Enabling leaders to engage, motivate and develop their teams in a hybrid workplace
Leading a team can be challenging in any circumstance. However, leaders of today find themselves operating in a new hybrid working environment, which is more complex, dynamic, and digital in nature. To meet this new challenge, leaders require different skills and strengths to support and enable their teams to adapt and thrive. The Active Manager programme, delivered in collaboration with Hastings Direct, has enabled a sustainable step-change in the capability of leaders to engage and motivate their teams in a continually evolving, digitally enabled environment working remotely from home and transitioning to a Hybrid environment.
The business needs
With over 3,300 colleagues servicing 3 million UK car, bike, van, and home insurance customers, Hastings Direct recognises that its people are fundamental to the success of its vision to be the best and biggest digital insurance provider.
In 2021, Hastings saw an acceleration in its digital products and services for customers, as well as undergoing a rapid transition of its UK colleagues moving to a hybrid working environment. Committed to investing in the development of the leadership team during a national pandemic and a period of significant change, Hastings Direct identified a need to uplift the capability of its leaders.
In response, BearingPoint partnered with Hastings Direct to deliver a transformational leadership programme, which would enable leaders to better support business objectives and deliver straight-forward insurance through high-performing, dedicated and customer-focused teams.
Active Manager for Future Leaders
The development in leadership capability needed to be sustainable and include the opportunity to work collaboratively to establish leadership standards. It was key that ongoing development was aligned with business values and objectives. The programme involved over 70 leaders and more than 500 colleagues from across two key business areas within Hastings – Customer Operations and New Business Review (Fraud) – and was delivered by an almost entirely remote team of Active Manager specialists.
During the initial phase of the programme, BearingPoint conducted interactive workshops, discovery meetings, observations, and analysis of insights to identify the key competencies and core behaviours that would enable participants to be successful leaders of the future.
The insights from the initial engagement activities enabled tailoring of the programme to develop leadership capability targeting four key focus areas:
- Creation of high performing teams within a flexible hybrid working environment
- Increased resilience, agility, and responsiveness to change
- Adoption of a consistent approach to the management of teams
- Increased confidence of the leadership team to drive accountability and ownership
A new way to lead
Through our joint Hastings Direct and BearingPoint Active Manager Specialist team, we provided leaders with accelerated one-to-one coaching and support to enable them to rapidly embed practical tools, knowledge, techniques. Using these, leaders were better equipped to motivate and engage their teams, creating an environment where colleagues feel more valued, empowered and able to reach their full potential.
A key enabler to unlocking effective leadership within a hybrid environment was the effective use of digital collaboration tools. Adoption of these tools offered leaders a way to interact in a creative and meaningful way to support cohesion, teamwork, and shared experience. One of the key digital assets used to support leadership development was the Active Manager platform, a digital portal that supports collaboration and provides on demand access to interactive tools, progress trackers and digital learning materials.
To create sustainable results, BearingPoint worked with all leadership levels through ongoing coaching to facilitate a culture of accountability and ownership which enabled their teams to deliver lasting improvements in performance.
A thriving hybrid workforce
The enhancement in leadership capability translated into a 14% uplift in team performance across several key business metrics including productivity, revenue growth, customer retention, first contact resolution and customer quality scores. These improvements have enabled the operation to absorb increases in work volumes and deliver meaningful outcomes for customers at a time of significant growth and volatility in demand.
Further to the tangible uplift in team performance, the transformation in leadership capability delivered the following outcomes:
- Unified and engaged teams: from people working across two locations, to one team successfully working together in multiple locations towards the same goals and objectives.
- A coaching culture: using a variety of coaching methods and approaches adapted to meet individual needs and situations, this maximised the value from the investment in coaching time, adapting our methodology to meet the demands of hybrid working.
- Proactive management: the adoption of a robust leadership framework and routines created consistency and enabled leaders to be more future-focused and less reactive.
- Performance focus: empowering leaders to be creative, adopt new approaches and share best- practice drove an increase in accountability and ownership of their performance results.
- Sustainable, Hybrid ways of working: allowing leaders and their teams to confidently engage, interact and perform effectively located both remotely and on site using the Active Manager digital tools, methods, and approaches
The successful rollout of the Active Manager Programme in Hastings Direct has facilitated an acceleration in leadership capability and resilience, resulting in a customer-focused leadership team who are pro-active, agile, accountable and have the confidence to effectively lead their teams in a hybrid, digitally focused working environment.
Testimonials
The combined BearingPoint and Hastings team delivered a programme that no one would have thought possible in the depths of a pandemic and national lockdown. It is a real credit to both teams to see the genuinely sustainable levels of increased performance and motivation delivered during the most challenging year for businesses and the UK at large. The teams should take genuine pride in their achievements that is centred around a positive, progressive culture of growth and development.
Tony Farnfield, Partner & UK Country Leader, BearingPoint
In the first half of 2021 Hastings partnered with BearingPoint to successfully deliver Hastings ‘Active Manager Programme’ in our Operational teams with positive results in both their behavioral and technical capabilities that have delivered measurable commercial benefits. The programme has delivered a transformational experience that develops leaders’ capability and creates the infrastructure and environment for them to be able to lead and coach engaged, high performance teams’. Working with BearingPoint has been a true partnership, their focus on delivering changes that we can sustain has been highly valuable to us.
Pam Angel – Group HR Director
