Episode 1: Culture

Thanks for downloading this first episode in a new podcast series from Octopus Energy, where our aim is to give you a real insight into the company's DNA, and that's the way we work, the way we think, our values and our people. My name is Russell Goulsmith, and together with my co-host, Executive Coach Trudy Lewis, we'll be chatting to various members of the Octopus Energy Team over the coming series, exploring everything from our products and services to the technology that sits behind them, and the culture that is driving us to deliver cheaper, greener energy. And so, what better way to kick things off and help set the scene for the conversation ahead, than to speak to the founder and CEO of the company Greg Jackson. So welcome Greg, and joining him online is the marketing and product director Rebecca Dibb, SimKip. So welcome both of you. Hey, Russell, hey Trudy, and hey Rebecca as well. Hello, hello, hello. It's a bit weird actually, yeah, the two of you are currently sat in your office, clearly a little bit apart. What's going on there at the moment? Well, we've just done opened a new office in Soho, but thanks to COVID, it's got room for 250 people and is occupied by right now, the two of us. So, we've just got around seven and a half thousand square feet to ourselves. We have, I mean, look, I think if I can, I could probably like appear in the background of Greg. So I should probably explain for the benefit of those listening to the podcast rather than. And Rebecca just picked up her laptop. He's currently walking around the office to where Greg is. Hey, I was Greg sitting on the floor, because that's just how we've all saw it all that really carefully planned set up. You can cut this bit out if you want. This is great. And no, because it's great to see the set up and the branding and everything. It's nice space. Yeah, it's good, isn't it? Right? Yeah. I think every time we, this is our 12th kind of office in our four and a half five year history, including the other towns, Leicester, Warwick and Brighton plus, oh, actually a couple more. You've got Melbourne and Sydney as well. But I think part of the job is to create a space where people want to come to work and that enables them to be collaborative, but also to be able to focus. And so, you know, big open plan areas, but with lots of breakout space. But I think the other bit that we're, you know, kind of really trying to achieve now is we've discovered that lots of people want to come and visit us and actually creating a great space for the visitors to flow around while people are working and to see how the company really operates. So deliberately what we've done is really create a space that's good for our people inspiring and hopefully motivating and relaxing. But also, yeah, to welcome the world. Cool. Well, thanks, Greg. Why don't you start by explaining where the idea came from for this podcast? You know what, we've been growing rapidly. I guess in four years since we started trading our revenues over one and a half billion pounds. And you know, our team site is growing from, I think Rebecca, you joined how long ago? I was employing number 34, three and a half years ago. Cool. And we're now, you know, there's over a thousand people on our Slack system. Now they're not all full-time and they're not all here in the UK. But, you know, we've got well over 700 full-time equivalent people in our team now. Plus we've got partners, companies who we work with to build our business here and internationally. And really what we're whining is that as we keep growing, the most important thing about our company is really understanding the mission we're on is not retrofitted to what we want to do. It's what we exist for. And our culture of everybody understanding and carrying that and spreading it is so important. And we would think like, how do we best communicate? If you weren't here on day one, how do we best help you kind of soak yourself into that quickly? And being part of these conversations is going to be a way out. I really hope that people who are joining the company, people who, you know, it may be with companies we acquire as we open up another countries, as we drive another line of business. I really hope that this enables people to really get a good sense of where we come from, what really matters to us and how they can really revel in being a part of that and growing it themselves. Now that's what people join the team. You know, if you're thinking about joining this company, what better way of getting to understand how we really are. And then I guess finally, we've worked hard to try and create a different kind of organisation. One way, you don't hang your personality up alongside your coat when you're right at the office, but where you can be your real self because that's who we hired and that's who your teammates and customers want to deal with. And I hope more organisations follow this path where when they recruit people, they really cherish the essence of the person they've hired and allow them to be themselves and to create and contribute as best they can. So if we can talk about this, opening this part of a conversation within the business community, I think that's a contribution we can make to how companies can better serve their employees. And of course, vice versa. Rebecca, we only spoke for the first time last week, about putting this podcast series together. Here we are literally a week later on episode one. Is that typical of the way you guys work? Yes, absolutely. I think if something's important, you make it happen and you make it happen fast. There's no point waiting around for it. We felt that the organisation has grown rapidly. We can't talk to everyone all of the time. We're not in front of everyone all of the time, but actually how can we explain to people how we work and how we do things differently. Well, okay, well, let's dig a little deeper then into the culture of the business. So Greg, let's start with you. What does it take to work for octopus energy? First of all, we've got a concept that we talk about, the Drystone Wall. Now, I don't know if you know about Drystone Wall, but Drystone Wall is a way in which people build walls without using cement. The wall is most of the familiar with you have a brick. There's a perfect cuboid and you cement it onto another perfect cuboid and they all make a perfect straight wall. Drystone Walls date back millennia. They're still Drystone Walls around from Roman times here in the UK. The way they work is the person building a wall looks each stone, natural stone, and identifies how it will best fit with the others and they start stacking them. There's no cement, that's why it's called Drystone. Instead, it gets a strength from how well the natural shape of those stones fits together. That strength means, as I've just said, they can last millennia, whereas traditional cemented walls have real problems like watering grass, freezing, cracks the cement and the wall starts to fall apart. The wall is only held together in a traditional, in the wall, most of it from brick walls are with milliwaves because of that cement and that kind of requires a lot of effort to do that. Now, most companies recruit people, we're all different shapes. Then they try and turn them into bricks. They knock the edges off and they try to make straight lines because it's easier for them to construct the wall