Episode 72: How Rabobank Has Created an Agile HR Function (Interview with Tertia Wiedenhof)
My guest on this week's episode is Tertia Wiedenhof, Global Leader and Product Owner for the People Analytics and Insights Team at Rabobank. To reflect the advance of new technology, the changing needs of customers, the emergence of new competitors and changes in the way we work, Rabobank is shifting to agile ways of working as it transforms into a fast moving, digital co-operative bank. HR at Rabobank was one of the early adopters in embracing agile, but what does this actually mean to the work of HR? What does it mean to the approach to people analytics, both in the way the function is set up and the focus of its work?
You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.
In our conversation Tertia and I discuss:
How the shift to agile has intensified the focus on employee experience
How the people analytics team is set up and how it collaborates with the business
The impact the move to agile has had on the HR operating model
How to design, test and iterate products with and for employees
The changes in skillsets required to flourish with agile ways of working
This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in business transformation, new ways of working and employee experience. So that is Business Leaders, Chief HR Officers and anyone in a People Analytics, Organisational Design, Culture, Learning, Employee Experience, or HR Business Partner role.
Support for this podcast is brought to you by AG5. To learn more, visit www.ag5.com.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Tertia Wiedenhof, a Global Leader and Product Owner for the People Analytics and Insights at Rabobank to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. It is great to have you on the show Tertia. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to yourself and your role at Rabobank?
Tertia Wiedenhof: Yeah, sure. So I am a Tertia Wiedenhof. I am the Product Owner of People Analytics at Rabobank. We are a a global co-operative bank with headquarters in the Netherlands. My passion to be in people analytics is that I am really passionate about giving employees the insights they need to make data driven decisions, that help them thrive and also that helps them to do their job really well with themselves and with their teams. So that is a bit about me.
David Green: Great. Well, I can't think of a better passion to be in people analytics for, very similar to mine. I think it is about the people and how we can, as you said, help them to thrive.
Obviously we have known each other for a few years and I have seen the journey of people analytics at Rabobank. I think there was a point in time where also you made a shift at Rabobank and that is when you switched to agile ways of working. I know it is a topic we hear a lot about and agile has become a bit of one of those buzzwords, but Rabobank has actually made that shift. So what would be great is to understand, firstly, why has Rabobank shifted to agile ways of working?
Tertia Wiedenhof: Yeah. So what you see first, in the market, is that there is a lot of change. We have new technologies, they become available faster and faster. We see that customer demands change and of course also newcomers appear in the banking world. At the same time, of course as a bank, we have a lot of knowledge workers and because of digitisation work changed. So in the past, often people worked more alone, developed services and products alone. Whereas now we see we need multi-skilled teams working together on products and services. For instance, with someone who really knows the customers well, with an IT developer and with a designer. You see those multi-skilled teams, an agile way of working is perfect for them and it also helps you, as a company, to bring products, developments and improvements faster, to your customers. What I find pretty cool is that working agile is not something we only do, at Rabobank, in our commercial teams or in our IT teams, but as HR, we also made the decision to work completely agile as the whole of the HR department. So in HR, we have multi-skilled teams, developing products for our 40,000 employees. We started with that as of November 2019. I think it is something really cool to do as HR, because it helps you to really be there for your employees and to develop products and services they need.
David Green: I remember coming to see you, it must have been in the summer of 2019, just before you embarked on the agile journey in HR. I think it was in a meeting with you and others, including Janine and Mark Jansen and certainly in the tour of the office, I think you were already getting ready for that kind of way of working. I guess what also is important, in HR, sometimes we are tasked with helping the organisations become more agile but if HR isn't agile itself, it is quite hard. I guess what is great here is that HR is almost leading the way within the organisation. I know you weren't the first function, but you certainly were one of the first functions that has made that shift.
Tertia Wiedenhof: Yes, it is good and it really helps to gain an understanding of how well the rest of the business is working, but also to deliver fast and to become more predictable. So it helps to do this change as a whole organisation.
David Green: And of course, you mentioned the timeline where you shifted to agile in 2019, I guess we have all had to be agile three months later than that and I know we will talk about that in a minute. In terms of shifting to agile ways of working, what does that mean for the people analytics team itself?
