Interview with Alex Wilson – BT Group HR Director

Article Type: Leading edge From: Development and Learning in Organizations, Volume 24, Issue 3

Alex Wilson joined BT’s leadership team as Group Human Resources Director in July 2002, bringing wide-ranging global experience gained in a succession of senior line and HR management positions in top FMCG companies including Ford, Grand Metropolitan, Guinness and Diageo. Immediately before joining BT, Alex spent two years as Senior Vice President Human Resources and Group Communications at ICI.

Alex’s has a global perspective gained from his management of business operations across North America, Asia and Europe, and from having lived and worked in the US for five years. His specialist HR credentials cover many areas of expertise, including organizational transformation, change management,industrial relations, people development, and compensation and benefits.

In his current role, reporting to Ian Livingston, BT’s group Chief Executive, Alex is responsible for HR excellence across the BT group with functional responsibility for the HR Directors of BT’s various lines of business covering the international and UK environments. In addition, he has specific responsibility for organization development and the executive development of senior management throughout the group, including high potential managers to help build BT’s future capability with particular emphasis on inspirational leadership.

He is also responsible for executive compensation and overall international compensation benefits, as well as developing a coherent HR strategy for the group which directly contributes to BT’s ongoing evolution and success in the world’s most dynamic industry. Alex instigated, and is leading, a major program to transform the HR function in BT to increase further its commercial connectivity and move towards its vision of “People experts at the heart of change.”

What attracted you to your current role?

Three things: firstly, the BT brand is an iconic brand; it’s part of UK history. Secondly, the new Chief Executive was putting together a new team after BT had its major crisis and the previous management had moved on. So, the opportunity existed not only to join an iconic brand, but to get in at ground level, on what was seen to be a major change program, which was a big factor for me. Major challenges are something that I really enjoy. The final thing was that the new Chief Executive wasn’t looking for an HR person, he said in his own words that he was looking for leaders within various roles: finance, HR etc. to be a part of the leadership group.

Prior to working at BT, you’ve held a succession of senior line and HR management positions in top FMCG companies. Have you seen any noticeable differences in how the HR function operates in each of these companies?

I think certainly. If you look back over the companies that I have worked for, what I’ve seen is a change in the more leading edge organizations, in terms of HR and its role. I’ve seen a more broad based, development of HR into a function that is change management orientated, which is commercially capable. It’s more of a generic trend within the HR function. I think that adding strategic ability to a leadership team, not just a functional specialist has meant that BT HR has grown in strength over the last 10-15 years.

I understand that you have recently instigated, and are leading a program at BT designed to transform the HR function. Could you tell us about this program, and what you hope to achieve through its implementation?

In simple terms, it is geared up to deliver the vision that we have for the HR function at BT. We did come up with a vision that rang a big bell for people,that said “People Experts at the Heart of Change”. So, that brings in the commercialism angle, but its been about delivering against the vision and making sure that we had communications; internal processes; the individual and collective ability to do this. And that activity mirrored what I see as the broader generic demands of the last ten to fifteen years. So, there is a link there.

We have updates on a global basis for all the HR people; there are development centers, everybody has an individual development portfolio, and HR is run around driving the vision to become people experts at the heart of change. We’ve come a long way, but it will never be a journey that is finished.

How important to you think the brand of BT is to employee engagement? Do you think that people engage positively with the brand?

Yes, they do: the average length of service at BT is 17 years. In pockets of the organization, like the engineering department, the average is 24 years. The loyalty to the brand (and that brand means the public) is deeply inbred in the workforce. The pride they have in the brand is very high, particularly in the longer serving workforce. That can mean a couple of things: one, they are inherently proud of their role in the company. It also means that they have a high set of expectations of the management, and how we’re engaging with the workforce. In good times it can look extraordinarily good, but in hard times they can be critical. So, they hold us to a high standard of what is expected when managing the BT brand, and how we support our staff and our customers.

Has your HR policy been affected by the recent economic crisis?

There are definitely challenges there. On the positive side, we have recently been in the public view, talking about customer service and radically improving our customer service through our “Right First Time” program. So, we have tried to get people very emotionally engaged as supporters of it. We are now a tier one sponsor of the 2012 Olympics and we’re using that for engagement and that is working really well. We’re also using an internal program called “The Difference is You” which is all about customer service. On the other hand, we are under some pressure in how we’re perceived with regards to what we’re doing to the business to make sure it’s fit for the future. We have recently done a pension review, which has increased contributions and is increasing the retirement age. Last year some areas of the company didn’t get bonuses, and we have been doing some major labor reduction – this has been voluntary, not compulsory. So the workforce has clearly seen a lot of stress, which takes your engagement scores down.

How do you see HR leadership evolving over the next five-ten years?

The vision that I and others like me would have of the role and the impact of HR would be geared towards leadership and change capability: someone who is highly commercial and they just happen to be a HR specialist. There are a number of people that have been talking about this for years, and are trying to develop their own functions. CIPD and the work they have done towards the HR competencies for the future is around that agenda. BT and Shell have been doing a lot of work with them to help formulate that. But if we can get that right,will increase the pace of this systematically across the function.