In this series we take you UpClose with some of the world’s top HR leadership teams who share their experience, insights, lessons learned and how they are shaping the future of work for business and society.

Episode 3/4 - UpClose with E.ON

E.ON is one of Europe's largest operators of energy networks and energy infrastructure and a provider of innovative customer solutions for 50 million customers. They are decisively driving forward the energy transition in Europe and are committed to sustainability, climate protection, and the future of the planet.

Episode highlights

E.ON UK’s history from nationalisation and privatisation through to their current mission, and purpose
How HR is leading the charge to build the organisation of the future
How HR projects are empowering E.ON’s people to create a better tomorrow from reducing business carbon footprint to building smart and sustainable cities
Inclusivity for all: An inclusive culture at E.ON that builds equal conditions for all people
How HR plays a critical role in driving business transformation and the shift to a hybrid working model

Speakers

Helen Bradbury, Director of Organisational Development and Engagement
Damian Kirk, Director of Residential and SME
Chris Norbury, Chief People Officer
Sue Treharne, Head of Talent, E.ON Next
Nick Watchorn, Director of Colleague of Professional Services

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Chris: Chris, walk us through the journey behind E-ON to where we are today.

Chris Norbury: Thanks, Chris. I’ll start with a little bit of the journey as to how we got here.

E.ON is one of Europe's largest customer solutions in energy networks, businesses, and - in the UK - we are the 2nd largest energy supply business and growing energy solutions business. Fundamentally, we're focused on customer solutions and energy networks, as well as the supply of the commodity and the supply of the solutions, solutions such as decarbonizing energy demand.

Over the course of the last eight years, the group has taken bold choices to step away from carbon fossil power generation, and to focus in on its role in leading the energy transition and driving sustainability. We’re focused on growing our customer solutions businesses, and our networks, because those are the core components of the energy transition.

We like to ask ourselves, ‘how do you help society, as well as helping customers address the challenges of decarbonizing transport, decarbonizing heating, and how do we do so in a way that is sustainable and affordable’? Those are the challenges that we believe we've got the capability to help society address, and that's where our business is focused today.

Chris: It would be great to hear more about the wider purpose.

Helen: No problem! Our purpose is leading the energy transition as well as delivering smart, sustainable, personalised solutions for customers, especially in terms of leading NetZero. What's been incredibly helpful is having that consistency of purpose, and that continuity for colleagues. When we launched our purpose, we did quite a lot of activity in terms of helping people to engage with it, but also think about how their own personal purpose fits in with that. What we're seeing now, as we're talking to potential candidates externally, to see how we can make it fit with people's aspirations in working for an organisation that's playing a significant role in sustainability, and in that Zero Carbon future going forwards.

Chris: Nick, what are some of the projects that you're working on, or the teams working on that you're most excited about?

Nick: My number one priority is always making sure people get paid. But within the HR function, we’re transforming the way that we work, and so how people earn that pay. Through transforming the business, such as hybrid ways of working coming out the pandemic, we’re making sure that our function works for people. It's not just about a place to work, it's about how you work within that environment. I think that's a good area of focus.

Chris Norbury: What excites me is the stuff that the team are working on, and the results that they're delivering. Certainly, the one thing that's excited and motivated me is the digital transformation of our B2C (business to customer).

Sue: You're absolutely right. Moving from a legacy IT system into a brand new, really intuitive, customer focused and colleague focused platform has enabled all R&D specialists who work daily with customers to be empowered to offer that sort of personalised energy, because all of the information is there on the platform. It's really easy to use, they own the customer end to end, so they don't have to pass that customer on to anybody else. You can see previous conversations with that customer, so you could offer that tailored personalised solution. For the colleagues as individuals, they feel empowered, fulfilled, and have a purpose.

Last thing I'll say on that is about the collaboration between HR and the business. We're almost separate functions, but we are a real partnership. For me to do my job in the best way, I did the training on how to be an energy specialist, which is quite unusual for a HR person to learn for two weeks; I trained on how to talk to customers, because we are a customer focused business.

Now, I can use the system and the software, and learnt about the next evolution; what we've migrated to our customers and now looking at how to stabilise the organisation, and how to move it forward into the next phase. Just knowing the basics helps me contribute to that purpose.

It's part of the premise of E.ON Next, which is all about inclusion. It’s important that we all are energy specialists. I just happen to focus on HR.

Nick: We're just one of two-and-a-half-thousand employees that we’ve recruited to embark in a very digital way. Being able to change the way that we recruit, using Launchpad as a way to not just make it digital, but to actually improve the colleagues’ journey as well. That’s been a real success that we all look to replicate moving forward.

Chris Norbury: We had no customers on the platform last year. We had no colleagues in the business. And, with Damien and his teams, we made that happen.

Chris: So what is E.ON Next?

