That guy sounded like he had a much more stressful job than I have right now. Man, what a sight. It is great to be here. Let me say it's a privilege to be here in Bangalore, to be at UX India as a speaker. It's definitely a great privilege. So I flew in earlier this week, got to see some great cities. Hyderabad, Chennai, and now in Bangalore, so it's been a wild ride. It's my last day flying back tonight, so, whoo, lots to remember. But I am Andrew Pendleton, I need to pick up the clicker. I am the director of design systems at Verizon. My team focuses on growing and evolving Verizon's design system. I've been with Verizon for 10 years. I have a background in both design and computer sciences. So I kind of felt like I hit the lottery when I was asked to lead a team that has a strong mix of both designers and engineers. I'm just going to put this out there now. My talk is not about AI, so I can pause if half of you want to get up and leave. No. Instead, I'm going to be focusing on UX and more specifically how I think we elevated our UX at Verizon by leveraging our design system in ways that we hadn't before, and we actually got some pretty cool results out of it. So I'm excited to be able to share our journey in this. It just happened recently, and I hope you're excited about that too. So let me just jump right in. So my team is in the Verizon design organization. And within Verizon design, we focus on or we strive to create customer relationships by creating experiences that are meaningful, human, and responsible. Those are our guiding principles, but what does it really mean? So meaningful design is useful, simple, and reliable. We are solving real-world problems for our customers. We want to make sure our experiences are easy to understand and simple to use, and we want to make sure our experiences work every time and deliver speed and quality. Human design is personal, caring, and supportive. We want to show our customers that we know them by giving them tailored experiences specifically to what they need based on their behaviors. We lead with empathy and treat our customers like people, and we're supportive. We always want to proactively guide our customers to their goals and, if needed, quickly assist them further when it's called for. And then responsible design is honest, ethical, and sustainable. Our experiences, as well as our communication, are direct and truthful, because above all we want our customers to make informed decisions. We advocate for all, and we want to make sure that we are respectful of people's rights to privacy and choice, and then sustainable. We use technologies, infrastructure, and materials that are safe and environmentally friendly. So these are the guiding principles that direct everything that we create within Verizon Design, even the Verizon Design System, and that ensures that our designers not only reflect back what these principles are, but it ensures that they are creating the best experiences for our customers. So what exactly is the Verizon Design System? Well, we're most known for these two things, our reusable components and our usage guidelines, which inform and teach people how to utilize the components. The components themselves can be broken down into two parts. We have our Figma component, which is what our designers use to draw their experiences. And then we have the coded component. And this is what our engineers use to build those experiences. When we were first identifying and building our component library, we followed the atomic design methodology, which basically states that all UI patterns or user interfaces can be broken down to the atomic level. And then just strictly by layering atoms on top of themselves, you can grow and make more and more complex elements. Within the Verizon Design System, we have atoms and molecules. Specifically, here are some of the examples of our library. So we have a button. We have a dropdown select, a tile, and a list group. This is four of more than 30 components that make up our core component library, both Figma components for our designers and coded components for our engineers. But wait, there's more. Not just components and usage guidelines, our system is made up of our fundamentals, which are guidelines that speak to color, spacing, our grid system, typography, iconography. We also reflect our brand guidelines, our accessibility guidelines, and also our content guidelines. All of these things come together to form the Verizon Design System, which we shorten with the very creative name VDS, trademark pending. And this system, with all of its elements, is built on top of that foundation of our global design principles. And as much as I love Verizon Design and I love the people I work with on a daily basis, some of the most talented designers, most passionate in their field, this doesn't come without some challenges. So Verizon is a big company, and it is almost impossible for any one individual to be able to look across and understand all of the lines of business that we have that span the enterprise. On top of that, all of those lines of business have their own projects going on all the time, which makes it hard for any individual to keep that line of sight as to what projects and key initiatives the design system should be plugged into at any given time. But we were able to plug it into a product launch that happened recently. And we were actually able to reduce friction in our creative process and see some efficiency gains within our design iteration process, which enabled us to deliver a product within a high fidelity with minimal error and on time. Let me introduce you to my plan. My plan is Verizon's refresh of their mobile plans. This launched in May of this year. What makes this such a groundbreaking product for Verizon is that it was a complete relook at how we are offering our plans to our customers. It's all about giving flexibility and control to our customers. You get to choose your plan, starting with the data option, and then you can choose any, all, none of the perks that you want to include with your plan at a discount. And you can go back and change those at any time. This is a fundamental change from how we had structured our plans before. So to make this a reality, it was going to ask a lot of us, like we had to transform our existing plans experience. So we got really excited. Let's transform things. But keep in mind, when you're in the middle of transforming an experience on your site, you have to remember that this experience does not live in isolation. It's not a silo. This experience lives in a existing ecosystem with existing UI patterns that our customers have grown to understand, to know, to anticipate. An anticipation builds trust. They begin to trust the experience, the digital site, but more so they begin to trust Verizon more. So as we're transforming this experience, we have to be very careful that we don't do anything that's going to cause confusion or cause our customers to lose trust in the experience or even worse, lose trust in our brand. So that being said, one of the cool things that we found with using the design system in this project was that we were able to have transformational work that actually looked progressive. It looked like it was a continuation of the space that it was in. It didn't look foreign or alien. So the dynamic and often chaotic environment that we are in normally means designers don't get the time they need to deliver. I'm jumping ahead. So let me take a step back. So the transformational work that looks progressive, what we are trying to do is ensure that we build and encourage that transformational design iteration process. And we did that by embedding the design system into that process with our creative teams. That's normally not the case. But this time we did not to stifle the creativity within the transformation, but rather to provide guardrails to make sure that things weren't changed that were not necessary to change and to encourage transformation in the areas that really required it. So let's see some examples. So what we see on the left is an initial design of a redesign of our overlay pattern specifically for the MyPlan experience. This is triggered by a button on the page and it would take over the screen full width, full height up to our header, and you can interact with it, scroll, and then you would hit the X and close out. Now granted, this actually mirrors our navigational UI. However, the team had to question, does it make sense for this overlay to behave like this in this space? And so the recommendation was made, and it was later approved, that it makes more sense for this overlay to actually model after our existing VDS overlay pattern. Because this mirrors overlays that one would experience or possibly encounter before entering this experience as well as after leaving the experience, therefore maintaining that consistency of pattern. This is another more nuanced example. We're on the left side is the initial design of these select tiles, very similar to what we already had in other places, but here we decided to add a little bit more vertical space. You see that the content header is a bit smaller. Again, this prompted some questions. What are we trying to solve here? It felt more like we were just changing things for the sake of changing things. And so because of that, made the recommendation, and it got approved, you know what, it's better to align to this pattern over here that we see in other parts of the ecosystem. Because it's that type of conformity to the design system when it doesn't make sense to transform, it creates that holistic continuity that