Culture and Behaviours at V. Part Two

[MUSIC] Hi and welcome to V Conversations, the podcast from V about the way the company is changing and the work colleagues are doing right across the company to put V at the forefront of innovation in ship management. I'm Sam Shaw, and in this episode I speak to Graham Lindsay, your chief human resource officer and director of operating model, Loris Demio, about culture and behaviors at V. In our conversation, we discuss how culture and behaviors are about continual improvements, practical applications being more helpful than just concepts and the importance of cultural hotspots. [MUSIC] Graham, I'll come to you first with a two-part question. Why is culture important to you and also to V? Great, thanks Sam. Culture is critically important, and I think through my years of working in various industries, it's something that every company talks about. It's something that every company tends to have a definition for and has distributed things around their offices that describe what their culture is. But very few companies really emulate and behave in the way that their culture asks for. And I think here at V, we've got deeply embedded values. We've had many ways of describing our culture over the years. But in many ways, we haven't really brought the culture to life. And I think culture is so critical for our employees and for our customers and for everyone that interacts with V to understand what we value, to understand how we behave and what we emphasize. And I think that's really what the task for us is, is to get that alignment and to really make sure our behaviors, our actions reflect what we have on the wall and reflect what we say in our various marketing materials and what not. And that's the challenge that's ahead of us. And Laura, same question to you. Why is culture important both to you and to the work that you do at V? So I think culture is a fundamental backbone of everything we do. As Grim said, we have our values, but our values need to become practice, means to become something that each and everyone of us in the company live in breath and can express in day-to-day operations and day-to-day jobs. And you can only do that through culture. You can only be part of this company, being part of the cultural backbone that we actually want to follow. And that's why for me is maybe the most important thing we're also looking for when hiring new people. The cultural fit needs to be there. It's way more difficult to bring somebody. Maybe it's more skill, more talented, etc. into our work if there is no cultural match with that. So I think it's really the backbone of everything we're looking for. Great, some great points there. Thank you. Now, Grim, you've alluded to the values. So the five values that we express is our care, challenge, collaborate, consistency and deliver. But I'd also like to talk about the four behaviors. So these are accountability, customer focus, decisiveness and simplicity. How would you describe the difference between those, the values and the behaviors? Yeah, no, great question. I think before I describe the differences and give my view on the four behaviors, I wouldn't mind stepping back and describing how we got to where we are. And as I said earlier, our values are something that I think, if you ask the average employee around to name our values, they would do that easily. They're well ingrained. People understand them. They know what they mean. And I think we've done a fantastic job of embedding those genuinely over the years. Those aren't changing. Those are the core of who we are and what we do. What we've done a less good job on is defining behaviors. What we expect people to do, leadership, behaviors, how we expect people to interact with each other beyond the values, we've done not so good a job of that. In fact, I think we've sort of crowded the space with a lot of different terms, whether that's linked to safety or it's linked to leadership. We've had too many ways to describe behaviors. And so the backdrop to this is we recognize that and we want to simplify it, which makes sense why we have one of our behaviors being simplicity. We want to make sure the organization sees that these are not the only behaviors that matter, but they're the four key behaviors that we think will have sort of really incremental value creation. If we do this well, we really think it's going to help the organization. So that's sort of the reason why these four. We also chose these four because in many respects, we're not particularly or consistently good at these across the organization. Not only are they important, we have lots of room to improve on these things and learn from each other and where it is working well. So that's the why we're focused on these four. I'd start with the fours. I'd start with customer focus because it really is everything we do. We are a customer focused organization, customer centric organization. And if we start with the customer and work backwards, we're inevitably going to get it right. And I think often we don't. So customer focus is an area we want to absolutely improve understanding of what great customer service and customer focus looks like, what that means it v and what are the behaviors relative to the role that people are in and how they interface with customers. So there's a whole piece there on that that we think we can raise the bar on. Decisiveness, accountability and simplicity feed into that. If we do those things well, it's going to provide better customer service which will grow our business and have lots of great sort of positive outcomes. So I'd say customer focus is really about us thinking about the customer in everything we do working back from that as I say. And then balancing the customer's needs with these needs and needs needs to grow and to prosper. So that therein lies some tension sometimes. We don't always align those things. And that's where we want to help the organization