Tertia Wiedenhof: For me, agile HR, working agile and people analytics, goes hand in hand. If you want to do work in HR properly as HR, you really want to know what employees need, what they want, what problems they have during the day, that you can solve as HR. You cannot base yourself, as HR, on hearsay or your assumptions and even not on your own craftsmanship. I think in the past, HR departments developed too much based on their own enthusiasm and thinking for employees. What you actually want to do is to start collecting the voice of employees, to use the data you have, to create data and to actually know what they need. As a people analytics team, we started developing a product life cycle, which we introduced to HR teams, and they start with thinking about which problems do employees actually have? Which problems do we want to solve? Can we articulate our own assumptions? Can we test these with employees? If we are going to develop products, when do we know when we are successful? How are we going to measure that? And then they start developing minimal viable products for employees, again, design these with the employees, is it actually what they need or they are going to use? And then develop further and scale.
If you look at that in all these phases, data are needed. I think that makes it pretty interesting that in this whole way of agile development, you are going to have all kinds of points or phases where you are going to collect data. For us as people analytics, yeah it takes also something of our mindset because I am not only passionate about people analytics. Everyone I meet within our company, but also in other companies, if you are in people analytics, usually you are really passionate about advanced techniques, doing cool predictive research cases. And it is pretty cool, but sometimes you also have to look at the low hanging fruit, maybe help other colleagues to collect data with easy surveys or to help people with how are you going to analyse the data you collected? So you have to balance that as a people analytics team. What I noticed was, as long as you start measuring your impact, you see that you have value for employees, it helps getting everyone engaged. Sometimes it is via a simple solution and sometimes it is through an advanced research case.
David Green: It is quite interesting the way you explain that as one of the big parts of HR going agile, is almost putting the employee at the centre.
So as you said, understanding their needs, building minimal viable products that can meet those needs and testing them, learning from those by gaining feedback and data from employees, then actually before you put those products into production, making sure you built that in. I guess a very similar journey to how marketing has gone, where it is all about customer centricity and understanding those various touch points with a customer, obviously using data and analytics to understand feedback from customers and building that into products. Obviously data and analytics effectively transformed marketing, it seems like we are seeing something very similar with HR and data analytics. Certainly the way you have explained what agile means for people analytics and HR at Rabobank, it sounds like that is definitely the case.
Tertia Wiedenhof: It is and I think it is good to learn from other analytics departments. We have learned from IT, from customer experience experts, from marketing and it all comes together but in the end, everyone who develops services or products really only want that to be used by your target group and you only know that by really knowing your target group really well. For us, it is employees.
David Green: So in terms of the roles in the people analytics team, what does agile working mean for the types of roles that you have got within the team? And how has that changed, since you have implemented agile?
Tertia Wiedenhof: What is really important for us in the team, is that we know of everyone in the team where do they want to develop themselves? So we are looking really about engagement and the ambition people have, where they want to grow, what they want to learn, rather than having a big importance of the specific or fixed roles. Of course, we have data scientists and consultants and researchers in our team, but what brings us together is that we all have this passion to let all employees, in our company, thrive and to be curious about what is going on. You are all really curious people, we want to understand the question behind the questions and I think that is also the secret of being an agile team, not to specialise too much, but to work together. And we don't have the luxury to specialise too much, we have to be multi-skilled and get the job done together and also have a positive mindset and belief in ourselves, that we get things done.
So it is a lot about working together, collaboration and knowing the question behind the question rather than fixed roles.
David Green: My understanding is that you spend time together, as a people analytics team, but you also then spend time in multi-skilled teams, coming across to try and work on problems together.
Tertia Wiedenhof:
Yeah, I think we made quite a bold decision because we decided to spend half of our time, 50%, within the other HR team. So to be embedded there and you might ask, okay, which team is going to give up 50% of the time that they have to spend on their own people analytics backlog, or research cases? We think it is really important to be there working with other HR teams, to develop products together because we are there in all the phases. The phases when they are checking with employees what they need, the analysing part, the development part, but also when a product is delivered and customer feedback is asked and then we also see where data driven skills can be even further improved.
So that can be in the data collection part but for instance, you can also notice a product is presented and we can advise at this point on data visualisation or something like that so we are really involved in all our HR teams. I think it is also very valuable because, in our role as a team, we know what is going on in all the other HR teams and that means sometimes we notice two or three teams are working on the same topic, but with a different angle. So at some point we saw that three teams were working on the topic of internal employee mobility, that is an important topic for us, but we could then bring those teams together so they could align and also improve and make a more transparent offering for employees. So that helped.
