivity, connectivity, and social proof of people in their teams telling their stories. We didn't want to leave this as just an annual event, but to build on the ethos of sharing and learning from colleague to colleagues.

So drawing on the diffusion of innovation theory as popularized by Everett Rogers, which seeks to explain how the spread and adoption of a new idea or technology takes place, our principle was to focus on the innovators and the early adopters to share social proof towards getting to that magic point of critical mass.

Rogers proposes that there are four main elements that influence the spread of a new idea or practice: innovation itself, communication channels, time, and social systems. So whilst various efforts in the enablement team were focusing on coaching new ways of working, this was all about building on the communication channels and the social system itself.

So to follow up, we started from understanding our own problem and opportunity statements against our own context. This summary here points to moving from increased ad hoc ways of working team demand, and an increasing use of push material, towards empowering internal colleague voices based on demand, and helping to draw out systemic themes, so reducing duplication whilst breaking down those learning bubbles.

It helped us to get to a position of principles and outcomes focused on organizational inclusivity, pull-driven content based on demand, and valuing practical case studies against our own organizational context.

So here, we really wanted to give early adopters a greater voice and foster a collaborative learning culture.

This required some structure, so we followed up and we launched a Ways of Working colleague-to-colleague learning series, essentially run by colleagues and for colleagues. Anyone can create a session on a subject matter that they're interested in, experienced, or passionate about. It's promoted through a simple Microsoft Teams invite and shared on our central intranet.

We launched colleague-to-colleague by following up and sharing the Ways of Working Award stories. We coached and recorded 10-minute summary case study videos, which segued into an open invitation for the organization to join 45-minute deep dives and live Q&As with each of our award-winning teams.

So from this, the energy continued to flow. Teams were opening up bravely, sharing their stories, their successes, their failures, their learnings, and importantly, the cultural shift that sat beneath the journey and how this felt for the people on that journey.

We further launched with a Python coding dojo, with two sessions being fully booked within the first day.

So it's early, but there's organizational-wide interest, and we're excited to see, as we continue to pop those learning bubbles, how this energy continues to grow.

Sarah Sambidge

Thanks, Paul.

So that's about all from us for today. We hope you found the session interesting.

For us to see engagement levels and interest in new ways of working rising across Nationwide during a very challenging year has been absolutely fantastic.

Giving colleagues the social proof they need to encourage them to go and have a go is something we definitely intend to build on, as Paul and Zsolt have explained.

So we thought we'd leave you with some closing words from our Chief Operating Officer, Patrick Eldridge, and to get his thoughts on the way forward. Thank you for watching.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Patrick Eldridge

Since I spoke at last year's DevOps Enterprise Summit, we've seen more and more colleagues across Nationwide embracing business agility and really leaning in to finding out more about new ways of working.

We've deliberately built our outcomes on how we improve flow, culture, and value, but we've also underpinned this with a move to creating a learning organization with continuous improvement right at the very heart of it.

The events and the awards that you've heard about today were, of course, a fantastic way to celebrate our teams' various achievements, but even more than this, they were about inspiring others through social proof.

We know here at Nationwide, like many other organizations, people only truly believe when they can see a colleague or a peer doing something differently and seeing it working, and that's what we're really trying to encourage now, whether through more learning events, more awards, or simply by encouraging colleagues to share their stories with others, whether in formal or informal showcases or other sorts of gatherings.

We want this to be a revolution from the ground up rather than something forced down on people. And it's about creating a pull towards new ways of working and being curious about what they can do for you.

So I sincerely believe that motivated, happy colleagues can be the best ambassadors that there are for embracing new ways of working, and it's been fantastic to see the response and the reaction to our first awards. I'm certainly looking forward to what we see in 2021.