like that. It's harder to do it our way, which is really getting to know an individual, really getting to know where their strengths will fit against those of others. But if we do that well, instead of chipping off some bits of someone that are incredibly valuable and then trying to get them to do some stuff that's just not them because they've got to fit into the wall, we're able to really try to enable people to contribute what they are naturally best at and then join most. If someone brings those characteristics in and is comfortable with that, then they can enjoy tremendous time here. If on the other hand, they crave being turned into a cuboid and some people do, then they genuinely are better off, for example, a more traditional corporate. So, Greg, are you saying that the kind of people that you're looking for are those that are really looking for a challenge that want to push themselves? Yeah, it's interesting. I think most companies say that, right? But then what I did push themselves to do, I worked in a large corporate matrix organisation, and what I was pushing myself to do is to get someone to do something they didn't want to do. If you spend your entire life pushing water up hell, it's just not enjoyable. It's also not making the most of the chance of yourself and everyone else. So, I think with us, it's interesting. Have you ever seen one of these videos on YouTube of an animal being that out of captivity? So, they'll have like a deer or a bear or something. It's been kept in a cage and they'll take it off to a field and they'll open a cage and it will kind of gently nervously tend to the work its way towards the gate and look around. Nine times out of ten, it will take a couple of steps into the wild, breathe the fresh air, see the horizon and disappear in a distance. And that fills us with joy. At one time out of ten, by the way, it will kind of see the outside world and it'll go, actually, this looks a bit scary. I quite enjoyed being fed three times a day and having a free vet built, whatever medical care. I guess back in the cage. And I think an organisation like ours is very much, if you're moving from a corporate world, are you considering where you want to work? It's having the freedom and the responsibility that for example, I've just described there, you have to be able to do a lot for yourself. There aren't loads of support functions. We've got 700 people or wherever and we don't have an HR department. You cannot expect other people people to cover your back, you have to take responsibility. But in return, you're able to do so much to keep on, you know, delivering, whether it be outstandingly good customer service, whether it be nurturing and growing a fantastic team as you work your way through this growing organization, whether it be having a lot more freedom in how you write code, might software, whatever the kind of space you're in, we don't always deliver this, but the idea of the concept is you can see the challenge. You want to be successful. No one comes to work to do a bad job. All right, great. Okay. In that case, let's let you do a good job. So we hired you because you're great. - So Rebecca, you've been here about three years. How is it different working for octopus in comparison to your previous experience? - So previously, I worked at British Gas, which, to be honest, is for a lot of some really great people trying to do some great stuff. And great people getting totally beaten down by the traditional way of doing things, which is sign off and processes and silos and functions. And I remember when I first joined that business, trying to get something across the line and in a meeting with some people who have been in the business for years, and it was just an absolute kind of computer says, "No, faces, that won't work here. You don't understand your new in, you're so keen, you won't be that keen for long." And I managed to stay keen for about eight years. And then when I was the person in the meeting, when someone knew suggested something and I was going, you know, that kind of sucking through teeth thing that I realized it was time to go because I could no longer, I no longer have that joy of work. And I think when I came to octopus, there are, right, you have complete freedom to drive value and grow the business. And that's quite scary, first of all. So, you know, I remember having a conversation with Greg and first of all, it was even stuff like, "Well, who's my team going to be?" Because obviously this is a senior person coming to the organization. And then someone wants to know who your team will be. And he was like, "Well, you know, there are people who will do stuff for you. It's not quite as simple as that. You know, there's that kind of this guy here. He's awesome. You know, he creates stuff and this person builds stuff and this woman, she writes stuff. And you kind of use them to fulfill your needs. And that was quite difficult to kind of get my head running till I realized it's the kind of organization where, you know, if you leave people, people will come and people will create great things together. If you kind of, you know, you don't put them in a particular where you're a writer and you're a developer. And, but, you know, you encourage them to expand their own horizons. And something else that was a big change for me was, as a mark to how you get work approved, how I get things, you know, I was used to kind of you come up with an idea. And then you take it for someone to reprieve and they go, "Yes, you can do that." And when you created something, it would go to a lawyer or a regulatory person and a data protection person and an operations person and a public affairs person and a PR person, all these different people to sign off. We don't have utter octopus that actually, you know, I'm the head of marketing. It's my responsibility to make sure that anything that is going out is correct. It's not going to cause us any problems. And that actually I know my trade. I know when I'm creating something that it's not illegal or, you know, to Reverend, it's going to do the right job. And that creates, it's like complete accountability for your work. It's not just responsibility, but accountability. And that means that you're thinking whenever you create anything, you're thinking about all the edge cases, you're thinking about all the things that could go wrong. You're thinking about what if that customer thought that or someone read it in a particular way. So there's no lazy creation of ideas. You're working really hard to make sure that what you put out of the door isn't going to cause you the issues later down the line. Greg, what about yourself in terms of, because this isn't the first time that you've led an organization. So was there anything from your previous businesses that influenced how you wanted octopus energy to kind of look, feel run? Yeah. And I think we had the opportunity because we had kind of visionary investors to start off on a path that would enable us to kind of set a trajectory that I've always wanted to be on. And the recap things-- I mean, first of all, the way from what Rebecca was talking, even from things I've previously led. But I used to work at Procter and Gamble in Marketing. And probably the core skill of a junior marketing person, Procter and Gamble, was getting signatures. You actually didn't put that much effort into making sure that the creator