get better at it. Moving to, I'd say maybe the next one is the difference in my mind which can be a bit confusing between decisiveness and accountability. Decisiveness is a really a behavior where the individual is willing to take decisions, critical decisions in particular with urgency owning them but taking the decision but equally consulting the right people before they do. So it's not sort of in a vacuum racing often saying, I've got it in sort of, you know, Maverick in decision making. It's knowing when to engage and when to ask questions to come to a decision but inevitably make the decision and make it with pace. That's really what the decisiveness is. And if you're a leader, it's allowing your teams to make decisions. So it isn't just sort of having all the decisions sort of flow up to you. You need to make sure that you've empowered your team to take decisions and allow them to fail, not catastrophically, hopefully, but in a way that allows them to learn. So that's how I define decisiveness. Accountability is really something slightly different. Accountability is right at the beginning, you know, owning it. It's really understanding that this is my accountability. It's not my neighbors, it's not another department. This is mine. And taking it and then actually owning it is a big part of it. Now that could also be accountability on a departmental level as well where they really understand what is theirs and their accountable deliver. I was going to ask that is whether it's individual or team departmental based or most. Yeah, it cuts across both. And I think first, this effort we've got underway is to really make individuals understand their accountabilities in their roles. And then having, I think, the courage to take that accountability is a big part of it. And it does a thing to to decisiveness. Of course, if you're accountable, then you're going to move and make decisions that are timely and all the rest of it. But it is, they are different things. You can be massively accountable, but not take any decisions in an effective way or not engage people in your decision making. Equally, you can be very decisive and then sort of, you know, point the finger everywhere and not be entirely accountable. So I, so they are slightly different things, but they go very hand in love. And then I think probably the easiest one for people to understand is simplicity. But very hard to, to bring the life. And I think there's plenty of examples in our company, whether that's too many people listed on an email, meetings that don't need to happen, complexity in our processes, that everybody recognizes and sort of bellicates about, that they continue. And I think what we really want to get out of this is, and I've used the word courage already, is the courage for people, and there has to be the desire, but the courage to step in and say, this is inefficient. This is not a simple way of doing things. Why can't we just do it this way differently? And I think people, we got a lot of smart people in this company that recognize inefficiency and recognize the lack of simplicity, but it's that extra step to say, I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to stop doing something or I'm going to suggest that we change something to make it more simplistic. Yeah, it's all too easy. You see it all the time about people just accepting that's the way it's always being rather than challenging that there's possibly a better, more simple way of doing things. Great, thank you for that. Boris, I'm going to bring you back in here. So can you share one or two examples? I'm interested in these values or indeed the behaviors and where they've been put into practice in the work that you do. Yeah, absolutely. Actually, many comes to mind, but I'm focusing some of them, the most recent one. And one of them was, I mean, shipping is a fantastic industry. And one of our owners basically was in a very challenging situation. He focused all his trade in one product and when that product market collapsed, of course, he was faced with a big, big dilemma. And the dilemma was, should I sell the ship and exit the market or should I upgrade my ships and actually trying to pursue a different cargo at different market? Everything is great, everything fantastic, but of course the task then landed on us because as tech managed in ship managers, of course, there's our bread and butter. But this requires multiple teams to come together and write down basically a full plan for the owners acting on the alpha of the owners and the different scenarios, different solution, an extremely tight timeline because of course we're talking about millions and millions of assets and you can imagine that the clock is taking very fast. But again, close collaboration across multiple teams, fleet cell, HSSEQ, technical, everyone working together, everyone not waiting actually to be told what to do, that comes back to the accountability and the size of that dream, actually mentioned before. Everyone having in mind that actually we need to deliver something that is also simple, going back to simplicity and of course always having in mind how do we add value to our customer, that goes back to customer focus, to contact energy majors, shipyards, repairs, markets, suppliers. And again, you can really see how those four behaviors came into one and just delivered a great outcome for the owner that then decided to actually upgrade their vessels. But again, this showed again that how do we together using these four behaviors become actually bigger than the individuals that are working in that because not any individual department would have been able to actually deliver this. And that's just the amazing part of it, how those four things that are slightly different from the values because you see how we really live and breathe those things on a daily basis. The values are there but those are things that we can put into practice to actually deliver a good