L&G’s 5 Steps to Increase Back-Office Operational Control & Capacity
October 30, 2024
We were fortunate this year to have one of our power users of Verint® Operations Manager™ join us at Engage last month in Orlando. Juliet Jetson is the Head of Workflow & Performance Optimisation in the Retail division of Legal & General (L&G), a top 20 global asset manager and the UK’s largest provider of individual life assurance products.
Juliet’s team is responsible for governing and maintaining the use of Operations Manager, which L&G has been using since 2008 to drive consistent workflow and performance controls across 40 departments and 3,000 team members. Leveraging Operations Manager, her team has been able to deliver considerable increased capacity in the groups the solution has been deployed.
With such extensive experience deploying the solution across business units and complex processing groups, Juliet’s team has been able to fine-tune their approach and develop best practices for delivering results. Juliet shared their 5-step approach, courtesy of the letter C.
- Communicate and Collaborate
- Create visibility and Control
- Build Capacity plans and accurate forecasts
- Collect and share employee performance metrics
- Convert detractors into Champions
Juliet emphasized that a clear communication strategy from the outset can smooth your way into gaining buy-in and adoption. Understand your why, how and what before starting.
Why are you doing this? It’s about understanding the needs of your business and how you can give them the insights and performance reporting they need to improve throughput, increase capacity, and make better decisions.
How will you organize this? Will you start small in an initial business area and then expand? Do you already have a centralized planning team or business transformation group to lead the charge? How will you collaborate with your business partners?
What do you want to achieve? In L&G’s case, they wanted to change the way they managed and allocated work to create greater visibility and flexibility to better meet their customers’ needs. They established measurable success metrics for the project overall, and for each business unit in which they implemented the solution.
To create visibility and control, L&G needed real-time data to understand how much work and availability they had, which is why they turned to Verint Operations Manager. The solution gives them real-time data on work volumes, types, handle times, and end-to-end process workflows, as well as employee activity, skills and availability.
With this information they can understand:
- All the work that’s being done—not just the key processes but all the tasks performed that managers/outsiders don’t realize is happening.
- Their shrinkage and opportunities to improve it.
- True workloads and availability so they can create more accurate resource plans to increase capacity.
The workload data and actual timings enable you to build capacity plans and accurate forecasts. The workflow and performance optimization team has regular reviews with their business partners to analyze the numbers and gain their buy-in and signoff on projected savings.
Because as Juliet says, “The benefit realization comes from what your future forecast is, not what has gone before.”
For example, L&G’s initial rollout exceeded its capacity creation target by over 30%.
Today L&G can use workload and employee activity data captured directly from the desktop to measure employee performance against goals. Initially, the team got a lot of push back from employees as they felt this level of monitoring was “big brotherish” and demonstrated a lack of trust.
But by educating employees and managers on the tool and involving them in the model design, they realized that the solution validated the amount of work and effort they were putting in. It leveled the playing field among employees and enabled managers to reward those who are going above and beyond.
It also saved manager time in collecting data and compiling reports. Since implementing Operations Manager, L&G has seen some really good improvements in staff engagement scores.
A point Juliet was passionate about was that her team is not just about providing data and driving workflow consistency through software. Her team is equally focused on elevating their business partners and bringing them along on this optimization journey.
As you can imagine, not everyone welcomed Juliet’s team with open arms. Many had been managing their departments successfully for years. They were resistant to change and skeptical of yet another new software that promised to make their life easier. This is where the workforce and performance optimization team shined.
First, they openly acknowledged that they weren’t SMEs in each group’s processes and way of working. For each new group, they used people within that team to go through the processes with them and help design and test the workflows. Next, they would identify the detractors—the nonbelievers—as well as people they knew would be supporters. The detractors often had the loudest voices. Winning them over typically guaranteed a successful rollout.
L&G’s Success
L&G’s high-level objectives for their workflow and performance optimization program are to increase workflow efficiencies and optimize the use of resources to meet customer demand and service goals. These improvements have consistently led to increases in capacity, like the instance mentioned earlier.
When onboarding a new area, the workflow and performance optimization team will very conservatively target delivering a 5% capacity gain. However, Juliet shared that they typically double this, having captured upwards of 20% capacity improvements in some departments.
More importantly for L&G, the team has driven consistency in workflows, management processes, and performance reporting across teams. They have the visibility and data they need to make better decisions, faster, and have freed up their managers to focus on people development and process improvement, vs. report creation and manual work allocation.
To learn more about L&G’s story, check out their customer success story here.
To learn how Verint Operations Manager can help your back-office operations, click here.