was brilliant, because you knew it would get butchered during the signature process. Moreover, you wouldn't put that much effort into making sure it was going to be fully compliant, because the compliance team would do that. And fully legal, because the legal team would do that. Now, by the end, a dozen people would have done a whole load of work to make a good idea of pretty bland and ordinary. And then the process it was painful. And by the way, sometimes-- because you always get signatures, you can actually care that much whether the signatures should have gone on the paper. You just got them. That was the joy. And so when you look at how companies, for example, in sectors like ours, ended up in misselling scandals, everything there was signed off. Everything there had gone through all those processes. If at what those processes did was once people had got the sign off on something, they allowed it to be scaled without anyone questioning whether it was right. And I think that what Rebecca talked about there, the touch of accountability sitting with you actually means that you make sure-- you absolutely make sure it's right. Now, of course, if Rebecca wants you to go to legal and say, hey, we're first going to check this. But it's unrequest as opposed to forced. And that is what causes the accountability. In terms of other stuff I've learned from us, I think it's so difficult for people to come from high-flying backgrounds to remember so important for them to be aware that pretty much everyone's pretty much as smart as they are. And if you can make ends meet in the modern world, if you can bring up a family and take out a mortgage and deal with all of the things that make life hard, you can do what most companies want if you most of the time. And instead of managing a sitting over you with a set of KPIs and a checklist and a prod to make you go faster, what they should really be doing is freeing you up to deliver the brilliance that's inside you. Very good. OK, change your subject slightly. Someone's gone through your recruitment process. They've got their job offer. They're all very excited. They're rearing to go. They're listening to this podcast. What can they expect on day one? I think it speaks so long since my day one. Rebecca, I've gone. No, it's funny actually, because I've had two people join the company during lockdown, actually. People who were both interviewed during lockdown, which is kind of hard, hard work. And then it served out their notice. And then joined, including one who'd moved from another country. And they're the kind of octopus people, right? So they're people who, you know, one, they didn't have a company laptop, you know, but they were kind of rolled with that. They had a company we use Gmail. So they had access to everything. We got them second up on our Slack channel first. They can talk to everyone. So the first thing we do, we go, here's the marketing group. Everybody say hi and share some banter. And there was immediately some banter. So actually the first thing you're doing is kind of, this is everyone, this is a community. I buddhist them up with people immediately. So actually the second person to join, I budded up with the first person to join two weeks earlier, because he'd just gone through that process. And I was like, what did we say to read that was useful? You know, there's not a kind of set process for it, in my team in particular. It was just kind of bring them in, bring them in immediately and start to talk to people and talk to everyone about how we do things. Yeah, I think it's interesting. It's on reflection listening to Rebecca. One of the things about having a very decentralized organization with very little in the way of process. Yeah. It's like that's the experience when someone joins Rebecca's team. It's probably quite different when they're joining a different team. Right? Now, all the people who run teams will be learning from each to the right what works and what doesn't. And finding flavors that work best for their function, their role, their location. But rather than as trying to say, hey, here's the best practice, which would then immediately constrain that learning. Every time someone joins, is part of the company learning how to do it better? How cool is that? I sometimes say, I don't run the show. I just host the party. I create the environment in which people can mingle and get to know each other and deliver great stuff. But it is everyone's responsibility to make it that. So I guess, and I think that is probably, you know, a lot of companies might say similar things, but we're at the more extreme end of it. Have you had any challenges? So individuals coming in new and experiencing perhaps that for the first time you said earlier, it's not for some people. Yeah, we've had a very few people who craved structure, you know, and actually would look at this and think, this is just, it's some might think it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it recognizes powerful but not for them. And a few might even think this is kind of crazy. And they'd go, rather go back to a very structured process oriented corporate. And that's totally cool, you know, I think it's a bit like, you know, products and services that company sell, not every product services for everyone. And if I say I want you to be yourself here, well, you know, if you turn up here as a kind of person who vehemently wants to make the most money possible and will tread on your colleagues to get it and that believes that the way to get things done is through politics. Well, you know, I don't know how we went, you know, if you do join, it won't be, you know, it won't be a place you're successful. Rebecca, when, when we were planning this podcast, so we've had a couple of emails go back and forth and one of your emails, you wrote that you're keen to keep your random awesomeness and way of doing things, which kind of really stood out for me. So I don't know if this is going to be something that you are able to answer, but it was just an interesting phrase. And so I just tell me about random awesomeness. What's all that about? Well, I think random awesomeness is always enabling the most kooky bits of everyone's personality, you know, all those bits, you know, when you sit in a meeting in a corporate and you kind of wonder, what people really like outside of work. And sometimes you see that, the Christmas party and people drink a bit and you think, "Well, I'm a dint know that you did that or you were like that or something." But it's about, you know, "Octopathau, can you kind of bring that out every day?" And what people will do at work. So, and actually almost, you know, people kind of coming up with stuff that feels a bit uncomfortable. You know, I like the fact that the business that Greg founded and I joined early on, and we've kind of set a lot of the culture around. And you people coming into the business will push it even we kind of think is acceptable and occasionally something will be happening. And you know, me and Greg will be like, "God, you know, that's a bit far out even for us." You know, someone will come up with an idea and we have to kind of believe that actually bring in brilliant people and they do, they do random, random, awesome stuff. Whether that's, you know, a developer deciding to change something because they've worked very closely with an operations person. You know, as