Chris Norbury: In the UK, we've got three businesses; we've got a B2C business, we've got a Beat at Large B2B business, and we've got a solutions business. E.ON Next is the b2c business. If you're one of our eight and a half million residential customer accounts, if you're a domestic homeowner, or you're responsible for domestic energy bill, any one of those eight and a half million, then you'll be with E.ON Next.

These guys and many others built this business out from nothing, to eight and a half million accounts, and twenty-three-hundred directly employed folk. During the pandemic, starting on the first day of the first lockdown, we had no clue how we were going to do any of it; we just knew we had to do it.

Damian: Nobody worked from home before the pandemic, either. Within the first four weeks of the pandemic, 1000 people worked from home straightaway. Weeks before, colleagues and HR colleagues and the business all worked together. Then we started the whole process of getting ourselves prepared, stabilised, and ready for migration across to the new world.

Sue: I think the other challenge we had with existing colleagues and encouraging them to work from home, was their home circumstances. Most were varied; not everybody had the ability to book a slot at the kitchen table and just be able to deal with customers. But what was great was customers understood, because we were all in the pandemic, and we got really good feedback about the support that we were giving customers during that time.

We still kept some of our offices open.

Chris: What's the biggest challenge in doing it?

Sue: That was really difficult; how do you actually onboard new colleagues successfully? What we do is, we have a full three-week virtual onboarding. The first bit is very informal, no PowerPoints, just them getting to know the organisation. Then for those individuals who did want to come in and see an office, they find E.ON Next is a very different brand. It has a very different feel from working in an office, with a completely different layout. To make colleagues feel empowered, to make you feel like you're responsible, is to treat you like an adult. We bring people in to have that experience.

Chris: Did you do cohorts as well, so they can meet each other?

Sue: Oh yeah. Virtual teams worked really well. They have their own communication channel, in which we use a software called Slack. And those training teams continue to this day to still use their Slack channel to give each other support.

Chris: It's nice, isn't it? Because in any way, even in an office environment, you wouldn't normally get to meet each other. That’s the one thing about online; you get people from all over, no matter where you are, and you feel like you're a part of something, like you're on this journey together.

Okay, so what's the current?

Sue: The premise of E.ON Next was that it will be a hybrid way of working, even before the pandemic, so we're actually a little bit ahead of the curve setting up.

Chris: Oh! It was already planned to be that way?

Sue: Exactly. Two days in the office, three days at home working, so the office is a resource for you to use, but we’re like ‘here's a laptop, so you won't have a desktop anymore, and work wherever it suits you best’. That was always the premise.

Damian: nice collaboration partners helps as well. A big part of E.ON over the last two years has been working with partners and supporting us flexibly through the pandemic. What you've had is unusual but amazing, with our partners in South Africa, or Glasgow, or wherever, on the same social platform such as Teams, working for the same team leaders, coming in at nine o'clock in the morning, or whenever, but all working as one unit.

I actually think the pandemic’s got a lot of things to answer for, but I think there's some great things coming out of it. A few examples are how quickly we've digitised, and the hybrid working model we pushed so hard for. The other one is how we really moved forward, and how we work together with people in and out the organisation. We've all got the same aim, which in our case is to serve our customers.

Nick: As leaders, we're more accessible now. The fact that anybody can get hold of us at any point in time on Teams, or whatever, and are not constrained by location or time, people are responding positively to that.

Chris: That’s it now-a-days, so many digital platforms that we can use; Teams, WhatsApp, Slacks, etc. it’s great to have, but how do you manage all that and not become digitally disconnected?

Chris Norbury: What matters to us is about being an inclusive employer; for us, it’s about being a place that people can come and be themselves. We thrive on the understanding that everybody is different.

Damien's casually talked about integrating partners into our ecosystem of talent, but the amount of effort that's gone in behind that is huge. It incorporates the principles of inclusivity, and in terms of digitization, or digital disconnection, you've got to have quite a nuanced appreciation of just how different everybody is. It could be that one person's source of stress, maybe another person source of energy. Somebody may be suited to work in Digi Ops team where they're permanently remote, but for others, that's their idea of a kind of Cold Hell. Some people want to be with other human beings. Bringing all of those topics around digitization together, different ways of working, inclusivity, and the idea of how you bring others from outside the organisation to feel part of the same team, that's something that I'm proud to say we’ve worked really hard on, and is turning out to be a fulfilling journey.

Chris: How are your managers finding that process? Hybrid is tough. You've got half your team remote, half in the office, so a mixture of both trying to be inclusive and making sure everyone's voice is heard.

