In April 2007, Alison Conaghan and I attended The Forum’s annual Customer Strategy & Planning conference. Over the next two days we watched dozens of talks, keynotes, case studies, training events and, very importantly, the Innovation Awards ceremony. We learned a lot at that information-packed and inspiring event and walked away with our little heads full of ideas to revolutionise WFM in our company. Above all though, that conference left us united by a single objective: to win the overall Innovation of the Year Award at the next Forum conference. Something we still joke about to this day.
So we worked extra hard. Wrote up all our ideas. implemented key changes. Renewed our membership so we could keep learning and a year later...
...well, we had both found new jobs and we never even entered a nomination.
Alison’s expertise turned out to be an asset for The Forum itself while I moved to different companies leading different operational support functions.
Winning an Innovation Award takes a lot more than good will.
Now fast forward to 2024.
It’s the evening of the awards, circa 11pm, I’m at home but my team has just won a transformation award and I’m already elated, when I get a facetime call from one of The Forum’s crew who makes me watch the closing remarks. “Everyone who made it this far is a winner” says Phil Anderson, “but there can only be one overall winner... Indeed!”
It was the last thing I was expecting and one of the best moments of my career. Watching my team collect the award I definitely wasn’t crying nor dancing in my living room – and anyone telling you otherwise better be able to produce some evidence!!
On reflection, the main reason why I wasn’t expecting it was that everything we did back in 2007 seemed really difficult. In contrast, the changes we implemented in Indeed last year felt quite... obvious!
In the last month I’ve re-read our submission, watched our videos and read the judges feedback. You know what, we really did do some amazing work. When you stack it all together, I’m sure we have had more impact in 2 years at Indeed than I’ve ever been able to produce in any other company.
Three things struck me as worth understanding.
- Don’t confuse effort with value. Once you’ve done something for a while it will get easier and you’ll be able to do it better with less effort than before.
- Across the team we had over 50 years of experience. The award now is the sum of half a century of work, not just the last few years.
- Community power. In my career I’ve worked with hundreds of people, am connected to thousands of expert professionals and am constantly inspired by a whole host of people from different sectors. Alison herself, who over the years has trained me and others in my team, has a stake in our reward.
Now, if there is one thing I’ve learned through two decades of Forum membership, it’s that what we learn needs to be shared – so that what is difficult today, may become mundane (but just as impactful) tomorrow, for everyone.
To that end, here are my top take-aways from Indeed’s WFM journey.
- Set a clear direction, tell everyone about it and make sure they understand it.
- Establish a decision making forum where key stakeholders can help you prioritise your work to have the highest impact. They will also keep you accountable to deliver on your promise (and we all need a bit of that some days)
- Be brilliant at basics: make sure your data is right. Do adequate, but reliable forecasts. Schedule shifts. Manage your headcount.
- Know your limits and account for them: measure how volatile your forecast is and account for it. If your data could contain double-counting, make sure you know how much. If schedules aren’t adhered to – add the unplanned shrink to your target staffing curve.
- Be hyper connected: how does forecasting connect to scheduling or capacity planning? How does scheduling inform better recruitment? How can RT insight be fed back into forecasting?
- Build and deliver targeted initiatives that start to improve those imperfections. With approval from your governance, of course.
By working in this way, all the initiatives we drove were supported by stakeholders, measurable against those known imperfections and, because of the hyper connectivity, helped the whole planning function become more effective.
All this, repeated over dozens of projects, is what won us our Innovation award in 2024. It will not be enough to win in 2025 though, so there is one more thought I’d like to share.
For me at least, this award has been 17 years in the making. A combination of luck and years of effort has led to being here with a huge network to help me, really varied experiences, a team of people who love learning in a company that lives for the pursuit of change, a healthy dose of cynicism and decent understanding of organisational design. Probably some stars were aligned too.
The best thing you can do to help that happen is to surround yourself with as many diverse and clever people as you can – people that will argue with you and push you to think in different ways. Because even if you don’t need them today, those differences will make your more adaptable. And when next you face a new problem, you’ll have a new way of dealing with it ready to go.
Being innovative isn’t always about inventing a new thing. Sometimes it’s about using an old thing in an unexpected way. Like we did, by using bureaucracy to drive faster change in a cooperative way.
Who knew, right?!
Author: Bob Stella, Indeed