The Role of Finance & Operations

Investing in process for growth

LEADING CHANGE AT WORK:

The role of Finance & Operations in driving the digital workplace

SME Executive Summary

A Word From Our Moderator

Introduction

Challenges to Change

Survive Mode to Thrive Mode

People First Cost Strategies

Conclusion & Recommendations

Section 1: Challenges to Change

When it comes to the challenges to change being faced by finance and operations teams, there are some blanket barriers impacting public and private sectors alike and nuances specific to each.

Recruiting, Retaining, Returning

The issue of recruitment and staff retention was a universal challenge faced by all our attendees regardless of their sector. As Seema Jones, Finance Director at Town Legal LLP, outlined, “We are struggling to recruit after numerous attempts this year, and it’s a candidate’s market. I think it’s also a challenge that will increase going forward, especially with employees being more demanding, particularly around issues like pay scale.”

Regardless of sector, employees everywhere have struggled physically and mentally over the past two years, which means they are much clearer on what they want and expect from an employer. Senior leaders need to recognise that to retain staff, they must begin investing in avenues to retain and attract existing and potential talent.

Part of this will also come in the universal management of employee expectations. Previous reports in this roundtable series have also highlighted the need for senior leaders to lead by example, a thought echoed by David Hardern, COO at AON, who said,

“People’s expectations of what the workplace should be have changed. The last two years have proved that remote working is effective for many roles, but now we need to show people that hybrid working can work even better. A lot of good has come from remote working, but we still need people back in the office for collaboration, development and innovation."

He explained that the issue in realigning this thought process stems from employees considering and comparing to only the past 18 months and not remembering a professional period before that.

SME Executive Summary

By Tim Stuart, Chief Financial Officer, Ricoh Europe

Finance and Operations teams have been dealt an incredibly difficult hand. Having to balance everything from complex new finance support systems to navigating the move from office, to remote, to hybrid working and back again.

Dealing with the effects of recurring crises, including but not limited to Brexit, a Pandemic and a global supply chain issue, these teams are less concerned with the cause of the trouble and rather the effects. Their focus is on navigating the business to safer waters.

From an operational perspective they are looking for hard facts and statistics to develop clear plans which will allow for the development of agile admin requirements and processes, ensuring that only clever and necessary investments are being made to support both staff and operational strategies.

Tim Stuart
CFO, Ricoh Europe

HAVING A CLEAR VISION

A further challenge finance and operations teams are struggling against is the lack of clarity around the future workplace. Without clear direction, it’s proving tricky to establish a clear investment and activation plan.

As one of the roundtable participants said, “The biggest challenge is deciding what the balance between the office and the remote location will look like and getting that balance right, for people and the business, is imperative. Unfortunately, no one has the visibility to make that decision with absolute confidence. From a real estate perspective, I would encourage business leaders to be bold and make decisions. Be prepared to make mistakes, learn from them and adapt.”

This highlights the need for clarity and confidence in providing clear direction that ensures finances are being properly channeled to ensure the smoothest return – or non-return – to the office. Senior business leaders need to involve finance and operations teams in the key decisions to accurately plan and provide concrete financial evidence to help justify the decisions made.

A Word From Our Moderator – Paul Mason

As the teams responsible for investing and implementing new processes and technologies, Finance and Operations professionals struggle with cost-benefit analysis. Only through sourcing reliable metrics will these teams make successful and valuable investments to support employees and encourage productivity.

The message I hope CEOs take from this report is to probe deeper into the mythologies and folklores revolving around the new practice of home working. They need to put assumptions behind them and instead inform their decisions with metrics and research, both quantitative and qualitative. Doing so will unburden the finance and operations professionals and unite them with other leaders from around the business.

Paul Mason,
Journalist, writer and film-maker

PUBLIC VS PRIVATE

What was made incredibly clear when it came to financial planning was the sector's influence on investment strategies.

