Cable and Wireless (Part 1) - Developing a strong performance culture with SuccessFactors

Speaker

In this podcast, James Eastwood, Director of HR Shares Services at Cable & Wireless, talks about the decision to use a Software as a Service performance management system provided by SuccessFactors. This is the first of two podcasts.

Jim

Cable & Wireless is a global telecoms company, the organisation is split into two separate businesses: Cable & Wireless International focuses on providing services to residential customers, the Cable & Wireless Europe AGUS business that I work for provides telecom services for the largest users of telecoms services globally, so typically large enterprise customers or large public sector organisations.

Our strategy is to redefine the telecoms marketplace, and the way we're doing that is by providing great service to all of our customers. In order to deliver great service, we need great people, so great service is around robust systems and processes and protocol, but more importantly than that, it's about people, so we recognise that if we were to deliver on our strategy to redefine the market, and rewrite the rules when it comes to telecoms services, we needed to make sure that we were investing in our people and helping our people to go the extra mile and deliver a fantastic service to our end customers, and through our listening groups and our internal surveys, colleagues have been telling us loud and clear that we're not helping them enough in terms of helping them develop, helping them grow, helping them understand what their objectives are, so we know for example that many managers were not holding regular one to one sessions with colleagues to help them understand what they needed to deliver in order to contribute to the business objectives, and the SuccessFactors' solution comes in and directly addresses those issues by giving us the systems and the tools to help not only colleagues, but also managers and HR professionals improve the performance culture in Cable & Wireless.

We looked at a number of possible solutions, we looked at developing our in house HR system, which was a SAP system, so that was one option, to turn on some new functionality in SAP; we also looked at going down the bespoke route, and partnering with an organisation that would help us build exactly what we wanted, and we also looked at the SuccessFactors' solution, which is a model based on software as a service, and we felt that that was most appropriate to us, because the software as a service meant we were getting something which was tried and tested, absolute best practice, and also something that we could implement very quickly, which was important to us, because we were operating very much in turnaround mode, and clock speed is everything in our business, so we didn't want to delay the improvements that we wanted to introduce.

And finally, the SuccessFactors' solution also means that any new developments that any of the SuccessFactors' customers want to be switched on, or developed in conjunction with SuccessFactors are automatically available to us as well, and we can determine whether we want to switch on any new functionality going forward, so it really gives us a future-proof solution and it means that we know exactly now what the investment is going to cost us, but we also know that we'll get the benefit of all the downstream improvements as well.

Speaker

Eastwood now goes on to talk about the business challenges of implementing an online performance management system at Cable & Wireless.

Jim

The most significant business challenge that SuccessFactors will help us address is closing the gap between our business strategy and the execution of that strategy. We know that our colleagues don't always understand how their contribution fits into the business strategy, so what we did for the first time in April 2008 was we took a different approach to writing objectives, and we actually involved our colleagues in writing objectives around five corporate pillars, and what that enabled us to do was make sure that everybody understood how all of their objectives linked in to those corporate pillars. However, it wasn't enough —colleagues were still telling us in the surveys that we conduct on a regular basis that it's still not clear enough, how their contribution fits in with that broader strategy, so SuccessFactors will address that, it will enable us to have a more sophisticated way of cascading objectives, so rather than just by corporate pillars, we can really understand how objectives link with your immediate line manager, and the executives higher up the organisation, but also, very importantly to our businesses, helping individuals understand how their objectives link with other teams' objectives, and those teams could be in different functions, so quite often our telecoms solutions that we provide for customers are very complex in nature, and in order to deliver those solutions it involves close teamwork across a number of different functions within our business, so having objectives in line, and being able to see how teams are dependent on other objectives, as well as being able to see how objectives roll up and down the organisation, is really important to us, and at the end of the day it comes back to that underlying principle of delivering great service to customers, so if we can align objectives, align everybody's objectives in teams, into our strategy, at the end of the day that will mean a great service and better service for our customers, which is what we're here to achieve.