Strategic HR Matthew Taylor in conversation with...
CV
Ann
Pickering
2017 – Present
CHRO and chief
of staff
Telefónica
O2 UK
2008 – 2017
HR director
Telefónica
O2 UK
2004 – 2006
Head of HR
– customer
service
and retail
Telefónica
O2 UK
2004 – 2006
Head of HR
– customer
service
Telefónica
O2 UK
1989 – 2004
Multiple roles in
HR and business
development
FI Group
1987 – 1989
Personnel
executive
Fidelity
International
1983 – 1987
HR graduate
training scheme
Marks and
Spencer
went home and thought ‘that was the
right decision’. Because I thought ‘what’s
the alternative for these people? They
stay working at O2 and probably in the
next three months get made redundant’.
MT: And presumably you trusted the
company you were outsourcing to?
AP: Completely. They’re still with us
now… And being a responsible
organisation means when we go out to
tender the first thing they have to fill in
is around good working standards, and
if they don’t meet them they’re out.
MT: I want to move on to the equalities
agenda, because that’s a big issue and it’s
continually shifting… Do you ever
think there’ll be no end to the number
of things we’ve got to get right?
AP: We’ve made reasonable strides on
gender. We’ve got a gender-balanced
board now. For a short period of time
five years ago I was the only woman on
the board because someone was on
maternity leave and we were waiting for
someone else to join. I metaphorically
lost my voice. That’s when the penny
really dropped for me that I was the
different person in the room.
I’ve introduced a career returners
programme for women who’ve been out
of the market typically because of
having children, bringing them back on
a 12-week programme. On the last
programme 100% secured jobs
afterwards in O2. We’re really poor in
the UK at bringing people back from
maternity leave.
But it’s much wider than that. The
focus for me at O2 at the moment is
BAME. It’s really hard because people
are afraid of putting their foot in it.
MT: What we’re trying to achieve is a
world where people can fully express
themselves. But it often feels that it’s
understood more in terms of a set of
traps you could fall into.
AP: I had a reverse mentoring session
where a woman told me she recently
decided to wear her headscarf into
work. She said ‘I was really worried
about what people were going to say’,
but she walked in and no-one said
anything. She said ‘part of me was
relieved but the other part thought why
didn’t the buggers ask?’ But they didn’t
know what to say; they didn’t want to
upset her.
One of the things we’re trying to do
is make the organisation instinctively
inclusive. So it’s as much your
responsibility as it is mine as the HRD.
MT: In terms of my perceptions
of HR… I think our big problem
isn’t HR departments, it’s that
so many organisations don’t have
HR departments or don’t take
HR seriously…
people’… So we’re not teaching young
people to appreciate the skills they’ve
got and that those are transferable.
MT: One of the things you hear quite
a lot is that young people are different.
Do you find that your new recruits
want different things out of work than
maybe you did?
AP: Yes, they do their homework,
they’re much more selective. They will
look at your CSR record, whether they
can work flexibly, whether they get
autonomy. And all good organisations
are chasing the same people;
unemployment is relatively low.
Therefore progressive organisations
need to step up.
MT: You’ve used that phrase
‘progressive organisation’ a couple of
times. What do you mean?
AP: I mean: be flexible about start and
finish times. It’s not about presenteeism
it’s about output. And empower people.
For example we had a call centre where
we had a real problem trying to staff it
for Christmas. You could say a good
employer doesn’t open on Christmas
Day, but if you’ve got a child getting
their phone under the tree they’re
going to want to activate it. We went to
our people and they came up with a
brilliant idea, which was ‘if you work
Christmas I’ll work Eid’.
MT: You’ve had to make some really
difficult decisions about outsourcing
and redundancies. How do you feel
when you’re involved in that? Do
you dread it or is dealing with
difficult things ultimately the most
exciting challenge?
AP: The intellectual challenge is
certainly in a bizarre way an enjoyable
part of the job. For example we were in
a situation where the number of calls
were dropping significantly because
people wanted to be serviced online. So
we had people not fully occupied. So
we did a lot of investigation, had a lot
of heated debates. When we made a
decision to outsource a significant part
of our organisation to a third party I
34 HR June 2019 hrmagazine.co.uk
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