helps a customer feel like they're in the right place. This is making sense as you move through. This is a really cool example because it shows both targeted divergence from the system as well as when you should align to the system. And so this is the plan select card. This is new for the my plan plan select experience. We had not displayed our plan options in this type of format. We had not listed promos, which is the text in the red box over plan cards like this before. And so it was introduced, well, maybe this is a good use of Verizon Red. Like let's make it pop. Let's call it out. Let's put a little icon on the left side of the text. That feels like a good use of that space. Also draw your attention to the red radio button that has that red fill, Verizon fill with the white check mark. That's a new pattern. Like we've never done that anywhere on the Verizon site. But with what we were trying to do with this new experience and look for ways to actually push our brand forward, it felt right. And then I contrast that to the buttons down here at the bottom. Those buttons are using the standard VDS Verizon design system button. Standard primary, standard secondary. That is a good example of where it would not make sense to change that because buttons are all over the place. And we want to make sure that we don't break that common pattern. And so this is a really good example in my mind where targeted divergence makes a lot of sense. Another piece of value that we get from only diverging when necessary and leveraging what is existing in the design system when not is that when you leverage the design system, you are getting all of our user research, all of our testing optimization, all of our accessibility fixes and pushing forward over the years, you get that inherent in the design system. I show this as an example of our color accessibility showing where and where we don't use our Verizon vivid red in text on a black surface. We only do that when the information in red is not critical or important at all. Why? Because there are certain visual impaired users of our site who would not be able to read it based on color accessibility. And so that's why we don't say no completely, but we also make sure for those moments that matter, we're definitely not going to do that because we want to make sure our customers get the information they need built into the design system. This is another great example of new functionality that was delivered for my plan. This is the my plan per detail example.  Now I was showing overlays earlier, but this is a new overlay because we like to put things inside things and other things. So notice that there is a toggle button in the card that's in a carousel that's also in an overlay. That's crazy talk. A carousel on its own is almost impossible to develop accessibly, but our design team or design system team actually cracked that egg last year after months spent in close partnership with our accessibility team. Now I'm happy to say at the base component level, our carousel is 100% accessible based on the Verizon YCAD guidelines. So when this design came through, the thought wasn't, hey, I'm going to build a brand new carousel from the ground up to do all these things, no. We were actually able to pull in our carousel with all of that lovely accessibility goodness in it, and then make some modifications and updates that enabled the team to extend it further for this specific layout and functionality. I've also broken out this overlay more completely on this side just to show that there are different types of content blocks in this overlay. Some of those blocks are common standard components within the design system. Some of them are standard components that have been extended a little bit to extend their functionality based on a need, and some of them are brand new. But why I'm showing you this is that the mixture of those things, the things that are recognizable, the things that are standard across our site mixed with the transformational actually provides that cohesiveness of experience that, again, makes a customer feel comfortable going through even a new experience, because it still feels normal, still feels like Verizon. So now we're going to the logistical hurdles. The dynamic and somewhat chaotic nature of the environment that we work in sometimes means that our designers don't have the time they need to deliver. That's what I refer to as logistical hurdles. And so what we were able to do, we actually pushed the design system team right in the middle of the design iteration process and the handoff with our IT engineer teams. And by doing so, we actually saw some of those logistical hurdles disappear. So this is a very oversimplified visual of our design iteration process, very oversimplified. And so we got our design brief, we're going into exploration, we're going to figure out all these cool things that we can do, we're going to get feedback, we're going to test it, we're going to refine it, we're going to hand it off for it to be built. This is oversimplified, because there's not one design handoff, it actually looks more like this, because we have multiple journeys, multiple ecosystems, multiple development teams that we're having to hand off on succession. Oh, but this is oversimplified, because this is assuming that the designers had the time that they needed to design what needed to be done. This is assuming that the requirements were immutable, they didn't change along the way. This is assuming that communication, the needed communication, actually happened. My time at Verizon has taught me you can't make those assumptions. It actually looks like this. It's iteration after iteration after iteration accounting for missed requirements, new requirements, missed feedback, you just need more time. This pencil is down, engineering handoffs date, that's still set, and it's missed. The next one, missed too, but the thing is, you miss enough of these, and you find yourself in the very tough spot that whenever you do actually hand it off, like nothing happened, you're going to get the response like, I can't build this in two days, and so now you're having the conversation around cutting scope. Oh, yeah, and plus you're doing it across all these different flows. So cutting scope, what does that look like? This is the common dialogue that happens. You see that button? What do you want to do there? No, we can't do that. We're going to have to do something different. We're going to have to do something that's either simple or there's an existing alternative for. What's the text in this card? That's dynamic, that's going to come from a database? No, we can't do that in this timeline, and have enough time to actually test and make sure it works. You're going to have to hard code that text. This media image over here, are you wanting it to do something fancy? No, static image, like that's what's going to have to happen. This is not the ideal scenario, right? So we thought, can we do something differently? And so what we did, we asked our design system engineering team, can you deliver more? Is it possible for you to extend past molecules and actually create the organisms and templates that each of those individual ecosystem engineering teams would have to build? Can we build those once, and distribute those out in the same way we did the atoms and molecules? Yes, we can. This is what that kind of looked like. So again, atoms and molecules, these are the same ones you saw earlier. But now we have an organism card. This is the plan select card. Much more complex, it's a combination of a lot more things. And then you have this template that's actually, it feels a page. All an engineer needs to do is call this template, and he's all set, or she. They are set. And so by having the design system, design team embedded in the design iteration, the engineering team, right there in the middle handing off to our IT engineering partners, they're both on the same team, design and engineering. And so the engineering team is actually seeing things coming through the design iteration process before it would normally happen. They're able to catch key requirements that no one else might have caught before.  