Private sector businesses are investing in technologies to support remote working. However, those in the public sector still indicated a need to make vital public and infrastructure investments. As Stephanie Innes explained,

“My concern stems from the fact that we have a huge landmass of people to look after. We’re managing a lot of hospitals in far-flung areas where we have different machinery people need to use, and from a finance perspective, the issues are keeping track of that and paying it efficiently.”

From a finance perspective, the public sector may need to invest in remote working technologies, but it proves difficult to justify this expenditure to the public and NHS boards when a new MRI scanner, or computers for school children, is also needed. The issue with this attitude to investment in public sector support is that it risks leaving the sector behind.

Introduction

In organising this series of roundtables, we hoped to understand the specific ways businesses have been impacted as a whole, looking at the different departments and speaking with leaders from across industries. For this report, we specifically spoke with Finance and Operations professionals to find out how the changing role and function of the office has impacted them and their day-to-day activities.

What was made apparent by all the attendees was that regardless of sector or industry there has been a refocus on people first strategies across the department, and the biggest challenge being faced by all is the issue of recruitment. That being said, despite some similarities such as a people first approach, there was a stark difference in investments made between public and private sectors which affected the return to the office strategy. With increased scrutiny on public spending over the past two years, public sector finance and operations professionals are having to choose between front line and back-office investment.

Distilling the information, experience and knowledge gathered, the following report has been split into four key themes: “Challenges to Change”, “Survive Mode to Thrive Mode”, “People First Cost Strategies”.

We hope that this report will act as a guide to help businesses leaders support Finance and Operations teams across the UK in developing a robust workplace, to support workers in the future. As such we have also collated a series of recommendations for CEOs and senior leaders to these teams in leading change at work.

Section 2: Survive Mode to Thrive Mode

The pandemic forced businesses to adapt their financial and operational strategies to meet the digital transformation in progress, thus moving into survival mode. One of the biggest challenges addressed with this is the balance of pandemic related policy change whilst focusing on continued business growth.

THE EMPLOYEE WELL-BEING BALANCE

The development of any company inevitably depends on the well-being of its employees. According to our roundtable attendees, investing in people, their comfort and security, is a crucial strategy and the key to enhancing trust in the company and the workplace.

While still working from home, the first step is to recognise the extra-work commitments of the employees, thus creating an environment based on a healthy sense of life/work balance. According to Seema Jones of Town Legal LLP: “Flexibility is a big benefit. We’re hopefully harnessing the best of both worlds (home and office), allowing people to come into the office, not just for the sake of coming in, but where there’s a real purpose in doing so.

At the same time, we should recognise that people have commitments outside of work and let them work from home. It’s necessary to establish a sense of balance, that work/life balance that people were often struggling to get before the pandemic”. In this regard, another roundtable participant agreed that the biggest challenge is “deciding what that balance is between the office and the remote location.”

Nevertheless, all the participants agreed on the need to spend time and resources on people and that the main focus of companies and CEOs should be the one to

“invest in people as they do with clients, making timed events - and not only for clients but also for internal entertainment because we want everybody to bond again and enjoy being back in the office, and thus harness the benefits of having built a strong culture.”

All attendees agreed that it would be necessary to maintain culture when moving through to the next phase of work, ensuring investment in wellbeing and employee support.

RETURNING TO NORMALITY

While every attendee agreed that development and investment in employee wellbeing are essential for business operations, several stressed that the “return to normality” would be a future challenge.

David Hardern of AON stated: “We want people to collaborate in the office for many reasons. We want to meet our clients, innovate and be around physically to help develop employees. It’s important to be around people, and everyone has a role to play here for the benefit of others. Consistency in this hybrid-working approach will allow us to access the broader benefits we’ve missed out on over the last 18 months.”

This statement was also supported by Stephanie Innes, who agreed on the need to go back to the office, underlining the frustration some employees were feeling towards colleagues working from home, saying, “The main friction now is that people working from home often don’t feel a pressing need to come back to the office, but because some of the more mundane things are always done by the people who are in the office, navigating that balance is becoming a challenge.” She went on to explain that “During the height of the pandemic, there was more tolerance, as some sense of normality returns, expectations are changing”.

