A presentation led by Michelle Owens from Owens HR Consulting Ltd, within the 'Organisation' stream at the APM Project Management Conference 2016.

1. Creating world class organisations
through great people strategies
Michele Owens Chartered FCIPD
Owens HR Consulting Ltd

2. It’s all about people! Let’s explore…
• What people strategies were used by the Olympic Delivery
Authority (ODA) to deliver success
• How to create leadership and belief cultures that show high
performance and concern for people go hand in glove
• Why building manager capability through tailored learning and
coaching really can engage people and transform organisations
• How small things make a big difference – some quick wins!

3. Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA)
Responsible for developing and constructing the venues and infrastructure for
the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games on time, on budget and in a
manner that leaves a legacy for the UK
3

4. ODA Workforce Numbers
Construction Workforce Numbers (Total over 46,000)
• ODA – ‘Intelligent client’ (staff 200 - 400)
• CLM - Delivery Partner (staff 400 – 800)
• Construction workforce (Max 12,500 on Park/Village)
• Construction workforce (Total over 46,000)
Games Operations Workforce Numbers (Total over 9,000)
• Park operations FM (500 on site – 2,500 total accreditation)
• Transport operations (6,000 plus under ODA Games-time control)
• Advertising + Trading regulations enforcement (circa 300)

5. Critical Business Challenges
• Time, cost and quality
• Public accountability and scrutiny
• One of the largest and most complex projects with multiple
stakeholders/ supply chain management
• Managing successfully different organisational phases
• Partnership working and cooperation critical
• Must attract and retain high calibre staff for finite period
• Delivering consistent high performance in a high-pressure
environment
Critical
Business
Challenges

6. The People Challenge
• Create the vision and live the
values
• Channel the behaviours and
mind set
• Create and sustain a high
performance culture
• Embed the People Strategy
• Create flex in all Organisation
Development initiatives
• Drive constant change in real
time
• Be proportionate and fit for
purpose
• Build great leadership and
partnership working
• Enable organisational and
individual growth
• Engage employees at all
times

7. The Approach: People Centric
Put people at the heart of everything
Inspire, Engage, Motivate, Develop, Listen

8. ODA People Strategy
http://learninglegacy.independent.gov.uk/documents/pdfs/programme-organisation-and-project-
management/oda-ll-micro-peoples-strat-tagged.pdf

9. People Strategy – making it live!
• Endorsed by the top team
• Focused leaders on a framework to manage and align
business and people issues
• Allowed managers and HR to understand business challenges
and decide changing priorities
• Helped HR to decide strategies required in all phases of the
business life cycle
• Kept it current and aligned to business changes
• Everything HR delivered was linked to Strategy
• Tracked progress against strategy and communicated it to all

10. Recruit, induct, embed
Strategies
To secure the right talent and help new joiners to perform early we will:
1. Align sourcing plans with workforce plans
2. Build a clear and realistic employer brand and employee proposition
3. Deliver flexibility in sourcing to meet resource requirements
4. Recruit for behaviour and cultural-fit as well as skills
5. Establish an effective induction for each new joiner
6. Monitor the way we recruit, induct and embed people
7. Source in an open and inclusive way
Business
Drivers
HR Principle
We get the right people at the
right time, engaged and
performing at high levels
quickly
• Need to get high calibre people
into the business quickly
• Source for ‘right fit’: skills and
cultural / behavioural fit
• Need to get new joiners engaged
and performing at high levels

11. Organisation and Team Effectiveness
Strategies
1. Motivate teams to do their best
2. Build and maintain strong manager – employee relationships
3. Create joint working with different teams
4. Have great decision making processes
5. Help external organisations work well with our teams
6. Help teams learn all the time
7. Create a culture of organisational learning and sharing
Business
Drivers
HR Principle
Create very effective
organisation structures and
support team working
• Sustain high performance
• Ongoing need to reshape
organisation structure
• Manage multiple and complex
organisational interfaces

12. Leadership, Vision and Values
Strategies
To make our vision and values meaningful to the work of each person in
the ODA we will:
1. Agree a core vision and values
2. Bring our vision and values to life
3. Ensure that decisions are taken with confidence
4. Create leadership that shows high performance and concern for
people go together
5. Enable our leaders to act with a strategic overview
6. Provide leadership to our suppliers
Business
Drivers
HR Principle
Our vision and the values we stand
for guide the way we work and help
us to build effective leadership to
drive successful delivery
• Core values to be demonstrated across
all organisations involved in delivering
the 2012 Olympics
• Reputation linked to vision & values
• Strong and unified leadership needed
• Internal and external leadership

13. Culture, Vision and Values
• Needs to be owned and led by senior team and cascaded to all
• Single shared Vision across the whole organisation
• All people strategies and initiatives need to feed into it
• Measure individual ownership via performance reviews; make it
really count
• Need to keep it simple but inspiring – don’t overwork it!
• Messages reinforced at every opportunity

14. People ‘tools’
• Culture, vision and values
• People Strategy and
proportionate people policies
• Organisation design
• Change capability tools
• Organisation learning aligned
to business drivers
• Performance management
• Talent management
• Employee engagement
• Communication channels
• Health and wellbeing
initiatives
• Career transition