we had quite recently, actually someone sent something live in the middle of the day that was totally brilliant and totally unexpected. And in a normal organisation, it would never have happened at all, but it was much, much better than what would have been before. And it's kind of an even people to go, "I've got a real passion. I think I can make a real difference by changing that thing within my remit and just being able to get on with it." You know, it's quite funny isn't it? I mean loads of comrades, people have got something they want to do. And they keep bashing their head against the war. It's like a flight at the window. Yeah. And you should be really honest. It's like, "We're either going to say yes straight away so you don't have that." Oh no, honestly don't bother. But keep coming up with stuff because we might say yes next time. Rather than having this thing where I was thinking to a big corporate and then we kind of try to be innovative and create a venture thing. And then, you know, they have people spend a year going through iteration after iteration of their idea, pitching to the executive and give wise words back to go and make a better job and then pitch it again. Now, it's a few things to come from that. First is, anybody who spent a year pitching something is never going to admit it didn't work. Right? So, they're not going to fail fast. They're going to keep on pretending it's worked. Right? The second thing is, the executive is often the worst people to know what's going to work. And we've had a great thing here, right? A guy on Rebecca's team, Max. There was a load of stuff around the office which we've been given by other companies all which have been part of development and they're ordinarily the thrown away or whatever. And he said, look, I put it all in a big box and give it away as a prize to customers on Facebook. And I was like, look, we don't do that. We're not a company that does competitions. Anyway, and. He did it anyway. Yeah, actually, anyway. And guess what? It was unbelievably successful. Incredibly successful. So, a couple of months later, Max said, hey, you know, a competition. I want to do another one. I want to give away eight electric vehicles, eight because we're not to put a Tesla and what I was like, how much is that going to cost? Anyway, again, I think it was completely not what I would ever do, but we could have forward it. It worked out at, I think, at 16 pence per customer because I rolled business. So, let him do it. And again, it was outrageous. It was successful to the extent that the CEO of another energy company came up to and he went, that is genius. Right? How does your company develop ideas like that? And I was like, you know, just develop them and just let's people come up with stuff. Exactly. You know, I think he's the thing. They can't replicate this. Yeah. It is so hard for a company to replicate that freedom. So, I can tell everyone about it. Right? And it's not competitive factors. Sorry, everybody. There is a filter. I mean, you know, we give people support. So, kind of, Max did, you know, and we kind of pote the idea around and Greg was like, oh, I'm really not sure. But then we decided to go with it. So, it's not people are totally, it's not freely range. It's not total do whatever you want. It's like, you know, come up with whatever you want and then we will help you do that. And actually, it's the kind of environment. Sometimes even if we go no, and then actually Max and other people feel empowered to go, I'm really going to champion this one because I really think we should. And it's just a confused, it's like, okay, well, we're listening. And then we need to understand that, you know, this is our culture and what people would do is develop even beyond what we could have hoped. And there's a similar thing actually. We have, we use Slack as a communications channel and we have a comms channel where anyone in the business can put in any suggestion around whether that's a customer said, oh, I don't have the email, can we tweak it or just random suggestions. And that channel is monitored by my team. And I look in there, you know, I'm kind of constantly reading that channel to see what suggestions go in. And it means that, you know, you'll get some incredibly brilliant ideas from our operations team. We just spoke into a customer that you never would have thought of when we can action them really quickly. So, there might be like 20 things going there a day. And 15 also, we've had that question before and we can give an answer to, you know, and, you know, four things are really hard and yes, ideal, but it's not something that would be really productive just an organisation. And there might be one thing which we literally never thought it was absolutely brilliant. And then you down tools and you make it happen. And that absolute ability for anyone in the business to talk to anyone in the business and share those ideas is what enables us to kind of, it's not just, you know, growth like that. It's, you know, it's growth in steps, right? Because we just do things that you never would have expected a business like us to do. But taking that as an example, so take the competition one and I get the autonomy and you want responsibility, but mistakes will happen at some point. So what do you guys as leaders, you know, as the leaders of the business do then? Yeah, like, so loads of companies say embrace failure, but they don't deliver on it. So we really do. And I think the first thing is you've got to remember when someone does something wrong, it's very rarely meant to, they probably feel worse about than we do. So first thing is like look after that person, put your arm around them. And if it happens a lot with that person, then we might be having a different conversation. But the point being we all make mistakes and we should learn from them, but we should be a little bit of support because guess what? The person who made the mistake this time is the one who's least likely to make it next time. Now, the next thing is that we don't brush it under the carpet because I think that if people are scared of telling you when they've made a mistake, right? And they don't know that we all make mistakes. Then there's a high chance that they try and cover it up. And I've seen that happening lots of companies. And the problem is it's the mistakes you don't know about that cause the biggest damage to a company. So it is literally thanking someone for telling us when something's gone wrong. Blame flows upwards. If we've put someone in a position where the mistake is going to cause a big problem for the company, well, that's my fault, right? So we were talking about that competition thing earlier as an example. If it didn't work, it's a small enough risk, it doesn't matter. And if it does work, it can make the company better. But nobody should be exposed to be able to make a mistake that kind of bets the company or creates massive problems financially, legally or in terms of customers. So the more seen you get, the more responsible that you have to take for making sure that you're aware of what can go wrong and guarding against it. And if anything goes wrong, it's your fault. And that's cool because ultimately the blame runs with me. Well, something that's kind of linked to this conversation, but it's just picking up on what you said earlier Greg about not having a HR function within