Dwain McDonald

Tag: new normal

  • Working from home – way more popular than expected

    Working from home – way more popular than expected

    While I was CEO of DPD UK, one of my biggest concerns when lockdown started was whether back-office employees would adapt successfully to working from home. At DPD there were 1,700 people in a wide range of functions such as Finance, Admin, Operations, Sales, Customer Care and IT. Would their performance or productivity drop? How could managers lead and inspire their people from a distance? Would communication and teamwork suffer? How would people handle domestic distractions?

    As I write this post nearly four months down the line, 1,450 managers and employees have given us their answers to these questions, in one of the most important people surveys we had ever conducted. And I must admit I was surprised by the results. Not only by the fact that over 90% completed the survey (our highest ever response rate), but also because a massive 80% said that they’d be more than happy to continue working from home in the future.

    We carried out the survey so that the team could help us shape office life in ‘the new normal’ and it looks like half of our office-based staff would, given the option, have chosen to continue working two to three days a week from home once lockdown restrictions had been lifted.

     

    The business benefits of working from home

    The survey responses did of course mention some downsides, including ‘lack of interaction’, ‘finding it difficult to switch off’, and mental wellbeing. These responses were factored into our thinking and in early July the leadership team learned far more about mental wellbeing from a leading expert before cascading a programme to more than 200 frontline operational managers.

    Back to the survey: a quarter of managers said there were no negatives at all about working from home, with a huge proportion citing benefits such as:

    • No commute
    • Flexibility
    • Reduced costs (fuel and food)
    • Better for the environment
    • Spending more time with family.

    Meanwhile, the service provided to customers by a dedicated DPD team on the front line was better than it’s ever been, despite the record-breaking volumes we were carrying, so concerns about a dip in performance were unfounded. We also saved nearly £60,000 per week on business travel and meetings and I definitely didn’t want to go back to spending that much every week!

     

    Investing for the future

    So, although day to day operational issues were a big challenge three months ago, we realised that we didn’t all need to be in the same office to tackle and overcome them. Likewise, despite having to run board meetings via conference call, our strategic discussions were probably more focused than they had been before.

    In fact, we have still been making very big decisions from our home offices, such as deciding to spend £100m on extra vehicles, £60m on new premises and £40m on new equipment and technology. This £200m investment from now until November 2020 should ensure the handling of our biggest ever pre-Christmas peak. DPD was expecting to carry 1.9m parcels on Cyber Tuesday, that’s a massive 300,000 more than on the same night last year, so as well as more vans and depots, we needed an extra 4,000 drivers and 500 shift managers by December!

    And looking further ahead, I was also keen to increase our graduate intake, so in 2020 I hoped to recruit 70 of the brightest minds from university – twice as many as in 2019.

     

    No more ‘copy, paste, repeat’

    So, what’s the moral of the tale? Despite DPD’s reputation for disruptive technology and innovation, the culture of the parcels sector was, in many ways, quite traditional. And the whole working from home experiment made me realise that it’s all too easy to fall into a ‘copy-paste-repeat’ style of management. And that means we haven’t always seen a better way of doing things – until we had to.

    By thinking we have to go to the office every day, we’ve carried on doing what we’ve always done since leaving school and what many of our parents did before us – go to work 9 to 5 from Monday to Friday. That was the DPD way for as long as I can remember. This corporate ‘sausage machine’ is what we were used to and of course changing the habits of a lifetime could feel uncomfortable at first. But I think we are coming to the conclusion: ‘If we have found a better, smarter and cheaper way of doing things, why go back to the old way?’

     

    Rewriting the rules of work

    The current pandemic gave us a huge opportunity to challenge old assumptions, to rip up the traditional landscape and to ‘rewrite the rules’ of work. So, I asked my people and talent team to take a fresh look at our terms and conditions and to think much more holistically about the package we have previously offered. To look beyond the traditional benefits – salary, car, pension, etc., and to reflect on what benefits are most important to people in the post-COVID-19 world.

    One of the directors said to me the other day: “I’m performing better now because I’m having a lie-in till 06.45 and am at my desk by 7:30am instead of being stuck in the morning commute. And I’m healthier too because I’m out cycling at 6pm instead of fighting my way home through the evening traffic. What’s not to love about that?”

    But again, not everyone will agree. Because around ten percent of DPD employees, for all sorts of personal and professional reasons, were chomping at the bit to get back to office life. For some, it’s a case of valuing the camaraderie of colleagues even more than they’d realised. So where possible, once we begin a phased return to DPD premises, we will do what we can to prioritise their return to familiar surroundings.

    And perhaps that’s the real moral of the tale. Just as different customers have valued different elements of DPD’s service proposition, different employees will value different aspects of their working lives. For some, the office banter will be well worth the daily commute, while for others the flexibility of working from home will trump even the best office routine.

    Thanks to an award-winning app, DPD offers home shoppers more choice than any other carrier about where and when they receive their parcel. Perhaps it’s time to give our employees as much choice about where and when they do the jobs that we pay them to perform.