15. Creating leadership that ensures high performance
and concern for people go hand in glove

16. Managing for high performance
Business Drivers:
• Deliver and sustain high performance
• Time, cost and quality are critical
• Must focus high calibre talent on results
Strategies
• Set individual performance expectations aligned to business goals
• Give clarity about roles and deliverables
• Regularly review individual performance so expectations are kept fresh
• Build manager capability to hold effective coaching conversations
• Address poor or under performance swiftly and decisively
• Create an environment that recognises high performance

17. Wellbeing and Engagement
Business Drivers
• Require high performance at all times
• Organisation needs committed, engaged people who will give extra effort
• Need high levels of employee engagement, motivation and commitment
Strategies
• Be clear about what is expected from each person
• Create good communication links through managers
• Allow everyone to share their views
• Create a ‘healthy’, high performing work place that supports all
employees
• Deliver a great health and wellbeing programme
• Understand and recognise the views and needs of suppliers

18. Holistic approach to wellbeing
Build ‘joined up’ initiatives, align delivery with organisational
phases and individual needs
Tools
• Performance management
• Personal development
• Health and wellbeing programmes
• Management of change
• Engagement initiatives
• Link to behaviours and culture
Activities
• Wellbeing Weeks
• Gym subscription
• Medicals for staff
• Personal coaching
• Specific programmes aligned to
organisation phases
• Hotlines
• Workshops on ‘hot topics’e.g.
stress management

19. High Performance and concern for people aligned
= ODA Health & Safety
• No fatalities
• 30 periods of one million hours worked without reportable injury
• Exceptional record recognised by various awards
• British Safety Council Sword of Honour (2010)
• RoSPA Diamond JubileeAward most outstanding Health + Safety
performance in the Queen’s reign (2012)

20. Building manager capability through tailored learning and
coaching really engages people and transforms
organisations
• Link to needs of organisation & future career of individual
• Reflect time constraints
• Self and team learning
• Clear focus on change capability
• Build ahead of when skills and knowledge are needed
• Tailor leadership programmes
• Make coaching an integral part of organisation development
• All learning should reinforce high performance mindset
Individual owns their development... guided by others!

21. Leadership and management capability?
Being…
• Truly savvy about business, people and relationships
• Great at ‘plugging into’ the business
• Aligned to and a driver of the organisation culture
• Knowledgeable about economic, political and social trends
• Ambitious for people and the organisation
• Creative, innovative, challenging and realistic
• Purposeful, focussed, resolute but not inflexible
• Vocal in using their voice - makes it count
• A leader of change
• Superb at engaging
And …

22. Blended solution to building management capability
• Facilitated Workshops
• Coaching and Mentoring
• Knowledge Nuggets
• Tailored Leadership Programme
• Individual Training Programmes
• 360 Feedback
• Career Transition

23. Coaching & Mentoring
• Establish need and understand business context
• Get senior team on board first so they spread the word about
success
• Reflect business and people challenges in coaching
programme
• Dovetail coaching with other interventions
• Embed a detailed coach / coachee selection process
• Minimise ‘set headers’ for discussion
• Individually tailor it... with a persuasive hand!
• Mentoring: blend internal and external mentoring
• Light touch evaluation: use success stories as a guide

24. Coaching and mentoring really matters!
• Bedrock of the ODA’s organisational learning, change and
wellbeing programmes
• It had real impact on the delivery of the ODA’s business goals
• It can build leadership & change capability at all levels
• Engages people on a personal level and they feel invested in
• It is a key tool for driving organisation change... ahead of when
needed!
• Can be used to flush out issues early and manage them
• Needs effort and championing from the top
http://learninglegacy.independent.gov.uk/documents/pdfs/programme-organisation-and-project-
management/426401-2012-ll-organisation-learning-oda-tagged.pdf

25. Small things make a big difference- quick wins!
• Organisational culture and accountability for behaviours are
vital, so start there
• Get the key executives to lead the way on people management
and keep it that way!
• Create a People Strategy to direct the organisation at all times
• Align people activities to business goals and milestones
• Be very savvy about organisation transformation
• Pull different levers and keep changing the gears!
• Relationship management should be very high on the agenda

26. Small things make a big difference- quick wins
• Build strong leadership & change capability at all levels
• Focus on key people priorities and deliver on them
• Tailor and personalise the HR service to the max
• Have high expectations for the organisation and people
• Be confident and have belief there is a way… you will find it!
• Be very flexible – it was all only a plan
• Only measure what matters!
Communication? Just be great at it!

27. Excerpt from Learning Legacy paper
(Imperial College Business School, London)
“A striking feature of the London 2012 construction programme
was the extent of attention and resourcing devoted to providing
modern human resource management and organisational
development capability.
These efforts contributed greatly to the effective working of the
ODA and Delivery Partner…”
http://learninglegacy.independent.gov.uk/documents/pdfs/programme-organisation-and-project-
management/425009-234-innovation-aw.pdf

28. Thank You