the business. So how does that work exactly? I think, first of all, it's a bit of a philosophy. But by the way, one day maybe we'll have one. The question is, if we've got this far without one, maybe we can go all the way. When I first run small businesses, you start a business, you've got one person and 10, then 20 and 30 and 50 and so on. You don't have an HR function. You learn how to do it yourself. You learn how to deal with all of the really important aspects of management. And it's incredibly fulfilling. And I think, I use that one as an example because if you can run a company of 50 people without one, which most companies of 50 people don't, why do you need one when you get to 500 people? Because as a manager in that 50 person company, actually what you spot when you're going to small companies is very often they're closer to their people. They know they're people better than a large machine. So what we don't want to do is create that large machine what we want to do, scale the magic of smaller companies. And so what it does mean is that we need to teach managers and leaders how to manage and lead, not how to outsource it when it gets hard to someone else. And we also need to talk to our people because sometimes people come from other organisations. I like, well, where do I go with this problem? I normally take this to HR. And what you have to remember is that HR doesn't work for team members. It works for the company. And so actually, it's just very often and there's no critics in it. There's some amazing HR professionals. But once you have a function, any function in the company, the first thing it does is make sure it has a role. And that role is really important. And typically that that role keeps getting bigger. So essentially the idea here is, we try to minimise the number of specialist functions. Because as a manager, you always look at going like, how did that get so big? Right? So better not to get started on that in the first place. So how do you then deal with some specific things? So for example, within HR, there are things like disputes, bereavements, there might be some quite big things that happen for employees. So how do some of those things get handled? Yes, I think most of the way in which an HR function, I take a bereavement as an example, they'll be telling the manager how they should help look after that person. But hey, why don't we just train our managers to be able to do that themselves? Right? No, by the way, we may get it wrong sometimes. But so do HR department. But by being a learning organization where people are taking responsibility and accountability, I hope we get it right most of the time. But no one's more, no one's got more interest in making it work than team leaders and managers. And then you talk about, if you get into more complex areas like a dispute or a complaint about a manager or something, ultimately in a company with an HR function, those complaints would flow up the tree and might end up at the CEO. Well, hey, they can get to me, right? And then get to any manager in the tree and then go horizontally across the company. And we really encourage those discussions. So I think we can provide the same outlets and the same capabilities that we do so by, instead of shrinking the role of managers growing it, instead of kind of taking away some of the most important stuff and most rewarding bits about being a business builder, we give it to those people. And then finally, there are some technical things and we have an outsource company that advises and can help with that, who are truly expert. But I think what's interesting is, if that were an internal function, then it would be continually trying to add value by, you know, prying into what's going on. Whereas again, I think we talked earlier about, you know, kind of legal support being on demand rather than forced. And it's the same with HR support. And that balance of really making sure it's available with, I mean, probably greater expertise than many internal functions have, because external access to a whole world of expertise, but on demand, it's kind of, I think it's a much more contemporary progressive approach to building a people-centred organisation. Yeah. And again, as a manager, you know, we would want to empower people to have the skills to be able to manage that. And for example, to give an example, if someone in my team, you know, has had a lot of sickness, but had been off sick, then, you know, first of all, if you've got worried about that person, because, you know, and see, is there something that we could do to help if they are, you know, if there's ever change of working, you know, to the least some time off? But, you know, if I wasn't sure that sometimes, you know, if people are a bit grumpy about work, that can visualise in sickness. So it's like, actually, if I kind of felt that, you know, someone was grumpy about work rather than sickness, then I should have that conversation with them and it shouldn't be kind of, or tell you what, I'll wait till they get their ad to their allocated number of sick days for a year, and then I'll put them through a performance review, actually pick up the phone, you go, I'm only sorry, you're not very well, there's only thing I can do to help, you know, and try and identify kind of if someone just needs extra support from that. And whether that's actually, you know, we've had someone in my team had a joint problem, which affected their working, so we got them some physio to try and help them get back on the feet again, because there's no point just kind of, you know, if it's not going to get better by someone just having time off, let's see what the company can do to make that better. So it's all kind of bespoke to the person, but again, around the manager, knowing their team and being empowered to do what's necessary to make their working lives better and having that closer relationship. Yeah, and in terms of you acquiring companies and other businesses, how do you then deal with that, bringing in a new culture, they've gone through a totally different time at their old company. Also, things like the onboarding and how that gets handled, given it's a group of people from a different company, and some of the potential things like job losses, changes, and the transitions that have just gone on there. I think Tridi, there's a couple of bits here, and I think part of our company is about having adult conversations. This stuff's not easy, okay. Typically, there will be job losses, the reason we acquire another company, but it depends actually, I'm sorry, it should be really clear here. If it's an energy retail business, chances are we're more efficient, therefore, we'll be able to manage the company with often very many fewer people. We make decisions really quickly, so helping people are not going to be part of the future, finding something else from the office. They're not sitting there worrying about what's going to happen, being led down a garden path. Hard conversations very early is really important. Really helping thereafter, because it's not their fault. They're probably on a brilliant job just for a company that in the end of winning the marketplace. Within that, it's then really trying to embrace the talent that's innate in so many people. We don't want the processes of those companies, and we don't want their culture, but we want the talent of their people. I