Businesses need to use culture and encourage employee support across the board to ensure the burden of tasks doesn’t sit heavily on the same shoulders consistently.

Section 3: People First Cost Strategies

“Putting people first” marked a turning point in the Finance and Operation discussion, leading to the core issue of costs. As pointed out by one roundtable participant: “The cost of changing an office, from a traditional desk form to a future workplace with agile desks and collaboration spaces can be eye-wateringly expensive”.

MONEY WELL SPENT

The first strictly finance-led discussion was very heavily focused on the cost of the investments over the past twelve months and whether it had been necessary. The cost of remote work added to the reshaping of the office and has been, according to Finance and Operation Managers, extremely high whilst at the same time indispensable. Companies who did not invest in technological tools and further training, did not and are still not seeing any notable benefits.

There were several attendees who expressed that resources allocated to enhancing technology and creating “a home set up” was essential. Among others, David Hardern of Aon stated: “We gave everyone a home set-up. Everyone already had a laptop, but we provided: a monitor; a keyboard; a mouse; and headphones. We felt it was necessary to provide our employees with everything they needed to work effectively from home, to ensure we continued to fully deliver to our clients. When we did that, we thought the situation would last a few months, because we were naïve - but even if it had have been that short, it was still money well spent.”

In conclusion, there was a consensus among the attendees on the need for that rapid investment and that the high costs did pay off in terms of productivity and employee satisfaction.

AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

Given the expenses of home working set-ups, it’s important that there are metrics that can be deployed to evaluate its effectiveness. In this regard, one roundtable participant stated: “Having listened to my colleagues, they're all saying, ‘we want to spend an extra one or two days a week at home on average. So, you do the maths and go, ‘Well, we just don't need that much space.’ And then you try to work out what additional kit or flexible spaces or collaboration areas you might need. That's what we're finding difficult. What does that future workplace look like? We don’t want to make investments and then go ‘well, that didn't work did it?’ It's a real minefield, and we're entering a trial period now, but even then, it's difficult to know with so much uncertainty about the future”.

What all attendees agreed on was the need for metrics to inform a CEO level decision. For finance teams to make an accurate and reliable cost-benefit analysis, they need all the information possible. Teams need to avoid the folklore of productivity and use hard facts and evidence to support their decisions and investments. Only by continually speaking with employees and managers to gather data, can businesses develop a culture which understands and supports operational strategy.

Conclusions & Recommendations

1. Leadership: Cross-departmental collaboration will be needed

For an organisation's finance and operations team to enact effective and long-term strategy, their CEOs must provide more holistic frameworks for cross-departmental collaboration. By uniting these siloed groups, the finance and operations team can unite the expertise of other business leads to develop a strategy that puts people at its heart, bringing together the different aches and growing pains to create a more seamless operation.

2. Analysis: Using metrics to gain clarity

To develop plans with longevity, finance and operations teams need their CEOs to seek out metrics from the wider business. They need to define what a productive and well-supported employee looks like so the right investments can be invested in. By defining these structures, the finance and operations team will be able to develop and enact a more robust business strategy to protect against any other issues which may occur as a side-effect of recent global events. Only through this approach can we move away from assumptions and lead effective change to hybrid businesses.

3. Understanding: Assessing the “cost-benefit” of new working practices.

Finally, by utilising realistic metrics and cross-departmental collaboration, the finance and operations team will be able to effectively implement and assess the “cost-benefit” of new working practices. Ensuring that plans designed for today are fit for purpose for tomorrow.

Businesses should look to utilise digital workspace technologies, like sensors, which offer real time data and thus dependable insights for future HR developments. This data can be used to make other critical decisions such as the need for desks and room booking, which will support hybrid working plans – what every they look like. Another key solution organisations can explore is business process and automation such as accounts payable receiving and e-invoicing, alongside the use of dashboard reporting which will give critical time back to HR teams. By employing these technologies they in turn can re-invest their time in your organisation's people management and support.