Someone's going to need to set up a database connection. All right, let me put something together. I'll ship it out to the teams. We'll figure it out, but at least they'll have that foundational connection to the database in place. Entering exit requirements, those are pretty set already, but why didn't we communicate those earlier? Let's just go ahead and do that. Functional requirements, yeah, we can do that too. And so the team was empowered to build this MVP, basically a little bit elevated prototype, that actually had those key requirements in it that the engineering teams needed. So once we were able to deliver that to the teams and they were actually able to plug it into their ecosystems, the design iteration was uninterrupted. It could continue going. And anything that comes out of that is just an update. You just push an update to what's already been implemented in those ecosystems. What that enabled then was for our design teams to keep iterating longer and longer, getting some good stuff out of those iterations, a lot more feedback, a lot more design variants, a lot more late requirements. But hey, we had the time, right? And it enabled us to use that time effectively. So this is an example of how these tiles actually evolved throughout that process. First delivery is really nothing as a placeholder. Second delivery, OK, now we're getting somewhere. This was actually the most important deliverable to our engineering partners within our IT organization, because it told them what to expect. When this was ready, the actual perks and the assets, that was easy. This is all front end stuff. The difficulty was in the back end and we were able to facilitate that development much sooner. Requirements also evolved. This is a good example of a perk tile that ended up having a more complex interaction than was originally anticipated. We discovered this new interaction about halfway through. But because we had the time, we were able to account for it. So what we saw was that the design that was actually designed makes it into production and it was delivered with very little error. Normally, when we are handing off to our engineering teams, depending on the timing of each of the handoffs, depending on the state of the ecosystem or application at the time of handoff, you could actually see an experience be deployed to production, put in front of our customers, with varying degrees of completeness, which I think that's worse than just having a unified experience that's incomplete. But now we have various states. Well, which one's the actual one? But because with my plan, we actually delivered a single library of UI elements across all the teams, that all of the teams were actually able to deliver a complete and uniform experience. And by the way, because now we are focusing on a single library of components, not all of these independent experiences, we launched with zero defects. No, we didn't. But wouldn't that be great, right? But to be fair, it was significantly less, like literally in order of magnitude, fewer defects. And why that matters to all of us is that who has to spend time triaging those visual defects? Designers. Who's got to try to figure out how to fix that broken design? We do, right? And so the fewer defects we can launch with, that's more time we get to design, right? And there's got to be that, I can't be the only one here, the satisfaction of pouring so much time and energy into crafting this, I'm a little biased here, beautiful experience. And then you actually get to see it come to life as you designed it. I mean, I get excited about that. So where do we go from here? I just told you a story that happened with us earlier this year. I presented it with a lot of good news. Hey, we made a lot of great decisions. We're still in an unstable place right now in terms of where do we go from here, right? So first, we're still trying to figure out how we decide what transformational elements actually get scaled. So the things that were new with my plan, well, do we want any of those transformational things in the system so that all experiences can leverage them? Or do we want some things to be specific to the plants experience? How can we systematically handle appropriate journey-specific divergence? This is a $10 sentence. But really, we were all up in the design iteration business, right? We were helping to coach and guide when we should diverge from the system and when we shouldn't. How can we automate that? There we go. Maybe that's an AI topic next year. And how do we continue, or not how, do we continue to provide organisms and templates within the design system? We did it to successfully launch my plan. But is this a new strategy moving forward? I know. Kind of excited. I might come back next year and tell you guys how it went. But anyway, that's all I got. I just want to say thank you. And I hope you guys have a great rest of your day. Oh, yeah, QA. Any questions? Raise your hands.  Oh, wait a minute. Who's deciding? So just wanted to understand the templates at what break points you have them for and what platforms. How do they work on platforms like iOS and web? So you're asking about the design system specifically. It's responsive. So we cover mobile desktop tablet. We're looking at bigger screens than just desktop. But we'll see how that goes. What was your other question, platforms? You're asking about the coded components? We primarily focus on React. I'll go next. Andrew, as designers, we love to get creative. So how do you make sure that all the designers are creating everything which is design system, 100% design system compliant? Oh, I can't do that. I'm just one person. So it's really just awareness, right? Making sure people know that the design system exists. They understand what is in it, how they can leverage it. They know how to use it. And then at the leadership level, we're trying to create these best practices and principles of design within practical principles, like how we execute. We're building that into those principles. So again, there's not a catch all. There's not a way for us to 100% insure compliance or usage. But we're doing what we can just to grow the awareness and make sure people understand how it works, right? Because it makes your job easier. Like, do you want to draw a button there? Do you want to create this cool new interactive thing? It's probably not a button, right? So use a button if you need it from the design system. I'm Divya, and I am associated with the design system of my company. So it's VDS for you. It's VDS for us, principle design system. So my question to you is, what are a few challenges or resistance that you and your company faced while adoption of VDS in your company itself? I could give a whole other keynote on that topic alone, right? What's funny is that, and I'll try to keep this short, but it's never one thing, right? And that might be the biggest misconception that I found coming into my role and growing into it is that it always seems like people are personally against the system. Like, it's out to get them or take away their job. But if you actually sit down and have a conversation with your customers, the people using the system or your potential customers, you really find it's way more nuanced and complicated than that. It could be things outside of their control, like platform architecture. It could be non-aware of it. So again, my encouragement to everyone is to just sit down and have conversations and see if we can figure out what the actual issue is and see if it's resolvable that way. But it's never just one thing. Definitely. Thank you. Thank you, and we'll take one last question here. Go ahead, sir. You have the mic, so. My name is Vith. I'm here. I don't know where to look. On your right side, yeah. So my question is, when we talk about this cross-functional team, so we need to interact with a couple of designers, product managers, product owners, tech teams. So how do you optimize while understanding the component requirements from the designer's point of view, sometimes from the development point of view? How do you optimize it? And what challenges do you see? What are you wanting to optimize? That's a very general question. Yeah, very generic. So basically, while adapting the components, so I see, personally, in my current company, so there are a lot of problems. There might be versioning controls. There are existing product is there when I talk about the new component, to when, what time I supposed to adapt this. So these kind of challenges, how do you communicate with the different setup people? That's my question. Yeah, there's a long story there that I can tell you more about my background and how we kind of laid that foundation. The short answer is, well, again, from my perspective, you got to do a lot of up front work. You can't just make the decisions of your design system architecture in a vacuum. For us, we made sure that we knew what our IT enterprise architecture teams, standards, and best practices were. And we aligned to that. Like, we wanted to make sure that teams, by using the design system, were actually getting themselves more alignment with their own standards and best practices. But that caused us to have to know them better than them and get that stuff ingrained in the system directly. So start there. And for a more detailed answer, we can talk after. Thank you. Hello? Oh, yeah. Hi, Andrew. So I have a question. Our team is working on a product, which is at a stage where we are designing new features in the product. Can we, from your presentation, I can infer one thing. That more complex elements, if you are designing at an early stage in your design system, then your delivery can be fast. So at this stage, can we develop templates for different features, which we are not even aware of at the moment, or we are experimenting to expedite the process? I think that would require me to have a lot more context of your situation to give you a more accurate answer. But I would say, again, this was a very specific point in time, specific needs. So the stars were aligned for us. But generally, we wouldn't take this approach for normal product launches or new feature releases. Philosophically, as a design system team, we are reactive by design. We want things to launch. We want to be able to look broadly, and then try to encapsulate those reusable elements that we're finding out there already, and then turn them into components, and then make it easier for teams to use those same things going forward. Or else, there's a good chance we would spend a lot of our time building one-off components that are niche and aren't really used everywhere. And so we tend to take a hyper-conservative approach there, which is totally counter to what I just showed here. But again, that's why there's a lot of unanswered questions there at the end. We're having an existential crisis, not that dramatically. But yeah, so I mean, it's going to be based on your needs, what you're comfortable with, and what you think is best for that project. Maybe we can discuss this on break.