think for a lot of people who joined us through acquisition, they describe as a breadth of fresh air. A lot of them were not exactly in the happiest companies, the part of the reason the companies are getting acquired is that things aren't going well. Whether for some people, that is the end of the road, but we will help them the best we can. For others, it's the beginning of a new beginning. I think that's when we look at things like energy retail. We don't use words like HR as a dismissive commoditization of humans. Humans as incredibly special, each individual value creators of what this business is built on. The people in part of the future genuinely, I hope, feel that this is a place to flourish. When we're acquiring businesses that are in whole new sectors, we're largely acquiring for the people. It's the talent of the people and the stuff they've created in areas that we're not currently expert. In those scenarios, what I hope we do is we create a great place for that talent to flourish. But again, within the processes and culture of our company, which hopefully then means that you don't end up with stylization, you don't over a period of time end up with all these kind of individual citadels, but we are one society. This leads nicely on to actually, I want to get onto this whole area of communication within the teams. You've talked about flat structures, people being empowered to take responsibility. What about across functions, though? In lots of businesses, you wouldn't even talk to or even know half the people outside of your own department. Is there regular dialogue between colleagues across different teams? Do they work together well? We have no walls between functions at Optipus. We vigorously knock down those walls should ever they occur because one of the most dangerous things in organisation is where an operations team gets a bit grumpy with marketing, because marketing keeps them stuff to drive the business that makes them busy and marketing get a bit grumpy because they're trying to drive the business and then every time they do something, operations get jumpy that people are calling more and then operations get jumpy because tech aren't delivering all the stuff that they'd like and then tech gets grumpy because they just have this massive list of things that they need to do that they haven't quite delivered yet. You just end up with all this incredible amount of circular grump where everyone's just unhappy with each other and actually you strip all those walls back and you relentlessly talk to people about everybody is here to grow the business and to add value and to enjoy what they're doing and it's not about marketing driving the business and making ops busier and it's about everybody working together to drive the business and actually how you can practically work around that. So we have something called yaygaring where tech people, developers will go and sit with an operations person and actually sit with them as they work and understand how they work and sit with them for a whole day and understand how they use the systems and what works and what doesn't work and they identify how kind of stuff they'll go on. I could build a little bit of code there that made that really easy. Oh I could just do that and I'll just go away and do it and they'll go kind of back to their desk and release that. I can just come in on that because I think this kind of thing about functional walls is one of the most important considerations that we've had since beginning the business and you know years ago around this business where and there were just three of us and every Friday we'd go for a pint and what we found was during that time of course what we talked about was work and it really helped create an informal way of resolving things that had otherwise hung in the air or the creating new ideas or coming together. As that business grew it went from three people to 30 to you know I think maybe just under 100 that Friday night pint carried on. Now the bill used to be like you know 20 quid and by the end it was in the hundreds if not more and we got a quiet and the company that acquired us I remember the the finance director very quickly saying obviously these Friday night things we're going to have to work out to bring the cost down because and I said no way this brings our whole company together and it reminds people we can we count that everyone they work with in other functions cares as much and is as smart as and is as driven as they are and that is where however many pounds west spending on our Friday night bar bill and someone we started this business we began that right from the beginning and now here we are with you know even during covid we'll have three four five hundred people on a Zoom call every Friday and the most important thing it is is to remind us we're all here for the same reason and regardless of what function we work in we're all great people doing our best and if tech gets something wrong in the system crashes it's not just a crap it's because they're working so hard to keep bringing new things in and because we're so successful at growing that continually up rating it similarly you know if marketing accidentally set an initiative live before the rest of the business was ready for it and we're inundated with customers and the phone lines and melting and you know it's not because they don't care about everyone else It's because in the quest to get this out of the door, or because it was more successful than we expected, we couldn't have got ready. And then the same for every function. So I think that that ability to keep coming together is one thing that differentiates us from siloized companies which allow that resentment or lack of respect to grow between functions. And the reason I wanted to really emphasize this is that anyone who's listening who works here, today in 2020, this is important to us. Maybe in 2025, it will be even more important. And what about are you monitoring what your colleagues are saying about the business? Do you look at things like, to glass door, for example, sites like that? Yeah, we do a bunch of things. So first of all, many functions of business run something called Office Vive, which on a daily and weekly basis is selecting, is asking questions about how people are doing. And that's an incredibly important part of our understanding of how well we do. And we certainly look at glass door. But for example, my personal slack is actually a way in which I learn a tremendous amount and creating permission for people to feel comfortable, letting us know when something goes wrong or when something they're worried about or something they're proud of through all those channels that are important. I think the cut first, so I got an email from someone a few days ago who was leaving the company. And his experience hadn't reflected everything that he thought we stood for. And the ability to phone him up and have a chat. Half an hour on the phone with him to really understand more about it was invaluable. And similarly, someone wants tweeted at me. I got a tweet about happy customers. They do it well. Because it was maybe happy with your stuff on. And I dropped him a direct message. And it turned out he was the father of one of our team. And he felt that her talent was going and recognized. And she was stressed. And he told me a lot about it. And we ended up-- and by the way, I never