David Green: One of the challenges I guess, for people analytics being within HR, as it is in 99% of organisations that we have worked with at Insight222, is that creating that data-driven culture in the wider HR can be a challenge. And it almost seems that by spending 50% of your time with your other HR colleagues, A) it breaks down some of those silos that we traditionally associate with HR and B) it enables you to infuse some of that data driven skill-set into your HR colleagues, actually in the flow of work. So, as you said, you can see at the right time where a better bit of data visualisation or storytelling could actually help land that more with the business or on the piece of work that you are trying to do. So I think that is really interesting.
Like with every organisation, you are trying to help your HR colleagues improve their data-driven skills, are you finding that easier now with working together with them 50% of the time?
Tertia Wiedenhof: It is because before we did the trainings and the one-offs, but really working closely together, you get a glimpse of what is going on and you get a better understanding of it. What you also see is that at some points and for a certain period of time, HR teams will take over some of the tasks, that in other organisations, are done by a people analytics team. I am never afraid of becoming obsolete when all of HR can do data-driven analysis. It is a method, it is not a goal, but it really will help you to develop better products and in the end help employees better. And if all the HR teams can work with data and do the analysis, then we are successful as a people analytics team, so that is good to see. Of course you see a difference in the teams, it really helps us and I think it is a better way than only doing the one-off trainings but to be really embedded into teams and work alongside and to learn from each other. We, as a people analytics team, also get a better understanding of what is going on and all of the different products offerings.
David Green: Of course, because the danger otherwise on the flip side in people analytics, sometimes we can also be caught in our own silo and don't understand some of the day-to-day challenges that our colleagues in HR, HR business partners in particular, have. So you are kind of solving for that, by working together really, it is interesting. You made a comment about taking quite a brave step to spend 50% of your time and I suppose in some respects that means you, as a team, are not able to do as much work as you previously might have done, if you were working together.
Although by the sounds of it, some of those duties that you would have done, sounds like other HR professionals are doing now, so there is a quid pro quo there. I guess what that means is, it makes prioritisation of what you do do, even more important.
Tertia Wiedenhof: I think as an agile HR department, prioritisation is really important because if you want to do HR in a good way, you want to be transparent, you want to be predictive and also be able to react quickly if something is going on. If I look at the impact we are making and the value we are delivering, I am really happy with this agile change. Even if we spent now spent half of her time in the HR teams, we are making impact there as well. Of course, it is good to look at your balance and focus, so team members can be focused around our work, but I really think we are making a lot of impact. So I like this way of working.
David Green: I think one other thing on this is again, if we look at HR generally not just at Rabobank, historically it has been quite siloed. You have got learning, talent acquisition, reward, talent development and sometimes those have all worked off in their own little ways and not necessarily come together that often. Whereas I have always seen analytics as something that has helped thread all these things together but if you have also got learning colleagues working together with talent acquisition colleagues, working together with people analytics, working together with people that are looking at workforce planning and learning. Straight away, as you are designing those products, you are actually trying to solve for all the challenges that might go across the employee life cycle, for example. Which seems a much better way of work.
Tertia Wiedenhof: Absolutely because it is the same cycle that an employee goes through, so you are really aligned with that. I think it is better than having all these separate teams, not knowing each other or what each other is doing. So the alignments part is really important.
David Green: ]As HR has shifted to agile ways of working, what has been the impact on the broader HR operating model at Rabobank?
Tertia Wiedenhof: So what you see at Rabobank, but also at other companies, HR, in the past year, is operating at a more and more strategic level. We see that also, of course, with our HR business partners who are at the table with the senior management of all the business departments.
Of course, ideally, senior managers of any business departments should really know what is important for their employees, but to be realistic, that is not always the case that they know that very well. So, what you see is our HR business partners now also have the task to check with senior management, if they know what the employee needs are. And at the same time we opened up channels for the HR teams to contact employees directly because if you want to capture the voice of the employees, you really have to be able to contact them directly as well. I think as a bank, we have a lot of knowledge workers and our employees are really our capital, so we would be stupid not to make sure that we really know what our employees need, but that also they are equipped to do their job in an outstanding way. We as HR really want to facilitate that, so you see that changing in our operating model.