Damian: Early on, we made a decision; in the first month of the pandemic, we said we're going to work it one way. So, you're either all in the office or you're all on the phone, (or on other portals, such as video with some EMS teams or Slack). Straightaway, it’s a massive learn, and a really positive thing we've done. Now, we can bring in anybody from all over Europe, and South Africa, and India, and everywhere! If we want their expertise, or their knowledge, or their learnings, to intermix, we use video. If we have them locally, then we can have them come in and use the office.

I do think it's opened up an opportunity to gather rich information, and use more people better across the globe than you ever did before. It’s helped us become a more learning organisation. We've always been learning organisation anyway, so kind of nature arranges for us to keep learning. It's new tech in energy, or new tech for colleagues and customers, or new ways of working. But I would say that again, the opportunities that have come after the pandemic has demonstrated to us how much we can learn, and just how quickly we can learn it. That's something we're continuing with.

Helen: It’s about realising that we're not going to get it right first time. That's what we found coming out of the pandemic and coming into an office environment with an increasing hybrid approach. But what we’ve continued to do is Colleague Listening. Getting that feedback on a regular basis from individuals, from teams, and through our wide range of networks, and listening to what colleagues are telling us about what's working and what isn't, and making adjustments as we go, is where we’re improving.

The other thing that we've been able to do through the pandemic is around talent, and talent transformation. We previously had very closed talent pools; traditional talent pools that covered the various different levels of the organisation, that were exclusive, and where you had to be nominated by your manager to go through a process in order to get access to those. What we've been doing over the last 18 months (through the pandemic), is switched those talent pools off.

We've totally transitioned to an open access talent approach that's built on networks that are aligned to the capabilities needed to build an organisation able to deliver our strategy for the future. And we've done it online. The access to those networks is through our intranet site. There's a number of resources and learning curriculums giving access to leaders and experts through seminars, webinars, and that kind of thing. Just connecting colleagues together, where maybe in the past it was difficult to do, has opened up that whole opportunity around learning, irrespective of where they work in the organisation.

Damian: Picking up on what Chris said about treating people like adults, I think what you'll start to see across E.ON is that we've moved from this kind of traditional view, where everything goes one direction, and you have to ask for permission for anything at all, which we’ve now eradicated. Now, you can go wherever you have to go and do whatever you have to do, because you're an adult.

For example, if I want to go speak to Chris, I just go and speak to Chris. I don't have to speak to Sue to speak to Chris. Right? That alone breaks down barriers and boundaries, so people can put themselves on any task.

You find more talent that way.

Nick: Absolutely. I was gonna say a similar thing, but I think the first step in that journey was the mindset and getting the mindset right. In the office, it’s not a place of work, but somewhere that you can use to facilitate the work that you do. You know that you can return to the office if you like. Coming out of hybrid to collaborate, and to use it as a way of connecting with people. If you're doing technical stuff on your own, you can you can do that, too. Whether you're in the office or not, it's your choice. And I think that's the first step to trusting people; the company matures the individuals; they grow, they take that space, and they build on it.

Sue: What we’ve done is given everyone the space to move into E.ON Next. But we have to tell them that it's a very different way of working, it might not work for you, and let's be okay about that. And if it is for you, we'll support you to get your head around what might be different. And even then, you might think, ‘no, this isn't for me’, or ‘I'm absolutely wedded to this. It’s where I want to work’.

There's a real opportunity there to fulfil their purpose. Within the whole team, we managed the journey for about three and a half thousand people deciding what they wanted to do. And we've either supported them with life beyond E.ON, or we support them into E.ON Next, or one of the other pillars E.ON offers.

Chris: What do you have in terms of principles or decision making? What does your process look like?

Damian: It’s important to remember you're dealing with people, you're dealing with customers, or you're dealing with the commercials, the performance, and the business?

When you're dealing with people, your decisions have got to involve accountability-based cultures and models. You also have to create a critical mindset, the boundary of the values of the organisation.

If a decision is coming to me, and it could have been made by someone else, you start challenging every single one of those people that decision making process went through. It's not an overnight thing, you'll never get it right all the time. They come to you because you've got this authority. So, you say ‘let's give them the authority’, right?

It does scare people. Remember, if you're an inclusive organisation, you are hiring people at different stage of their life, with different abilities. Some people have autism or ADHD. How comfortable are they, and do they feel safe making decisions of authority?

I say, ‘Let's just try it. If it works, we'll carry on tomorrow, if it doesn't work, what we'll learn is what might work next time’.

I call it the inch-by-inch approach. You keep doing something, and you learn from it and keep moving forward. It's really short and simple. You don't have to go through hierarchies. And it's very similar for customers.

From a customer's point of view, you want decisions to be made by the person speaking to the customer. If there's a problem with that decision, still deal with the customer, but you won’t get in trouble because you're making the decision with the right intent. The customer can get the right service, they walk away from their query happy. We can give you the safe environment to operate, and deal with any processes that didn't work, or that might not have gone to plan.