knew the identity was swapping Twitter DMs. But I talked a lot to understand what was going on. And amazingly, he said, look, this has been really helpful. And a few months later, he dropped me a tweet at DM and said, look, my daughter's just been promoted. She's over the moon. That rough patch is gone. And by the way, it wasn't even something I'd done because I never knew who she was. But that dialogue was really helpful to me to know how someone felt, even if I didn't know who they were. Because we've got to make the machine better. But as I say, Rusted, you asked, do we try and monitor this and solicit it? No, no, no, I hope we do it in every channel. Great. So just dipping back into something we've been talking about earlier. And that's around flexibility. What is the company's attitude and approach to remote working? I mean, look, we've been remote almost from the beginning. There was a friend of mine set up a business, an online clothing retailer. And then her husband was a diplomat, got posted to I think it was Estonia. And suddenly, she got this business in the UK. And she couldn't be there. And so this is maybe more than a decade ago. Sophie built a remote team and ran it from Estonia. And all of the people who worked in her team were remote. And I remember, as she talked to me about how they used digital channels to stay in touch on a human level as well as a business level. And it really struck a chord, I mean. And it really enabled her to tap into talent that perhaps other companies didn't have access to. Often it would be people who have been an area that didn't have a company doing that sort of work. And others, it would be, often it would be parents whose employers weren't flexible to a return. And so she had access to all this talent. And that talent had access to a job in a career that otherwise wouldn't be there. So it was a real win-win. So very early in our history as a company, I thought we should do the same. And so I think we were probably six months, nine months old as a business when we deliberately started with current people who could work remotely and make issue where the infrastructure to support that. And so I was always really proud of, because of the career opportunities it gave people who were otherwise not getting them with less and lightened employers. But it also gave us access to talent and gave our customers tremendously capable support around the clock. And then finally, you believe in this stuff, you do it because it's right. And then with COVID, we were more prepared than almost anyone else for going to full remote working. So I think it's been a tremendous strength. And it opens up things you'd never imagined, by the way. So there was one of our customer team who was in relationship with a guy who was moving to Canada. And she could just take the job with her. - Yeah, I mean, this actually for me personally has been an incredible strength as well. So the early, specifically recruiting of the remote working team are our DigiOps team, a mainly women, and it's mainly women returning to work having had kids. And it's women from incredibly professional backgrounds. We've got some, all absolute superstars. But it's difficult to come back to work and juggle small children to society. It's still not, it's not quite there yet. It's hard being a woman having kids and trying to do a professional job. And so not only does it mean we've kind of tapped into this super incredible pot of talent, but also they can support each other as well. And it's incredibly powerful, really, where you look at the talent of someone and how you can enable them to work for you and with you rather than expecting someone to, like Greg said just at the beginning, be a brick and fit in a box, which is nine to five in an office and behave in a certain way. You get so much more value out of people and people get so much more value out of you as an organisation as well. - Okay, well, well, that actually leads nicely onto something I wanted to come back to you on Greg, which is the fact that today, companies are very much judged by all stakeholders on their ESG credential, so environmental, social and governance. The positive impact on the environmental part is obvious. So given the aim of delivering cheaper, greener energy, so, you know, big tick there, but how do you view your role in society as a business in integrating a social purpose into the company? - Actually, almost I think the question shouldn't apply to as if we're doing our job right. - Right. - 'Cause we were founded to drive change in society that's needed. There were two things that were critical. One, we talk about a lot, climate change. And, you know, we're a business, the observation I made early onwards, you know, what if you could have a business that kind of made money out of fighting climate change, rather than by causing it? Great, we've now aligned our shareholder interest, making money with our purpose and drivers, human beings, which is to fight climate change. That's cool. And the second one is social justice. And social justice has got a wide range of meanings, but in the first instance for us, at high energy prices and deceptive, or at least difficult decipher energy bills and tariffs, are the difference for a low income household between, you know, for a single parent, between being able to afford send the kids on school trip or not. For old people, or people on very low incomes, it might be a difference sitting at home all day, shivering and being able to feel comfortable that you can afford to put the heating on. Yeah, this is fairly fundamental stuff. In the long run, you know, I mean, the next five years if this business are about taking our UK kind of developed mission global to advanced economies. But over the five years following that, hopefully we can start to democratize clean energy into emerging economies and other nations too. So I think, you know, for us, our business is built in a way that should deliver both what other companies retrofit as ESG. And the obviously very important thing is a business, which is making sure that we make money when we deliver returns to the people who've invested in our mission for us. Rebecca, I spotted you nodding along to a couple of bits there. I mean, what's your experience, you know, from your side of things in the company? Yeah, I mean, it's, when I, well, the reason I joined Octopus was that both I was totally bold over by the vision of, you know, bringing cheaper greener power to everyone. And the way that everyone I met, including Greg, you know, talked so articulately about that and, you know, creating a successful business, which had those values at the core and could do that. But also the tech that underpinned the business. So the tech was the proof point that actually, you know, the business could do that as well. So it was like, actually, you'd improve that, you know, you could be green and good and do things differently and create a different kind of business. And this was how that was enabled. And actually showing, you know, rather than talking about retrofitting show, how you build a business from the ground up and you build a business where, you know, diversity is built in from day one because you have the ability to support people who want to work in it in a different way, whether that's somebody who, you know, prefers to work from home or that's someone who has to work around