     

  • Towards a new normal – how COVID-19 made us think differently

    Towards a new normal – how COVID-19 made us think differently

    I spoke to several CEOs during May 2020 and it’s safe to say that none were prepared for the challenges of grappling with a global pandemic. Sure, there were business continuity plans and experts who carried out regular risk assessments but dealing with an overnight economic lockdown is not something they teach you at business school. So by the end of this crisis, the new normal will probably look very different to what went before.

    How the Coronavirus pandemic impacted different industries

    The impact in different sectors was stark, with clear winners and losers. Divorce lawyers were apparently inundated with new enquiries, whereas the long-term prospects for karaoke bars looked somewhat less promising. At DPD B2B volumes halved – virtually from one week to the next. Simultaneously B2C doubled overnight – and because we led the UK market in home deliveries, this produced the kind of volumes that are normally only seen in the six-week pre-Christmas peak.

    Customers shopping online rather than on the high street meant we delivered more food, flowers, nail varnish, eyelashes and loungewear than ever before! In fact, Easter volumes were double those of last year. And incidentally, Coronavirus did nothing to put the brakes on the company’s mission to become the UK’s most sustainable carrier. This year we’ve already delivered 2.2 million parcels on all-electric vehicles and the target for Cyber Tuesday (1 December) is to deliver an incredible 70,000 parcels on EVs.

    The new normal and attracting the best talent

    The parcels sector is known for attracting resourceful people who can think on their feet, but in the last two months the business had to become more agile, flexible and innovative than ever before.

    For example, it took some pretty nimble footwork to recruit 500 new drivers in the last month, with another 500 in the pipeline by the end of June, ensuring that they’re trained to deliver the top-quality doorstep experience that DPD customers pay for. And given that we now expect the 2020 peak to be 40% bigger than last year, I found myself asking my Property team to find ten additional sites by the start of November, making a total of 15 new depots by the end of 2020. Oh, and a further 3,000 new drivers by then as well.

    It’s in this kind of crisis that you find out what your people are really made of. Resilience – how well you adapt in the face of adversity – is what will separate the winners from the losers as we navigate these uncharted waters and adapt to the new normal. So, the approach at DPD was to focus on what’s most important and on what we can change, while accepting what’s outside our control.

    The upside of government restrictions is, that while remaining physically remote from each other we had to find new ways of working together. And guess what, some of them are probably here to stay.

    Necessity is the mother of invention

    This old saying has never felt more true than it does today. And there’s something really exciting about questioning the status quo and finding new ways of doing things. For example, I held daily one to two-hour conference calls with the whole Senior Management Team, so that we could discuss the nitty-gritty of running the business. This extra communication brought us closer together and we became more productive and focused than ever.

    But the biggest benefit is that each director invited some of their people to these virtual meetings. That meant much faster cascading of decisions to the rest of the team at the coalface and much quicker execution of the operational changes we needed to make. And of course it also gave some up and coming senior managers direct exposure to the C-suite.

    The plan for the new normal is to extend this format to our annual Strategic Board meeting, which normally sees 17 of us gathering in a hotel to discuss crucial business decisions for three days. That’s the way our previous two CEOs did it and when I took over in 2008, I carried on doing it the same way, thinking ‘if it ain’t broke, why fix it?’

    But the truth is that three such intense eight-hour days in a row became an endurance test and it’s fair to say that if you were the last presenter on Day three, you probably didn’t get everyone’s full and undivided attention!

    With the physical boardroom off-limits, the Coronavirus pandemic gave us the opportunity to look at this meeting with fresh eyes. This year we will still do three days in a row, but in highly focused and disciplined two-hour chunks, for a total of just four hours a day. Each director will have their say, but they’ll only present for 20 minutes at a time and we will draw names out of a hat to decide who goes next, keeping everyone on their toes and fully focused.

    Time to think

    In some ways the parcels sector can be quite traditional. But another myth proven to be untrue is the one that said people are less productive working from home. It’s simply not true, though I have to admit that I was one of the sceptics when the People and Talent Director said: “1,700 of our 13,000 people won’t be coming to the office tomorrow.”

    But what we discovered is that the quality and quantity of work is just as high and, in some cases, higher than before. It’s an outdated attitude to think that everyone must be at their desk all day every day – and be seen to be there.

    It has always been fully ingrained in DPD’s DNA to be a fast-paced culture, often moving at lightning speed to make things happen for our customers. But loads of people are enjoying the fact that they’re running around a bit less now. Less time stuck in rush hour traffic jams, less pollution, less time away from the family on business…, in short we’ve discovered that less is more and that some of our old habits are past their sell-by-date.

    For example, I suddenly had much more thinking time than before the pandemic – and I’ve realised that my diary doesn’t have to be crammed with appointments from 08:30 to 18:30 every day. That was just another outdated habit from old-world conditioning that tells you that this is the way to behave.

    In short, there’s been a lot of talk about ‘returning to normal’ and at the start of this crisis, I must admit that the question of how to do that at DPD was at the top of my mind. But what I have learned is that this pandemic has given business leaders the opportunity to take a step back, take a much-needed breath and then consciously decide which bits of the ‘old normal’ are, at the end of the day, really worth keeping.