Sue: We’ve also changed the model of how can colleagues best contact you? Instead of waiting for their break, or their lunch to make a call, you've now got live chat, the bot, which has intuitively learnt by the questions and answers it gives, to bring solutions to colleagues.

Nick: We put the common questions into live chat so that it can learn. Now, it’s at 1000 live chats every single month, and a quarter of those are resolved without a human interaction, which is absolutely great. You know, it's 24/7.

Chris: It allows you as a team to focus on more valuable tasks.

Chris Norbury: The journey that Nick and the team have been through in colleague services is fantastic. It just makes you really happy when you see the feedback that colleagues and our business give, and then the other thing is the data as well. It's the ability to use data. Building E.ON Next used data to really help you make logical database decisions that accord with your values.

In that transition, what was front and centre of our minds was how difficult a transition for some people it would be, but we want it to be a human one, we want it to be a personal one.

Sue: Joining on Chris's point about data, what's the data telling us? Our longer tenure team leaders had lower conversion rates than any other applicant going across energy specialists. What we realised by looking at the data was, it was probably the biggest transition of change of role. And we hadn't prepared them well.

Damian: I think, in the past, data was used to make decisions about groups. Then it was always if somebody wasn't happy, or it wasn't right for them, then you don't get the best out of them. Now, we’ve got so much data that we can actually go down right to that person. You can see everywhere they’ve been and everything they’ve done. We can decide from this data, pick them out, and ask maybe 'Sue, would you mind going to have a chat with them' and seeing just how we can use that data we collect to help people merge with E.ON Next.

Sue: Right from the very beginning, we talk to them about our ambition, what we want to achieve with a new organisation in E.ON Next, and the opportunity to start with a blank sheet of paper and make sure our recruitment processes were inclusive. Now we’ve got the best diversity demographics in that new company.

Chris: On that point, congratulations on the top 50 most inclusive employers.

Helen: Thank you. It's a real area of focus for us. In terms of diversity and inclusion, I'd say it's not only a priority, it feels like it's woven through everything that we do.

It's also about creating an inclusive culture where ultimately everyone can be their best. We've got a wide range of colleague led inclusion networks, covering everything from our Embrace network that really focuses on racial inclusion, we've got Fast Forward, which is focused on developing women into leadership positions, we've got a number of faith-based religious based networks, LGBT and friends, and many more.

One of our most recent ones is a networking group that's built up around menopause. We have menopause accreditation, and it's a real area of focus for us. It's a particular group of colleagues, but actually, they're really active and they're really engaged at helping to raise awareness of menopause across the whole organisation, and are starting to get some good traction.

Back to data. The data has really helped to inform our thinking and the plans that we've got around some key inclusion topics. For example, we are committed to closing our gender pay gap by 2025. We've got a commitment of 50/50 representation of male and female in senior exec roles by 2025.

Chris: The last question is a double question. What do you love most about working at E.ON? And what would you say to people that are listening that perhaps are considering working here?

Chris Norbury: What I love most about working here is sometimes it's tough, but what you're doing is so important to society. We can play a small part in helping decarbonize the industry. To be able to go home to my kids and tell them what I'm doing is what I work for. I love that.

Nick: The thing that gets me out of bed every morning is the fact that I know I go to work, and it's going to be different. You know, there's a variety in the role that you do. And you know that whatever you do is going to make a difference somewhere along the line. Whether that's to somebody's life, whether that's an organisation, or even for the planet, you have the opportunity to make a difference. And I think that's fundamentally what people want to do. And so you have a great opportunity within E.ON.

Sue: I would say the same. In fact, I probably bore people outside of work with this. I would echo everything that Chris and Nick, and I'm sure Damien and Helen gonna say, as well, it is making a difference to other colleagues lives or customers lives. And we have great opportunity. So, anybody out there, I'd say come and join us.

Damian: I love people. I love seeing people grow and develop. In 25 years, there's been so many people I've seen grow. And when you're looking at the impact E.ON can have on people's lives, working here is phenomenal. think the second bit about wanting to come to E.ON, it's an opportunity; it's a massive company with the opportunity to develop and grow and there's so many things you can get involved in. I'm out on those acquisitions. I've been involved in projects. I've worked in it. I've worked abroad! If this is what you want, I’m pretty confident it could work for you.

Helen: I often get asked why I stayed. I think probably two things for me. One is genuinely the people. I have really great colleagues that genuinely work well together, try to collaborate, and are really positive. I think the second thing is the opportunity to work on really meaningful, valuable activities. You can join an organisation where you can genuinely develop and work on different things and develop your career within a diverse organisation. I think everything that we're doing is helping to contribute towards that.

Chris: I think that's a wrap! Thank you so much for sharing your journeys, your experiences. Keep up the amazing work.

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