one-to-one basis, and we did offer them a transition financial assistance in the first year. We fully accept and we are working closely with Westminster in order to get the message across from and via employers and via the construction leadership council, for example, that to have one sector having to administer two levies within that tier one level in particular does not make particular sense in terms of economies of scale or efficiencies of scale. The main difference, I think, in Scotland and England, and colleagues may want to comment, is that our English companies, our English employers who pay the apprenticeship levy can then tap into a digital process of accessing limited funds to train in very specific areas. That is very different from the CITB levy and the diversity that we bring in terms of additional leverage, additional value. I think that there is something, obviously, working with employers that needs to be done in this space, just to make sure that there is a bit of a level playing field. We will undoubtedly—and we are under pressure from our tier one customers—ask us why we are paying two levies, why do we need to pay a construction levy. It is managed by CITB as well as Westminster levy. They are asking the question and it is coming off their P&L, so they have the right to ask the question. I think that there is work to be done here with Westminster Government in particular in order to try and rebalance the impact on the sector itself. A general feeling from the larger companies is that there is more transparency in England of how the apprenticeship levy is spent or what it sees. Perhaps there is a role coming forward or a function for the Scottish Government, just to make it a bit more transparent of how the levy is then spent in Scotland by sector. That might reflect back of how, if you are in construction and you are paying into the apprenticeship levy and the moneys are coming back north, then how much is then going into the sector in the various forms, whether it is FAs, MAs, graduate apprenticeships or wherever else it is happening. Several voices were raised in that regard that they would like to see more transparency, because in England they can see how they are spending or where it is going. 99 per cent of the industry are small and micro, so they do not. The CITB levy provides a different form of support to the sector, which is invaluable to Scotland. Scotland actually receives back from the industry training board far more than it puts in, because it trains it, and rightly so. The CITB has the challenge of being able to communicate clearly the offering and the value add that it brings back to the large, the medium and the micro, because it has moved away from a grants in money out to levy in skills out. There are two very different things. The Construction Index website highlighted in 2017 that 94 per cent of Scottish respondents were dissatisfied with the aspects of CITB. My question is what needs to change to make the governance and operation of CITB more accountable to Scottish CITB levy pairs? That is an interesting statistic. I will throw another statistic back when we carried out our last consensus poll in Scotland. We had over 80 per cent response happy with what CITB is doing in terms of its business, so I think that in terms of who you speak to and what stats you use, it is interesting what those responses are. Our governance model is changing. Our structure is changing. It is in the public domain. We are downsizing our headcount. That is a reaction to what employers, Governments and institutions have been telling us for a number of years. We became too large, too complex, too bloated, one would say. We are reducing our headcount and reducing what we are doing. We will concentrate in our key three operational areas, which are training and development, careers and standards and qualifications. Everything else that we have been doing over the decades will be moved aside—either outsourced or sold off in terms of our future operating model. Our timeline is to achieve that by 2020. That does not mean that, by any stretch of the imagination, we will be investing less in skills and training, and certainly we will be investing more in this whole area, particularly in Scotland because of the research that was carried out last year. The change is fundamentally within the back wiring and the back engine of the business. We are increasing our customer-facing units on the ground in Scotland, whether it is apprenticeships or company advisers who are on the ground. Our change to the governance model, which is now a Scottish Council, which is 100 per cent employer-led in that council. We have a split of roughly 50 per cent tier 1s and 50 per cent SMEs and micros on the Scottish Council. Their role is to hold the main CITB board to account in terms of what is happening in Scotland. That change was implemented quarter one this year, maybe the final quarter of last year. We will monitor that new governance model to make sure that it has the impact and influence over what we do in Scotland based on the CITB strategy that is coming out of HQ. CITB is very relevant in Scotland. We rely on CITB to shape standards and frameworks that set out the framework in which qualifications are then developed. We rely on CITB to work with industry to identify where technology has changed and qualifications and the national occupational standard, which governs the jobs and job descriptions, etc. Are all kept up to date. For me, there is a definite relevance in Scotland. It is like any organisation. There are challenges to do more with less and be better and faster and more responsive. I think that CITB is developing towards that. They are looking at the things that are their core activities and are going to do them better as we go forward. We spoke about the negative perceptions of the industry. CITB is going to do more. They do a huge amount of work in relation to diversity. They work with us. We have a five-year equalities plan and they work very close with us and SDS as do our other partners to try and change some of those entrenched behaviours and patterns. There is a huge task for them to rise to the challenge on. It is exciting that the shape that they are trying to get into for 2020 should really help us to make a difference in Scotland and make it a much more stronger sector. It is good to hear that new governance arrangements are coming in. There must have been concerns that you had to address within your membership. However, how much collaboration is there between the two bodies, given that you both have responsibility for providing apprenticeships? There is great collaboration. As I mentioned in a number of times, CITB is using our digital platform. As it digitises its activity, it is in a better place to be much more responsive. It helps us as we try to get enough information and relevant information and up-to-date information on to our platforms to allow young people to make informed choices about their future and parents and teachers. There is a huge amount of collaboration. The regional plans that they have, none of us can do this ourselves. We all have to work together. I think that it is quite exciting as we move forward into that new future. Just before you come in, Mr Hughes, the reason for asking that question is that some of the written submissions that we received from Glasgow Caledonia University in particular said that there was little evidence of any collaboration between the two bodies. They also said that, as far as Scotland is concerned, CITB was out of touch in meeting the needs of the industry. You are telling that there is one thing, but the written submissions that we have had from other organisations suggesting other ones. There are two aspects to this. CITB is our biggest contractor for apprenticeships. From a training and operational delivery, there is a huge partner. On the other side, standards, frameworks and qualifications, they take information from companies such as Morines and other small companies but also tier 1 suppliers. They try to shape a framework that will allow individuals to be trained for the industry, not just one job, so that when a downturn comes, they can move, they are mobile, they can change and go into other jobs that become available. Some of the work that we have done recently in the downturn in oil and gas, the transition training fund, has set up a fabulous model for being responsive and being fleet of foot to help individuals to change from one industry into another. Construction has been a huge supporter of that because it has benefited from people moving from oil and gas industry into construction. We have run an adopt an apprenticeship scheme with CITB again to try to change, tackle some of the perceptions that an apprentice can only complete their apprenticeship if they are in employment when it comes to doing the skills test. We have challenged through CITB trade organisations to allow some of those qualifications or skills tests to be done six months before the end, because they have the underpinning knowledge and the vocational capability and competence to do that at that point. I would say that some of the submissions do not understand the complexity and depth of partnership working that we have, but I would say that, from an SDS perspective, it is a very good collaboration with CITB. It is just to re-emphasise the point that, as you well know, skills, training and education are devolved across the three nations, and we are moving our business model to reflect that. We align ourselves with public sector partners to deliver government policy ostensibly. We do not create the CITB policy within three nations. We align ourselves with what the Government wants us to do in terms of priorities, and we make sure that it is communicated to our employer customer base to make sure that they know where their money is being invested within. In terms of the alignment with organisations such as SDS, and there are other public sector bodies that we have agreements with and we are putting in place shortly as well, it is to deliver the policies that are set by government. It is not to work on a vacuum or a bubble, and we cannot do that in isolation. I believe that the national construction college in Shinnon is getting close with the 29 training jobs moving down to York. Can you give us some background to that? In Shinnon is one of the six college networks that we are withdrawing from in terms of direct delivery. We are not withdrawing from the training that is being provided. What that means is that we will not deliver the scaffolding training in Shinnon moving forward. That is part of our operating model. We will find a new partner and enable them to deliver that scaffolding training. We have publicly said that we will not withdraw from any specialist training in any nation until a better alternative can be found within the marketplace. Much of what we evolved in doing over the decades was because of market failure, so we stepped in and we invested and we directly trained scaffolding in Shinnon. We believe that the market is now in a position to pick up training. We have a tremendous FE network in Scotland, for example, with infrastructure, with assets, with skills. I am not saying that they will pick up in Shinnon, but there are organisations out there that we believe can do it as well, if not better, than CITBs. Our overall model is to withdraw from that, but not to do that at the jeopardy of the training that is being provided. You cannot stop scaffolding being trained in this country. It would be disastrous. A number of other functions within Shinnon are being outsourced to other organisations, and they are in the process of colleagues having conversations with those new organisations to decide where they may or may not be located in the future. I cannot comment on whether they will go to York or not. I am sorry to interrupt, but we are a bit pressed for time here. I will have to catch up there. Dean Lockhart wants to come in very briefly, and Andy Wightman has a question as well. I will keep it brief. I want to come back to the observation made by a couple of panel members that Scotland does not do enough to train older people either in work or between jobs. We have heard about the role of apprenticeships in addressing the gap, but what about part-time college places? How important are part-time college places for retraining older workers in the sector, and are there enough college places available to meet the issue? In use, perhaps, I could ask you first, because I think that you made the observation about that we are not doing enough to train older people in the sector. I think that, in terms of the investment that goes into that cohort, we will call it, for example, it is about priorities, and I am sure Fiona will comment on that, and there is better than myself. The priority for government in the present time is 16 to 19-year-olds in terms of modern apprenticeships. For example, our employers are saying that they would be more than happy, and many of them would be delighted to work with older entrants into the workplace. The funding model at the present time makes it difficult because the reality is that, when you have a 25-year-old entering into construction on an apprenticeship rate in terms of wages, it is not attractive. We are keen to explore, as there is more that we can do in this space, to make an attractive proposition for an older individual to enter, but the present time, in terms of modern apprenticeships, Fiona is right in saying that government's priorities are that younger cohort, and that is where we concentrate our resources at present. Government policy is to give young people the best start that they can into careers. However, a third of the modern apprenticeship programme is 25-year-olds plus. As I mentioned earlier on, many of those individuals are doing leadership and management, so they are progressing their careers and using the apprenticeship employers or the apprenticeship for workforce development. Many of them are doing level 4 in construction site management, for example. Many of them are retraining from other industries and taking the opportunity. However, it is down to the employers and the support that employers make in terms of wage costs, etc., when an individual is maybe not as productive at the start of their career as they are as they move through their training. A third of apprenticeships currently are 25-year-olds plus. Thank you very much. I am afraid that we have other business that we have to deal with before 1 o'clock, and members also have other matters to attend to in Parliament. If there is anything that you wish to add to your evidence today on any of the points that we have perhaps not had time to cover fully or to come in on some of those last questions, then please feel free to write into the committee and that will be treated as part of your evidence. Apologies that we need to cut things short there, but thank you very much to everyone for coming in. We will suspend the meeting very briefly just to allow the witnesses to leave.