the kids or, you know, whatever, whatever that is, that actually modern businesses and the business like us. you know, can be just as successful, more successful than other businesses just by embracing humans and the talents of humans and the desire for humans to make the world a better place and formulating a business around that. It's been fascinating hearing both of you share your passion for this business and its culture. Rebecca, one thing I wanted to sort of like ask you, as the person in charge of communications, how do you strike that balance between ensuring Greg's passion for everything, you know, that the company stands for, which clearly comes through in this conversation and a lot of the comms obviously that I've seen him do. So his passion as a leader and then not, you know, the result not being everyone seeing this as Greg Jackson limited, you know, and so ensuring it's the octopus energy message that is being delivered. How do you manage that? We shouldn't feel in any way awkward about the fact that we're a founder, a founder led business and many things that we've done so far Greg set the, a lot of the initial objectives and values of the business, but we've built on them ourselves as an organisation and Greg talks about the fact that he hosts the party and it's the people who come to the party that make the party and we've, you know, we've built and delivered and, you know, increased their culture and our values and how we do things in every direction and so it's almost become bigger, you know, it has become bigger than Greg. And I think if you look at other organisations, if you like Tesla, you probably like Elon as well, but Elon is not. Everything there is about Tesla. Tesla is a fantastic organisation with a number of, you know, key dimensions and metrics are outside of it, you know, a kind of charismatic founder and, you know, but there's nothing wrong with the fact that that's a very strong element of their overall narrative. We're just following on from that. Do you feel you're winning in terms of the perception of octopus internally and externally? And that's in terms of the brand, how the brand comes across, how it's been perceived and how also you're articulating that message. How's that going? Well, we can never say that we're winning. It's always to try hard and to try harder and keep developing it and what's exciting is that, you know, our message continues to develop and we learn from both internal people and external people, how we can make that work even harder for us. Do you feel that's a consistent message, though, whether it's internal or external, so your employees, as opposed to your customer and partners, do they all feel the same about the brand? Yes, I've been surprised actually when I talk to people internally about how passionately they believe in and feel about what we're doing here and how we're trying to get that message of cheaper greener power out there. That's why people join the business. That's why they stay with the business, that's why they strive to help grow the business as well. And all, you know, the fact that it's a good place to work and you know, let yourself and all that kind of thing is incredibly important, but actually out that core people are here because they're striving to make a difference and drive greener power around the world. In terms of, you know, are we getting any consistent message, I think what loads of companies do is they'll come up with a catchphrase and then apply it to what they do anyway and then hope that people echo about the catchphrase. Now, whether or not people echo about the catchphrase, it doesn't change what you really are. Now, actually, I don't think we've really got, you know, a well articulated, well spread, mission statement or set values and all that stuff, but I think that we behave in a way that is broadly consistent with everything we've talked about today and that we'll unpack over the next few episodes. And that therefore, what people echo back is what we really are, rather than what we wish we were or what we say we are. Well, you say you don't have the mission statement, but I mean, if you could just sum up your culture, whether it's in a list of words or bullet points or a phrase or whatever, but how would you sum up the culture of the business? Great. Look, I think the thing we do is really understand that people are special, that everyone's an individual and that we've got one go at life. So if we can make the, you know, eight or nine or 10 hours, whatever day that we are working or involved in work, a part of our life because we are ourselves throughout it will live full of richer lives. I think we'll contribute more to the company and the company will contribute more to us. Dremendous Greg Jackson, Rebecca, did Simkin. Thank you for joining us today. It's been fascinating chat. It's been a long chat. One that's certainly longer than we anticipated, but Greg, what do you want listeners to do from here? Do you want them to contact you? Do you want them to follow you? Well, it was interesting. I think it was interesting enough. We'll turn it into a podcast series. They should probably subscribe. Either way, I hope that new team members will listen and be able to over a period of time get an understanding of where this company has come from and what they're are. I think people are thinking about joining us. Hopefully, listen and get a sense for themselves of whether they like this kind of what we, I hope, are revealing about the way we are under the hood. And then outside of that, you know, as a company, we're trying to look, we've got ideas about how organizations can better deliver for customers and for society and for the people who work in them. And maybe, you know, we can start to form a conversation about that. So if you're a business leader and stuff here that's interesting, whether you agree or disagree, drop me a note. And then I guess, you know, if you're a competitor, I hope it was interesting as well because I certainly find that a lot of what we do and say publicly kind of comes back to me through those channels too. So, you know, for whatever reason people have had to listen. And maybe if you're working in another organization, you want to take these ideas in your own company, drop us a note, follow me on Twitter, follow the company on Twitter and, you know, let's enjoy this kind of very, porous, open collaborative approach to building the future. - Pretty well, you know, given, given we've talked about technology led business, can we get your CTO on for the next one maybe? Talk tech. - I mean, if you think this one was long. But yeah, look, yeah, look, we can definitely do that. - I don't know, true, what would you like to pick upon in the next one? - Well, I think I like the tech story, where it's evolved from. I think there's really something important to share. We've kind of got a lot of grounding on what you're all about and where you came from. I think tech is the natural next step, actually. - Great, okay. Next one, tech. - Excellent. So, it looks like the tech story will be the next one. So, we better wrap this up now. So, thank you all for listening. Thank you for watching. If you've been watching us online as well. And from myself and Trudy, it's been an absolute pleasure to kick this podcast series off. So, we'll see you next time. Thanks a lot. - Thank you. - Thank you, everyone. [BLANK_AUDIO]