value and a good service delivery to our customers. Sure and true collaboration from what you said at the beginning of all these departments coming together through that. It's true collaboration, yes. Thank you. That's great. Graham, how can teams within the incorporate these new behaviors into their working patterns most effectively? If you've got any tips or perhaps some advice for them? I think it starts or come to the team piece but it starts with the individual which, if you think what culture is, culture is just a compilation or a whole bunch of individuals behaving in a certain way and I think that's why we're trying to do what we're doing at that level. So every individual can think about these four behaviors on any given day and any interaction. Have I really delivered on these behaviors and how can I change and get better in delivery? So I think that's one of the big takeaways so we ingrain this in the organization. And then there's a whole bunch of things that we can do, sort of as you say tips, we have multiple team meetings, which maybe an opportunity for simplicity, but we have multiple team meetings where this can and should be a topic. So we said earlier around how teams perform or the individual perform. You can talk about that and highlight where somebody in a team has exemplified decisiveness and let's celebrate it. Let's talk about pitfalls where it was particularly challenging in doing one of these things and how we worked around it or more input on how we can improve from our colleagues. So team meetings are great spots to do that. We also have spent a lot of time talking about culture over the last number of months and one of the key points we talk about are cultural hotspots. So every organization has spots in the organization where culture really comes to life where it can be around the water cooler, it can be in more formal meetings, it can be. So thinking about cultural hotspots and then how do those teams and those individuals influence those. So that could be over a lunch where people are describing what's working and not working and then sort of wrestling with the issues around these behaviors. So I'd encourage the organization to think about them in terms of cultural hotspots where we have big bang for our buck around the organization. That would be different from Manila, they would be from Perrails, they would be from Glasgow. Each office also has its own sort of unique cultural hotspots. And then as I say, I think it's celebrating successes and giving honest feedback on where we're making progress or where we're not making progress. And that can't come from the top down, it has to be organic, it has to be as part of team meetings and manager and employee discussions and employee to employee discussions where we address it. And I think it's great because like you say, those celebrations of these examples of these behaviors that all of Stoke helps kind of bring to life on a continual basis for people's peers rather than let you say it just not being coming from from the managers or from the top down really brings that to life. Perfect. Laura, what has been the impact then of these behaviors, both on your team and on the broader organization? Yeah, I think there's been many. I would start with accountability for example. So we're not focusing anymore on that's not my job. We're actually focusing on how can I help solve it? And you could think about that that's not accountability, but it actually is because you take part on something that you know you can help and you can support your organization with and you become accountable of your part, the disaxion, then the broader part. So it's shifting from this individual focus to what's the end goal that we're trying to achieve. And I think that's been a huge milestone that we're working towards. If you look at customer focus that become more tangible, we're not talking about the vessel anymore, but we're looking at the end to end. The customer, the vessel, the crew on board, our internal customers, many of our departments are serving internal customer that could be a fleet cell, it could be the crew in the department. And this is also our customer and we need to focus on them as well. So it's both internal and external. Personally, then I'm a big fan of simplicity and that's what I think we should be looking at every day. We're never going to be too lean in terms of our processes. We work in an extremely complex business and industry and all the external governments and bodies are trying to make it more complex for us. That's why internally we should aim at being the most lean and simple possible. And then of course the size inness is just tying all those things together, clear roles and responsibilities and making sure that you take decisions also when you don't have the full data. It's something that happens every time or we'll never be just playing with all the cars over and unfortunately so that is where the size inness comes in. Again I'm stressing for that I really love how practical those beaters are and how you can put them into your daily operations. They are helping you to show up every day, not just individually, but as a team. So they're more than words and that's bringing the synergy out of every team. I think it's just a matter of how do we leave those every day because there's going to be a time where you don't know how to solve certain issues and certain problems but if you follow those four behaviors actually you have the direction set and then together we will find the solution to them. I think it's so important that you say that they are practically applicable rather than just being conceptual. I've been really nice talking to you both. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thanks son. Thanks for listening. We'd love to know what you think of the show. If you've got any feedback or questions please send to [email protected]. Speak to you on another episode of The Conversations Soon.