So this presentation is really talking about how transforming bigger organizations like Philips, the culture into the agile way of working. So that's what the topic is. There was another speaker at this time, and there was some changes. The app got updated. Some people didn't see it. So just to make sure that all of you are aware where you're sitting and for what you're sitting. May I also request that since it's a very small group, it'll be good if you guys can come towards the front. So we have a small community that then I can interact with. My name is Raj Karunakaran. My last name is always difficult for a lot of people who are not used to South Indian names. So you can call me Raj. I'm the HR manager at Philips, and you must be wondering that how come an HR person is in an agile conference. I'm equally surprised not because why I'm here, but I expected more HR guys to be here. Because when you talk about agile, you can't think of just changing the way of working. There's a lot more involved. And a bigger part is changing the organizational culture. You change the org structures. You need to change the processes to align yourself to agile way of working. And the HR has to be in the core center of it. So if in your organizations, your HR guys are not thinking about it, this is your chance to go back to them and tell them that, hey, you guys are not there. You have to be here. So what I'm going to talk to you is today is in Philips what we have been doing. If it's a legacy organization, I hope all of you have heard about Philips and how we are making an old legacy. People think that it's a very bureaucratic, traditional organization and changing it into agile. And what is my role here? We have formed a central group where HR is a core part of it and I lead the HR practice for that. And I am at this point working on changing our entire R&D organization, which is close to 6,000 people and employees organization spread across different parts of the world and helping these organizations adapt agile practices from an HR point of view. So a little bit more about Philips. Philips is a legacy organization has been in existence since 1890, much before many of you or your parents or grandparents were born. And we are 113,000 plus employees worldwide and we are very diversified. So when you think of Philips, people get very different images starting from radios that many of you would have heard when you were young. Over the years, we have transformed ourselves and now we are, as we speak, we are also going through a transformation and our focus is now completely health tech. So many businesses that we had like televisions, audio, lighting, it's all in, spanning into different organizations and our core focus is health tech. And health tech is a space where we are market leaders and by, it's also going through a lot of changes and it's becoming more digital. It's no more just selling a product or a component. So I'm just sharing with you the background on why the need for the organization to transform and if you have to survive in such an environment where it's changing every day, there is no other option but to move to agile. So we moved our journey started around three years back when we started transforming ourselves into digital organization and the agile journey started from there. What I'd like to cover today and present to you is our story. So something where what we did in terms of driving a culture which is not driven by extrinsic motivation by more by intrinsic motivation and how did we create that intrinsic motivation in the organization? So that's one. The other is how can we make, put the team in the driving seat? How can we break the organizational structure of hierarchies and how do we re-look at and change the supervisor or the traditional manager's roles? And how do we drive innovation in the entire process? So these are some of the things which I would like to share and also some bit on people practices where we are reinventing ourselves. So let me also just put a caveat here that we are in the process of transformation. So our story is not complete. And I'll definitely like to hear from you. Yesterday I was sitting with a lady, I believe, from Mastik and she said that they have moved away from completely performance rating scales. Amazing story. And those are the stories if you have it, it'll benefit everybody in the room if you also bring in it. So let's make it also an exercise of a lot of sharing. Okay, so what motivates employees in the organization? So we heard a lot about it. There were a lot of speakers yesterday. We spoke this morning. Daniel Pink is somebody who has referred so many times and people get motivated by purpose. And people work in certain organizations for multiple reasons, right? So what do that organizations stand for? It's a big reason why organizations work for. What Phillips work for and what all our employees recognize that we are in a healthcare space where we are into saving lives, right? And our core purpose, the way we have defined it is touching people's life, right? In fact, we have a vision statement which talks about touching people's life. So we want to touch or improve three billion lives by 2025, so which is a big, big statement. So by 2025, it will be roughly around one in every two humans on this planet, right? But the focus is how can we improve people's lives? So if it's healthcare, then how do we save lives and if it's personal care, then how do we improve their lives, right? So that's what the mission statement is. And how do you drive this? We have a culture where we have a lot of leadership stories, okay? And over the last three or four years in the transformation journey, we have had enough instances where the leader would come stand and share their personal story, okay? And the story would be something like this.  There is a story behind that. And she was, she's been with Phillips for like some 20 plus years and a very hardcore sales driven number driven person always known for strong performance, right? And a tough lady to work with.  So it so happened that we were doing some kind of diagnostic event where people could detect the initial stage of breast cancer. And you know, the mother came to know and she got treated and this child came and said that. So that was a very strong personal story and that motivated her of what can we do more in saving lives, right? And where the team members come and share their personal story, okay? So sometimes, you know, we had one young girl said, she lost her mother at very young age. She wanted to be a doctor because of that and she could never get admission in a medical college and the closest she could come was, you know, work on healthcare products. So now these are purposes which is shared. These are stories which are shared. The other kind of stories that get shared is, you know, our field engineers come and talk about, you know, how the product and the solutions are helping people, okay?  So even in your organization, I'm sure there's something which is much bigger than the sales numbers or those statistics and creating such personal stories can build a very strong culture in the organization. The team chartering is the another piece of, you know, the visioning exercise of where the teams come together and they said what their personal vision is and what the team visions are and these are drawings, these are statements which is put across, okay? So another element of how you can bring the, build a team vision. How team takes ownership of the performance, right? So this is another process that we introduced two years back and it seems to work really well for us is, so if we look at the entire organizational construct, many a times the organizational construct is that things are driven from top down, right? You need a manager, a strong leader to tell people what is to be done. Agile environment, that's precisely what we are trying to break it. What we want is self-managed teams and the teams who can take full responsibility of who they are and what is that they want to achieve, okay? So any process which helps the team take, you know, be more empowered and drive towards that is, you know, what is required. So sharing with you two examples of, you know, so one is we call it Accelerate Survey and this is a survey which is done every quarter where the team gets, gives the input and the team gets the report. Very easy to use, but it's a very quick pulse check on how the team members feel around the culture, around the work, around, you know, their own satisfaction around the team. Now this is not driven by the manager, it's driven by the team, okay? And the team gets the input. The other piece is the team performance dialogue and this is the process where the team comes together without any supervisor or a facilitator and the way it is run is it's kind of gamified. So there are set of playing cards with certain questions saying, you know, so what is the thing that we are proud of in the last quarter that we did? What are things which, you know, we are not proud of? Something which kept us awake the entire night, something which is not really working well in our team and it kind of creates a discussion in the team where, and at the end it's like, you know, what is one action as a team that we all can commit to, okay? And this is a process where the team takes the ownership of what shift in the culture or any actions that they wanna take and they work on that, the team takes the ownership, they create plans and then again the next quarter they come and review it, okay? So this is another piece which is set up where the team takes the complete ownership of how driving the culture in the team is. They're also team competencies and behaviors which have been defined and this is, you know, many times these are like big posters or carpets, you know, empty room where people stand and they reflect on each of these competencies and these are some of the competencies that we also ask the team members to make each other accountable for. So when they're giving feedback, for instance, they have a framework in mind that on what they're giving feedback, right? Again, this is not something which is driven top down, this is something which is at a team level. So there is the tools, they are communications but at the end, you know, so one of the things when we launched this, we had events