David Green: And of course those HR business partners, as we discussed earlier, will then be able to support the businesses that they serve, move towards agile ways of working, as you roll out across the the bank. Really interesting stuff there.
As we have got to know each other over the years, I think one of the areas where Rabobank is really excelling when it comes to analytics as a whole, is how you are using analytics around the concept of employee experience and continuous listening. As you said, getting that voice for the employee to help them be more effective and equipped to do their jobs, but also getting learnings from employees around customers and feeding that in as well. Let’s dig into some of the work you are doing around that now. Could you tell us a little bit about what you have been doing around the listening journey that you have had at Rabobank, I will probably jump in with some questions too, perhaps covering both before and during the pandemic?
Tertia Wiedenhof: Yeah. So, with this understanding, we want to learn more about the employee needs and employee listening became more important as well. Of course we have to do that in a smart way, so now we no longer see employee listening as only something from the people analytics department but all the HR teams want to know more and more about the employees that are using their products, what do they need. But at the same time, of course you don't want to overload employees with all kinds of surveys etc. So we try to do that in a smart way, to combine question, to make use of samples etc. For instance, what you saw when the pandemic started, like a lot of organisations, we were all sitting at home and we didn't know what was going on or what employees needed. It was a situation we have never seen before and I am pretty proud that our team was able to, within one week offer of the start of the pandemic, set up a pulse survey on Corona., what did employees need and how they were doing. This was not to only help HR, but also other facilitating teams and that was really a momentum for employee listening.
And of course now, since hopefully the pandemic will be gone soon, we of course want to know how people want to return to the office? What they want to keep of the situation? Pulse surveys are becoming more and more important, but at the same time, what we also see is that if other HR teams have ideas, or solutions, or products, they want to test if employees are actually going to use it, if it is something that is attractive to them. So we have made an employee community in which we can test products with employees and help teams.
David Green: You and your colleagues wrote a great article that we published on myHRfuture last year. I think one of the benefits of listening to employees, in this situation that we have had with the pandemic, is it has helped your leaders make decisions around return to the workplace, in communications that were going out to employees during the pandemic. Just having that information is so important, isn't it? Because you have got data to back up what people think they should do.
Tertia Wiedenhof: Yes. It helps to make decisions and what we made very clear from the beginning, it is not only about the collection of the data, but we really want you to act upon it. So if we don’t have the commitment upfront from anyone that wants data, that they will act upon it and the commitment to do something with it, then we are not going to ask the question.
So we really saw that the questions we asked were followed up on and we were really transparent with employees first about what we collected and also what we did with it. I think it is good in its own sense to be transparent, but also you see that if people see that they are listened to and there is something done with my voice, then they are engaged to next time, to also answer a survey request or another request to give their opinion again and again.
David Green: The employee community is, coming back to what we have talked about at the start, a great way of testing a minimum viable product. To test it out on a representative sample of employees, to understand what they like, what they don't like, how is that helping your colleagues in HR, in terms of product development?
Tertia Wiedenhof: It is really cool because sometimes we, or other HR teams, are really enthusiastic about a product and you have a MVP, you test it and then unexpectedly you hear from employees, oh, we don't like it. It is too difficult or we wouldn't use it at all. Sometimes it is maybe not what you were expecting, but it is helpful because it is such a pity to spend resources on products that are not used and since you only have an MVP, the time spent on it is limited. So it is easier also to kill your darlings and to see what is it that employees need? Sometimes it is something totally different or they have a different problem than you thought, but it also helps you to collect features that are maybe needed in the future. So if you have a minimal viable product, employees also can give suggestions like, that feature would be interesting, or if that will be included I would use it even more. It helps you to to prioritise the work of the next course.
David Green: Yes, it sort of sets your roadmap for the product as well essentially. Obviously you have had the advantage of being at Rabobank pre and post agile ways of working. What have been the biggest changes that you have seen, pre and post ways of working agile?
Tertia Wiedenhof: I think we are now becoming better and better at making products smaller, so we are able to deliver faster. Also to stop products that don't work and to really incorporate the voice of employees, so that we become better at developing what people actually need.
