I recall the brief from the managing director at the time of accepting the role at Ladbrokes back in early 2007: “We need to modernise and improve revenue through our people.”

It was immediately noticeable that the organisation was excellent at relationship building and communication with its 12,500 employees – there is an energy and willingness for change in the company. However, the traditional employment brand lacked appeal, and HR lacked capacity, dealing mostly with transaction rather than with business improvement.

We would need to respond to the challenge through measured HR change. But the organisation, traditionally sceptical of HR practices, would no doubt respond badly to a radical HR overhaul. The key question, therefore, was where to start. I found it difficult as an HR practitioner to find evidence of how people’s performance and accountability were connected to strategy. This had to be a cornerstone. At every turn the systems for performance, organisational development and capability improvement were not fully integrated – I decided that this was an underlying cause of business performance issues. HR needed to improve its credibility, the business results needed to be improved and senior line managers were expecting a more commercially driven HR strategy. Added to this was an underlying issue with the cost structure of employees, specifically those working in our 2,100 shops.

In mid-2007 the HR team set about developing a new organisational performance management and capability system. From December 2007 the new system was implemented – not without some initial scepticism from the organisation. However, the integration of performance, reward, succession management, capability management and development, backed by an IT solution, soon won over the critics. In addition, we managed to unravel the people-cost structure in the business and we developed a three-year plan of change; the first part was implemented in January 2008.

The results in 2008 were phenomenal. The performance system, for all the right reasons, has become the most controversial and talked-about aspect of life at Ladbrokes, because it is driving improved business and employee performance. The organisation has a clear view on human performance, employees understand operational strategy, HR is proving its worth based on line and employee feedback, customers are benefiting from improved service and business results are improving.

Using performance as a central theme during early 2008 we set about establishing further interventions to assist in overcoming the issues identified early on, but also to integrate performance more permanently into the fabric of the business, rather than its being seen as simply an HR initiative. A new employment brand and resourcing process was developed, new shop training packages were developed to support the performance programme and leadership development has been redesigned to align with performance and organisational development requirements. These initiatives have been substantial undertakings and we have outsourced to specialist partners such as KnowledgePool, a training provider, and the consultancy Kaisen.

We are making progress and 2009 will be another year that we add value. HR now has legitimacy and this alone assists in forging a continually developing agenda for HR against the backdrop of increasing turnover. The plan is clear – continue to modernise, improve business performance and lead the gaming industry in the quality of HR practice.

Lessons learnt
- Change of this nature is as big for HR as it is for the organisation. As an HR function we took too long to deal with our own capability issues.
- Don’t try to compensate for negative reactions. Let the quality of the HR product deal with scepticism.
- IT and HR are not natural partners. The development of the performance system relied heavily on an IT solution. HR practitioners need to become more competent in steering IT integration.