where the team came and presented their interpretation about it. There was also a competition around, okay, you know, can you create a selfie or a picture which symbolizes some of this? So this kind of creates the excitement around what we are talking about, okay? And there's a lot of talk on, you know, some of these competencies whether it exists, it doesn't exist in the team. Within the team, if the team has to take ownership and this is something which we learned, you know, very early stage and I'm sure many of the people here would have seen it in their organization is when you remove the supervisor and supervisor in the sense, the person who is like, you know, has a reporting line and defines and dictates things or, you know, wants to control things. A lot of team issues, there's nobody to resolve that and in a team environment, you want the team to resolve team issues. And we wanted to create a culture of where the team can give feedback to each other and it was a very difficult task for us, right? The two things that we did and one is called a feedback souk, a very simple process where, you know, the team defines the frequencies whether they want to do it once in six months or, you know, it's part of the adapt and introspect and adapt process where the team comes together and they form a circle or two circles, they face each other and in just a minute, they give a feedback like, okay, so what made you great in this last program increment is this or what stopped your greatness from achieving big results in the last program increment is this, okay? And this is fun, right? And they do this, there's no questions asked, there's no clarification, the person just gives a feedback and the other person has a choice to take it or not to take it, but, you know, doesn't say anything, okay? And everybody takes a turn, okay? So in a minute, both side, they share the feedback, then they go to the next person, they share a feedback and the moment they cover at least 10 people, there's a pattern which is emerging, they know that how the team members are looking at them, how they view that person's contribution, okay? And this people have liked so much more than a 360 degree appraisal or, you know, somebody writing things and all of that. And what people have said is, you know, it's amazing to see some of these patterns emerging, some of things which they were not even aware of, okay? And created a culture where now people are so comfortable in a very positive way to give a feedback, okay? And why it's positive because you're seeing that the person is already great, you know, what made you great or you're great but something is stopping your greatness. So there is no negativity in the process, right? The other piece which we introduced where the team takes the ownership of giving feedback to each other is called courageous conversation. And in this process, if there is issues between two team members, you know, somebody is pushing really hard, the other person doesn't like it, we had a lot of, you know, sessions where we've, you know, now kind of trained our people to use a flow of conversation which is not very intimidating in any way, but they're able to express that, you know, what their own value systems are and what is it that they're not liking about somebody's behavior. So it's a process where people can resolve their own conflicts before it's blown up and gets into a crisis situation where the team kind of starts breaking down, okay? So that's another tool which is available now with the team members to resolve these issues. Why these tools are important? Because if you just leave it, you know, in a normal situation, you want the managers to intervene and try to solve this and we create a system where the employees will always walk up to the manager, right? The moment you give this tools to the employees, you know, they can resolve those issues, right? You don't need a third person to resolve that. Yes, sure. You know, how to do that. And you're right, you know, we went through a phase of change management where people didn't know how to deal with the situations. Okay, so they were going to the managers and I'll talk about the role of the manager here. It took some time for us to, you know, inculcate that where the managers would push back, saying, hey, you guys need to go and resolve this. Okay, or the process of where the team comes together and ideates and come up with the idea and set up the team goals. Okay, but, you know, that's how, you know, the scrum teams work. So it fitted really well with, you know, many of the ceremonies that happens within a scrum team. The other part is, you know, as I said in the beginning, is the, yeah, sure. Yeah, please, please, let's, yeah. So we, you know, so this reason we kept it like these two points. Okay, so let's say there is the individual who is, you know, very, you know, doesn't work in a team environment. He's always kept, keeps himself alone. Then that feedback will emerge, right? So the, it's not just from one person, but you know, the over a period the team will feed. They're not going to hide it from that person. Once the team comes, then it's, and that's where the person picks it as an action. And I'll talk about that when we come to the performance management piece on how we do that. The person works with the coach and seeing that, hey, this is what my team tells me. You know, this is one action that I'm committing to the team. Okay, so when we do this, this process, the way we end it is each individual then comes out and tells the team that, you know, thank you for the feedback. And this is one insight I got from this exercise today. Okay, and this is my commitment, something that I'm going to work on. Okay, so the individual volunteers and sees that this is what I heard from everybody telling me, you know, this is one good thing I heard and this is one area of which I heard I need to work on. And I'm making a commitment. So, you know, so once you make a commitment to the team, the team is again going to give you a feedback. It's very transparent, right? And if there's certain feedback where it requires a little more diving into and trying to do, find some facts, the person has to do that. Yeah, sure. And if you're not heard that question, you know, so what she's saying is not everybody would be comfortable with a process like this, right? So there's going to be inhibitions where apprehensions around some of these feedbacks, right? Yeah, so they are moments where, and we have examples where, you know, somebody felt very miserable at the end of it, okay? Because the feedbacks were very strong, though it's a very positive way of putting it across, but you know, it's a straight message coming from the team. And sometimes they leave the team and which is nothing, you know, bad about it, because if there is a person who is a misfit in the team and the team has decided that this person is not fitting in the culture, right? There is enough help and support which is there, but over the period, let's say, you know, over three cycles of feedback, the person is getting the same feedback, hey, you know, you're not really helping and you leave work in the middle of the process and walk away. It just creates that environment for the person to just leave the team and go. Give me one example. Yeah. So we consciously try to keep ourselves out of it, okay? And I'll tell you the reason. So one is, you know, at a very high philosophical level, just approaching saying that we are dealing with adults. We want them to go through this process of crisis and despair and come out of it and manage that. What we do is provide them tools and techniques, okay? So, oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes.   And they work with the coach and I'll tell you the coaching relationship where, you know, some of these things, then there's a sounding board which is there, right? It's more about giving tools and techniques for people to resolve conflicts within themselves. Yes. So, at least, yeah, so, yeah, so at least, you know, at least, I mean, I don't have a longevity of saying, you know, but at least last two years is long enough period for us to say that the postives have been more than, you know, any of the, the change management is a process which we need to deal with. But otherwise, we have not got into any major issues. You know, it's more positives which really came up, right? Okay, so the, and, you know, as I started saying, you know, so any process that we introduced, you know, the first question we asked is that, are we breaking the organizational hierarchy?  And one of the things, you know, I mean, if you look at it, this is a representation of a traditional org structure, and this is the way most of the agile teams are structured where they're more cross connected, there's no levels of hierarchy. This also comes the way people look at roles and they build their aspirations and how they wanna grow in the organization, right? So, typically you have your corporate ladders like this and career planning and all those exercise happens in this process. And what we wanted to do was break that because that's also a way people look at different levels and then start looking at roles that has more authority, right? So what we did was, we wanted to create equality in terms of the roles, equality in the sense that, you know, you're not looking at a higher level to have more authority, but you know that at your own level you have certain authority which is there, so it's not like, you know, you grow if you grow laterally, but you grow in different directions based on your personal aspirations, okay, your personal interests. Obviously, the skills that you gain have criticality and a value attached to it, and you know, that's how you differentiate based on a grade or a compensation piece. But you know, the aim was to build a culture where people can actually take, you know, moments across and it's also seen as a career growth, okay? And more and more now we talk about career ladders and not career ladders. It's not like, you know, someone says I'm an engineer and I want to become a project lead and a project manager and a delivery manager and just looks at only that one track. It could be any different tracks and you know that, you know, you are independent person who is really contributing and your value. So to give you an example, and this is for all agile teams, so, you know, for each of the roles we created, you know, came up with documents to help them which says what are the possible career options that one can take, okay?  