And of course, we are still learning and sometimes the products we make are still too big or take too long, but you really see that developments in our agile skills and that is great to see. I hope we start to improve more and more and really actually do, as HR, the things that employees really need.
David Green: If we look at HR as a whole, what additional skill-sets has working agile meant that you have needed to develop, as HR professionals at Rabobank, or have had to hire into HR?
Tertia Wiedenhof: I think there are a couple of things to say about that. Of course, many people would expect that you need data driven skills.
They are important, but I think what is really important, is to have a creative mindset because so much is possible. You will notice once you start working in multi-skilled teams, that will help with creativity, to look at different angles, to learn from other departments. I think what is also really important is an agile way of working is not only about doing certain meetings but it is really a way of working, it is a mindset and that sometimes can take longer. Typically, teams do training or have a coach, but it takes some time to get a hang of, how does it work? What works for us as a team? I think the creativity is the most important skill you need, the world we live in is getting more and more complex, so I like this creative mindset to think of solutions that people hadn’t thought of before.
David Green: And then bringing that back to people analytics, other organisations are looking at agile, or shifting to that way of working. What would you advise other people analytics leaders, who are looking to adopt this approach?
Tertia Wiedenhof: Yeah. I think in the end, it really comes to the question if you are willing to really put all of your employees first.
The employees that use your HR products daily, are you willing to listen to them, to adjust to their needs and to be transparent as HR? For me, it is a great way of working to really develop what people need and also to contribute to a great employee experience and to be inclusive at the same time. Because what you do in listening, is to give everyone that opportunity to raise their voice. I think for leaders, listening to your employees makes you humble because sometimes you hear what you didn't expect, or maybe you hear opinions you don't like, but you have to do something with it. You have to take a humble stance and set aside your own ego, listen to people and then develop what employees need, to do their work and not what you think is good for them.
David Green: And would you say that shifting to agile from a people analytics and HR perspective, that is the biggest shift becoming more employee centric versus maybe solving problems exclusively for leaders in the organisation. Obviously, you are always going to be doing that as well, but it is looking at the organisation more as a whole?
Tertia Wiedenhof: I really strongly believe in that because as I said before, your employees really are your capital and they do a lot of the important work and the work with customers, you really have to cherish that. Of course, you want to give your senior management the data driven insights, so they can steer on strategy but you have to do both. You really have to take care of the employees so they can do their work, in an outstanding way and then as HR, you can help a lot with that.
David Green: And of course, the two aren't mutually exclusive, by helping employees thrive and deliver better services to customers, you are helping the business.
Sadly, Tertia, we have got to the last question. This is a question we are asking everyone on this series and it probably relates to some of the skills that you are looking at, both inside HR and outside HR. What is the value of measuring skills data and how should companies approach it?
Tertia Wiedenhof: I think here, again, it is important to see how it can help employees. Why is it necessary for them, that you know more about their skills? What is in it for them? Maybe to match training offerings or to help people be ready for the future, we really have to think about how we can help employees. Also, how to make it a great experience for them, so maybe they already have their skills registered somewhere else, in a learning provider or somewhere else. Well, maybe you can collect that as passive data and make it really easy for employees.
Make it simple, think about which employee problem I am actually solving with that. I think that way of thinking helps to to tackle the skills issue.
David Green: I like that answer. I guess you are in a great position, at Rabobank, to look at this whole question around skills data. Because you are working in these squads of cross-functional HR, you can start to see that if we collect employee skills data, we can support their learning. We can support them with career mobility within Rabobank. We can tie that to the skills that we need, as an organisation. To go right back to what you said at the start, in terms of new entrants coming into the market, more technology coming into the banking sector and how that changes the skills we need and you can link it all together, which I guess is the magic around this. And that does all the things that you have just said there, it hopefully provides a great experience, to make it simple and easy if we are using analytical methods to actually infer some of these skills and it is solving that problem for the employee, developing career within the organisation and helping the bank at the same time, in terms of making sure you have got a future ready workforce. Really really good.
Well, Tertia, it is always a delight to talk to you and learn about the work that you and the team are doing at Rabobank. Thanks for being a guest on the show. How can listeners stay in touch with you or follow you on social media?
Tertia Wiedenhof: I am on Linkedin, they can follow me there.
David Green: Well, it has been great to great to speak to you again, Tertia. I know people are going to enjoy listening to this episode, so thank you very much.