Episode 28 - Employee Experience: Interview With HR Expert, Caroline Shine

Caroline Shine is a strategic Head of HR & L&D with an amazing track record of leading employee engagement strategy and HR. Caroline has worked with GANT, Rush Hair, A.S. Watson, and Austin Reed. In this interview, we get to dive into her wisdom of upgrading the employee experience.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to Sticky Interviews. I'm Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. We are the provider of leadership development and soft skills training to the grocery and manufacturing industry. The idea of these interviews is to share great ideas, great concepts, and great ways these skills are being used to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do. Welcome to the show.

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to today's Sticky Interview with me, Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. And today I have the privilege and honor as well to be interviewing Caroline Shine. She's a HR head of with an exemplary career history in a plethora of well known brands, organizations and companies including Austin Reed Group, Rush Hair Limited, AS Watson Group, which you may not know from that name, but from some of their brands on the high street in multiple countries around the world, you definitely would though, and more recently GANT Global as well. With her successes there being numerous and illuminous, by leading a complete culture change, helping them to get more focused on their values and behaviors, she has reduced absence cost by 60K in one year and reduced recruitment cost by a further 70,000 pounds. And at the same time improved employee engagement from plus 11 to plus 59 points in the time that she was there.

Nathan Simmonds:

With this level of experience I wanted to dive into all things employee engagement talking about culture, talking about the ideas and implementations to make this work. And I wanted to dig in and share her experiences in this interview. First and foremost Caroline, thank you very much for your time. Thank you for being here. Really appreciate it.

Caroline Shine:

Thank you for having me.

Nathan Simmonds:

Look, first question with me is always the same. Why do you do what you do?

Caroline Shine:

I think I do what I do because I'm absolutely passionate about all things people. But it's also about seeing results from all my interventions with people. So to see somebody go through a leadership program for example, and to get the feedback from that individual who has been with the business 19 years, never had any training, and to see his leadership score go up and up. But not only that, he tells me that his relationship with his wife has even got better. It's those kind of personal what they do, not just at work but what I see people improve on a personal level. And that's amazing to hear.

Nathan Simmonds:

It is. And I know this feeling because I've been in training rooms and sometimes it's the most difficult person in the training room. And you're having that conversation. You're just, "Really bloody hell. It's like pulling teeth in this conversation." And then for some reason you go back maybe a month later, it's me when I'm in the training room, or two months later or whatever, and it's, "Ah. I remember you," she says. And she says to me, "By the way I'm having less stress at home." And I'm, "That's the best thing in the world ever."

Caroline Shine:

Yep. Yeah.

Caroline Shine - strategic head of HR and Learning and Development

 

Nathan Simmonds:

And the other thing that comes up for me is do you know what? I hear a lot of people that the common [inaudible 00:03:33] response is when people say, "I'm in HR." "Why?" "Because I like people." And actually for me personally I've met a lot of HR people where actually it's not about the people. And then I suppose why. But then to drill it down the example. But do you know what? Actually it's about this and hearing this and getting this. That to me, that's not the words, it's the stuff that comes out of the good things that you do.

Caroline Shine:

Exactly.

Nathan Simmonds:

Phenomenal.

Caroline Shine:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Nathan Simmonds:

And it's not about numbers at the end of the day. It's about the people.

Caroline Shine:

Exactly. Always is about the people. But, I think HR can show a return on investment. So when it's not just about people but actually, "Look, it's also about the business. Improve the business. But it's improve people's lives."

Nathan Simmonds:

Massively. And I think if you chase the numbers you don't get the people. But if you grow the people the numbers come along all by themselves. And it's not a chicken and egg scenario. You can't have one without the other. It has got to be that way first, which is phenomenal.

Nathan Simmonds:

So I wanted to talk to about all things employee experience and employee engagement and I wanted to get your take on this. Like I said, with your experience, I think it's worth digging into that. So for you, what is meant by an employee experience?

Caroline Shine:

For me an employee experience starts with the candidate but it's about the perception that they personally have about the company, its values, it's how they feel that they've got a safe open environment with good technology, being able to do their job, but also that they understand what's their purpose in the business, and that's where for me it starts with the candidate experiences. "What's my perception? Based on the consumer brand, what's my perception of what this company is like to work for?" And then going through that experience, does it live up to those expectations on a personal level?

Nathan Simmonds:

I think it's interesting when you get to the personal level because I think a lot of organizers, they paint a picture and you go through the doors and it's, "Well okay. This is all well and good. And kind of do I want to work here?" But then kind of does the video and the audio sync up? Does what they're saying actually match up with the reality?

Caroline Shine:

Absolutely. And I think I introduce people, my leaders in training, I've done lots of training that I've wrote and delivered myself. But one was all about recruitment. So I'm relying on store managers to do their recruitment. And some of them have never even looked at Glassdoor and looked at, "What's the reality?" And there they were. I said, "You can't get away from it. People will put their experiences on there and GANT was on there." So it's all about, "You are the brand. You represent the brand. These are our values and our culture." So when you come to treating that candidate, that's where you'll get good employee branding. They've got to be the brand and act accordingly from the candidate perspective.

Nathan Simmonds:

You've got to be the ambassador. It's a constant dialogue. And I also had the pleasure of interviewing James Kerr and he wrote a book called Legacy. And his phrase that he used was about getting values off walls and getting them on floors and helping people to really live them. I think it was a statistic that I read when I was writing some content is, actually 27% of people, and that is only 27% of people actually agree and believe in their company values.

Caroline Shine:

Yep. Yep. I went through a whole piece of work around that, which was if you're going to embark on creating a values culture with the behaviors that match them, you have to be tenacious and not let go of it. I started off by doing a values workshop with all mixes of people from all over the business, brought them around to groups of about 10 people and the first thing I did was talk about, "What are values?" And asking people, "What are you passionate about?" And not just work but other stories. And what we got was some great stories of people's experience of life that made them passionate.

Caroline Shine:

For an example, I had people that walk over hot coals, I had other people loved scuba diving. But then I distinctly remember some people who came to this country not knowing how to speak any English at all. She put herself through university and she now speaks fluent English and has a very good career with GANT. And she's passionate about that what she achieved.

Caroline Shine:

So what we first all decided is that we are, our passion or our values are based on our own personal feelings. Then we dived into the values of what GANT are, which were authentic, passionate, and innovative. So we then had to decide, "Well they're just a set of words. What do they mean?" So what I did is I wrote out to help the groups along, just strips of written paper about a behavior that would be what I then called GANT Great, GANT No Thanks.

Caroline Shine:

So what we discussed with the group for example, authentic. What does being authentic actually look like? But actually what doesn't it look like? So for example, "I won't gossip. I won't bring my bad mood into the office and be the mood hoover of everybody else." So the people themselves then chose, "Yeah. That's what passionate means. Yes. That's what authentic. That's what it does mean, that's what it doesn't mean."

Caroline Shine:

And then I went into something called a values dilemma with them and I gave them some dilemmas just to discuss. And I got quite interesting and heated. One of the questions I asked him is, "Would you give money to beggars?" And just let them discuss. What we got back is people saying, "Nope. I'd give money to the people selling The Big Issue." Or, "I'd give money to a charity." Or, "I'd buy them a sandwich instead." And then because some of them felt very, "They're going to spend it on drink and drugs." And everyone had a different view. But the outcome was there's no right or wrong answer but we asked,