So we remove the levels and, you know, the lateral growth kind of structure completely, okay? Serve to purpose, it fits very well with the way the agile thing works. The other thing is also the notion of, you know, this hierarchy, we want to just break that, okay? Just one example of how you can, you know, take up any process and then relook at that and say how we can fit it into agile way of working. This is an example for a Scrum Master. So there's a similar documents for, yeah. So it could be agile developers. So this is one example for Scrum Master. So if I'm a Scrum Master, I can see what are the possible career movements for me. If I'm a developer, there is a similar document. So I just wanted to, you know, show one example here. So what is happening to our managers, okay? So what we have done is we have removed the project managers and we have made them competency managers and they manage a group of people with the similar competencies.  They manage a group of people with a similar competencies. We call them competency managers. We call them cluster managers. And their role is to develop those competencies, okay? So build competencies amongst people who are playing that role and they also are trained to be performance coaches, okay? So every employee has that coach assigned to them and there's a coaching session which happens every month. It could be bi-weekly. It could be a minimum of at least once in a month. They sit, they talk about, you know, it could be within the work, immediate work that they're doing. It's also, you know, looking at their own career development. And the coachee brings all this feedback, you know, what they got in the feedback soup. They got from dashboards within the team, how the team is performing and how they can build in their own effectiveness. So the coach here is not taking the ownership of driving the performance, but make sure that the ownership is still with the employee. But the coach here is the sounding board, okay? So the coach here is the person who is now helping, you know? So there is, again, coaching and a coach, coach and a coachee is a very equal relationship. It's not like a mentoring or a subject matter expert here. And in fact, a coach could be somebody who's completely outside the domain as well. So the coachee, by using various facts, statistics, 360 degree reports, dashboards, what the employee brings, help the employee to retrospect and put a plan. And it's the coach's responsibility to make sure that there's a rigorous development plan, which is their actions, which is defined by every quarter. And then is there an improvement happening based on that? So, you know, the driver in this system is the coachee, the employee, okay? So the performance assessment conversation has moved to more like coaching, reflections, career development, those kind of conversations. So for every coach, we have 20 coaches, okay? So for every coach, we have 20 coaches and it helps the coach to have at least one conversation with one employee every month. Depending on the need, it could be more than one conversation. Coaching plus the competency development. So the competency could be, let's say mobility is one competency. So there is a cluster leader for the mobility group where there are 20 people from the mobility who reports into this person. It is a metrics organization, okay? No, this is not a agile, agile coach in the sense, the agile coaches is the one who helps teams adapt agile processes. No, this is more like a performance coach. This is the sounding board, this is the sounding board. They're trained to be coaches. So they've gone through a coaching certification program to be coaches. It's not an easy skill to build. Just to give you an idea on how a performance management process works, okay? So there is a coach and a coachy relationship which is established and the performance management happens between these two individuals at the individual level. We emphasize more on the team performance part. So there is, the goal setting is completely tied with your program increment. Okay, so these are shorter iterative goal setting which happens for every quarter. There's a regular one-on-one feedback. There's a development planning discussion which happens between the coach and the coachy on what training the person has to go through. Is there a mentorship which is required? Is there on-the-job experience which is required? So more in that framework. And at the end of it, then again, there is enough indicators to show that is the person's performance is improving or not improving. And over the period, if the performance improves, then it gets into the final decision on the rating and all of that. So as I said, we have still not completely matured in the process and ideally I would say that full maturity would be when we move away from the rating per se and really focus more on the development and the forward-looking part because the entire focus is improving the performance. The entire focus is not how to derive the rating. So the feedback is within the team and with the coach and the coachy. But it's far more regular. So what are we observing?  Employees who have moved to Agile are extremely happy. We went through a cycle of change where people were not clear. Our project managers were completely unhappy. They didn't know what, some of them became scrum masters, but they didn't know whether they have gone down in their career or moved up in their career. People who became coaches had complete confusion on how to play those roles. But in general, now what we see is that the team is completely happy with the process. We continue to be driving in a lot of innovations around that. So it's no hit, in fact, it's changing for better. Also just to give you an idea that there are various processes that can get changed if you look at from an HR angle. So when you look at a talent acquisition, the big shift was that earlier the entire process was focusing on evaluating people on the skills. Can they do this job immediately? And that is important, but the focus has now moved more into can they collaborate? Can they adapt? Can they be independent? Can they work in ambiguous situation? So that has become a big focus. And what we have realized is that those things cannot be built easily. The skills can be trained. The other shift is again, breaking the organizational structure is how can we involve the team members in the decision making on whom to hire in the team? So that kind of brings in that ownership and the empowerment within the team on whom they want to add into the team. Performance management we spoke about. So it's more like a quarterly event, more feedback driven and a more feed forward driven. Learning, we have moved away from the learning calendars. We've made it like there's now a globalized tool process of Phillips University and their learning opportunities available immediately, e-learning processes. So it's like what the team wants immediately and how can we provide that rather than looking at something which you have a need and you can give it after three months or four months time. Employee engagement, it's more and just like what agile philosophy is driving it on extrinsic one. We want, we end the process, I would say that moving away from motivating people, giving performance ratings or using merit increases as a tool and that is our aim. And create a culture where there's more empowerment that they're driven by the projects that they are getting into to drive the motivation. Career paths, job designs is completely changed. So we have moved away from traditional lateral movements and those career paths and it's more career lattice which is there right now. And the decision making is completely within the team level. If you have to look at a shift in organizational culture and this is a model which it resonated well. And if you have to plot Phillips on this structure, so the two aspects or two axis of a culture is, one is where you want to have a lot of control within the organization, the other one is the flexibility part and the one is internal focused and the other is external focused. So Phillips as an organization years back was probably here. There was a lot of flexibility but it was very internal focus, very shy kind of an organization. The feeling of the Dutch organization, very internal focus, that kind of a culture. Over the years we moved to continue to be very internal focus but built a lot of systems, processes, controls within the organization. Over the last decade, the shift happened here where we started becoming more aggressive in the marketplace but we didn't move away from our control. And at this point, the focus is how we create a dynamic entrepreneurial, a creative workplace where the focus is completely on creating customer value and with a lot of flexibility. And I like this model because it's easy for us then to relook at our own organizations and see where do we stand in this four quadrants. And then look at what interventions to build around that. So yeah, so that was a little overview on some of the things that we have been doing. So I can take a few questions. I think we have five minutes for questions, yeah, sure. So at this point in time, we have looked at a software part primarily, software in the systems part, which is the R&D part of it. So which constitutes around 6,000 employees right now. So we started from there. We have not looked beyond like sales marketing and all of that at this point. Yes, so they are in different stages. So some are going to move, some have already moved. So we are deploying in a face manner, not entirely yet. Overall size of Philips is in terms of number of employees, more than 100,000 employees, 113,000 employees. So if you ask me, we didn't have big attrition. That's a risk when you go through it. And if you don't manage the entire change process. And that's where, so one of the things that helped was to bring in the HR team, the top leadership team, our centralized organizational development team into the process much early. So immediately we knew when we were moving that people had apprehensions about the new roles. How would they see their career growth