“If you’re interested in HR but haven’t broken into the field yet, it’s never too late. Business experience is just as much a part of HR as the People side of things. Having a rounded picture of the HR and People challenges of the whole business is much more valuable than drawing from a single area of experience.” – Ben Wharfe, Chief People Officer at Fiit, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.
As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success.
This week, we had a great conversation with Ben Wharfe at Fiit, who began his career as a Business Analyst at Accenture before branching out independently as a Freelance Business Consultant. In 2011, he joined the team at EDF Energy as Business Consulting Lead, later moving on to become Principal Business Partner and Future HR Programme Director there.
In January 2018, Ben became Non-Executive Director for Recruitment Smart, a responsibility he carried out alongside his role as Director of Operations for Fiit until December 2018. He transitioned to his current role in July 2019.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
I got into HR via a different route than normal. I actually started out as a Business Consultant at Accenture working on large IT implementations, and I was there for a couple of years before I chose to freelance and contracted mainly for BP on their business transformation projects. After another two years, I decided to go to in-house work, and took a job working in transformation for EDF Energy.
When they told me I was going to be working on an HR transformation, I wasn’t that passionate about HR at first. The company explained that the project was really struggling and asked me to go in and set it up anyway on the understanding that they’d move me onto something else after a few weeks. I caught the bug, and six-and-a-half years later, I was leading all of EDF Energy’s corporate HR projects and programmes from IT implementations to HR strategy to company restructures. When you’re implementing such a range of different projects, you really get a view of every single component of the HR lifecycle.
I became excited about what made companies tick and what differentiated good companies from great companies, and I saw that it came down to the same thing every time. Every company has access to pretty much the same technology and customers, and there aren’t many who offer something so unique that it can’t be copied, so the key differentiator is in the people.
Around that time, I was doing a lot of public speaking across Europe—and a little bit in the States—about the future of work and digital disruption. I would talk about diversifying ways of working, the challenge around people potentially working until they were in their 70s or 80s, and the resulting evolution of our view of careers, yet I was returning to a workplace where little was innovative or disruptive.
I decided I wanted to go and be one of the disruptors rather than one of the giants waiting to be disrupted, so I made the transition from working in the big corporate world—which I had still enjoyed every minute of—to building something with a start-up; whether that meant starting something myself, joining a venture early on in its life, or starting a consultancy. Within a week of my search starting, I’d been offered two jobs for two different start-ups which I ended up taking both of, and that started my life in the start-up world. It’s been one hell of a rollercoaster!
Coming from a mammoth company like EDF Energy where everything’s set up and very structured into a place like Fiit where you’re setting up and designing everything from scratch has proved scary at times, but it’s also been very liberating.
People and businesses alike have evolved over the years, and it almost feels like the business models and HR strategies of big companies haven’t kept up, so it’s refreshing to be able recreate the world of work from a blank sheet of paper. When lockdown was brought in in the UK, for example, we gave everyone £350 to set up their home workspace, and £150 to spend on wellness, whatever that meant to them. We actually beat lots of businesses to the punch on that, because in a start-up, if you think of something worthwhile, you can put it into action within 24 hours in most cases.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
One challenge that’s always jumped off the page for me is performance management. Thinking about the processes that I myself went through before I joined Fiit, they followed the standard practice of setting objectives at the beginning of the year, sometimes having a check-in halfway through the year, and then getting a performance score at the end of the year. The infrequency of feedback and information always stood out to me as an element of the system that was broken, so that’s why we run a quarterly cycle at Fiit. It’s more engaging, more interactive, and offers people ‘real-time’ feedback on their performance and development.
The other thing that I find hugely broken is the employee engagement cycle. We used to run our employee engagement survey once a year, which it took about six weeks to analyse the data from. Adding in time for each person to take an hour to complete it, we’d finally get the data about three months after the initial survey, by which point it’s already out of date. Even if it’s not, you’re only taking data from one fixed point in the year, during which time someone might be having a bad week or month, so that data might not be representative of their experience the rest of the year.
Now, we use tools that allow us to send out a five-question survey every single week. It takes no longer than two minutes to fill out, and we ask different questions every time so that we’ve always got real-time data on our people. We use that data to drive and implement decisions, and being a start-up, we can be very reactive to it.
We’re also facing the challenge of growing and scaling our business. We’ve been growing steadily for the last two years following the launch of our fitness app, and we’re currently making the transition from small to medium start-up. What comes with that is the need for more process, more rigor, and more of a focus on our legal compliance, while trying to keep the start-up mentality that allows us to be nimble and able to react quickly. We need to find a way to put the necessary changes in place without taking away too many of the reasons why people would join the company in the process.
I think the other big challenge that we’ve got is that the Black Lives Matter movement has really made us hold a mirror up to ourselves and realise we are not doing well enough in terms of diversity and inclusion, just as a lot of organisations aren’t. We are doing a lot to think about how we address that in terms of providing better opportunities to people from a broader range of backgrounds in the local community. In line with that, we’ve started offering traineeships, and are currently looking into creating two-day mini internships as well. We’ve also committed to providing one employee discussion session per month on diversity and inclusion, as well as a book club on the topic but I still think there’s a lot more to be done in that space.
Coronavirus is also posing a challenge, but not in the ways other companies seem to be challenged. We’ve adapted quite well, but we still need to think about what the future of work looks like and how we might start approaching that. The pandemic has shaken up the way we all view work and the workplace, and it would be a huge waste if we simply went back to how things were. Instead, we need to design something which optimises productivity and employee engagement. We’ve been talking about flexible working for years but have failed miserably to put it into practice, and this is the perfect time.
That said, the main challenge arising from that is in ensuring your employees still get the human, personal side of things; that we are able to balance mental health and wellbeing and provide the same kind of engagement as if we were face to face, even though they may be in vastly different locations.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
Given the fact that my route into HR stemmed from an interest in what impacts companies to move the needle, my first piece of advice would be that those who don’t work in HR right now shouldn’t dismiss it as a career path. While HR used to be a support function, it’s increasingly becoming a strategic driving force within organisations, and as such, we need people in HR who are business-minded and understand how companies work. We need people with MBAs, we need people who understand the industry, and we need people who understand data.
I would recommend getting some operational experience in a business—maybe working across a few different businesses and industries—and really understanding the different dynamics and relationships between people in those businesses. Once you do, you can draw on your experiences inside and outside HR to give you a lot of credibility when having conversations with others.
If you’re interested in HR but haven’t broken into the field yet, it’s never too late. Business experience is just as much a part of HR as the People side of things. Having a rounded picture of the HR and People challenges of the whole business is much more valuable than drawing from a single area of experience.
Ben has been working as Chief People Officer since July 2019, and leads the strategic and operational HR functions at Fiit to support and facilitate the company’s continuing growth and cultural development.
To find out more about the Fiit workout app, explore the range of classes available, or get details of how to start your free 14-day trial, visit fiit.tv