in Philips? And we had to. Some of those things like defining the roles, defining the career paths was the immediate thing that we delivered. So picking up what is really stopping people from making this change, the fears that they have and providing solutions around that, that was the focus. That really helped us. So one is the way we approached the change was we didn't go for a big bank mass deployment. So we took one big business group and within that business group we started with certain business units and we put a plan on how we are going to drive. So when I said the R&D organization, not the entire R&D organization has moved right now, but the shift has been in phases, right? Sorry, there was a, yeah. So in terms of how it has benefited, I mean we track with all our productivity metrics and the time to delivery has really improved. Significantly, also now there is, and some of the things that we work on is also moving from traditional product development of big machines to putting together a hospital system and all of that. So there's far more collaboration with the customers of co-creating some of these things. So a way of working in the business model has also changed. So it goes very well with that model. So it's not complete. So we started this journey around two years back. So it's in the process. In some of the teams it's been deployed like more than a year, they have been completely functioning in this format. Yeah, sure. Okay, so no questions coming from this side. Okay, how is the compensation handled? Honestly, that is a piece of work which I am right now involved in. And one of the purpose of coming to this conference was how can I pick ideas on, we heard yesterday in the keynote speech also that and Phillips is no different. We moved away from the bell curve and we thought that it's revolutionary. I would say the revolutionary thing would be the moment we move away from ratings, right? Because there's so much of culturally, people just look at ratings and it says, hey, if I have a higher rating, I get a higher increment. And the thought that we have in our mind is, pay based on the value of the role. So if there's a role which is there and it's very scientifically, you can evaluate that. That what is the market value of that role and based on the skills and the critical and you can bring in the performance factor but you can keep it to a 10 to 15% kind of a variation around that because there are enough indicators on how the individual is performing within the team. If at all we want to build that differentiation within a team on how we position people's salary but focus more on how can we have team bonuses. So then that's a very direct indicator of how the team is achieved and they see a correlation with the compensation. Rest of the time it's all bell curve and one year you are in the top and one year you're not. Some people get just branded for potential and not for performance. I don't know how I'm doing on time. Probably one last question I can take. No, I don't have. At this point we have not reached that stage. So I didn't get the question. Yeah, so the part that we have taken is where performance rating or a performance evaluation is more crowd sourced than our individual deciding what the rating is. So that's the approach that we are taking. So it's just breaking, making it more bottom sub rather than a top down. So at this point we are downplaying the entire rating piece and the performance appraisal piece completely. Yeah, so for that it's not the HR processes but it's the team targets and the team dashboards which is available, right? So the customer value that the team creates is a dashboard which is there already as part of a scrum team process, right? So there are various metrics. So we didn't want to introduce additional metrics around it. Right, so performance is clearly driven on the value that they're creating. That's the entire thing to, see our vision is to break that. We don't have a solution right now. But I believe there has been like yesterday the speaker at the end who gave the speech, they have managed to come up with a process where they're completely broken up. So there are examples there but all I can say is that it can be broken. Yeah, so let me just qualify it saying that we have a talent management process which is very central. So we know people, what the potentials are. We look at people's aspirations, people go and fill their internal resume talking about what their aspirations are but we evaluate based on how they're developing themselves. So the potential part is completely centralized and managed. So we have a visibility of who the people are. There is no ranking. So there's a difference between a ranking from a performance point of view and a ranking from a potential point of view. You have potential, everybody has a potential but for certain roles these are certain people for potential. So that's a way of looking at it. So there are two things. So let me just break this. You have to differentiate based on performance. It's not a socialistic approach. So it's differentiating based on the performance but based on the skill and the value that that person brings in. The emphasis here is more around driving a collaborative team focused system rather than creating individual stars. Within the team, there is a differentiation but currently the process, the traditional system that works is really focusing on the individuals and not really looking at how the team is working. So that's where creating the balance is important. At the end of it, the team did they perform. There's a part of money which is defined based on the team performance and within the team, there's some people who are much ahead and some behind. So there's a differentiation you bring in, not more than that. I've been told that I've run over time but I'm available during the lunchtime so we can take the conversations outside. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you.


Welcome back to another video. Today I want to talk about cardio. Two different things. I made a video about that a while ago, but still people keep asking me what's the difference between high intensity interval training and list training. Let's talk about list training. List stands for low impact steady state cardio. It involves a repetitive movement for a very long period of time. For example, you run on a treadmill for 30 minutes and you want to keep your heart rate at 40 to 60% of your max. Now hit. Hit stands for high intensity interval training. This involves performing high intensity activities at 95% of your maximum heart rate. Now that we know the difference between those two, I want to mention that both of them help increase your cardiovascular endurance. This is usually measured by VO2 max, which I will talk about later. Why wait, let's just talk about it right now. VO2 max is basically the ability to distribute oxygen and use oxygen as a form of energy. Also important to know is that there is a difference between anaerobic and aerobic training. Anaerobic is without oxygen and aerobic is with oxygen. To make that a little bit more clear, anaerobic training is basically the intensity is so high that you need ATP as a source of energy. And if you do, and that's usually like a shorter period of time. And if you think about aerobic training, that's a longer period of time and you can use oxygen to basically give your body and muscles the energy to perform that activity. I feel it, I'm starting to sweat in here. I turned the AC off, but if the AC is on, you cannot hear a single word I would say. So I have to sweat. Which form of cardio is better for fat loss? A lot of people swear on on list training, but I personally think high intensity interval training is the way to go. Why? It only takes up between 15 to 20 minutes to really keep you or leave you, not keep you, leave you exhausted after only 20 minutes. Another reason why I prefer hit training over list is because it elevates your metabolism for up to, or between 12 to 24 hours after your session. So you basically do a 20 minute workout and elevate your metabolism to like between 12 to 24 hours. I mean, that's a pretty good deal, right? Which one is better for fat loss while building muscle mass? So now that's the tricky part. I just said that I prefer hit training, but if it comes to building muscle mass, I go back and do list training. High intensity interval training uses up a lot of energy and if you wanna build muscle mass, you know you have to eat those calories and you have to be in a surplus to like gain muscle mass.  So if you wanna build muscle mass, you wanna be in a surplus, right? This is what I burn, this is how much I eat. I'm talking about calories. So now if I throw in another hit session, it gets a little closer, so I need to eat more. So it's counterproductive. So the answer is list training. If you wanna build muscle mass, but keeping your body fat percentage low, throw in one or two list sessions a week between 30 and 60 minutes and you're good to go. Which one's better to improve your VO2 max? If you wanna increase your endurance, there are two things you need to know. The anaerobic endurance and the aerobic one. So if you wanna increase your anaerobic endurance, you have to do hit training. On the other hand, if you wanna increase your aerobic endurance, you can do both. You can do list training or hit training. There's so many reasons why people do cardio, but I personally love the fact that if you increase your VO2 max, you can perform better in your usual bodybuilding, you know, muscle mass training routine. Why am I talking about endurance all the time? Why is it so important to know the difference between anaerobic and aerobic endurance? How does that help me gain muscle mass, for example? Think about it this way. The better your ability to use oxygen as an energy source throughout your workouts, the better your workout, right? Let's think about bench pressing. If you bench press 135 pounds, there are two things that limit your bench press. Number one, strength and then endurance, right? It's not only your strength that's limiting from doing more reps, it's also your endurance. So if you can increase the endurance within a specific exercise or overall your entire physique, you can do more and you will gain more strength over time. So if you increase your VO2 max, you can increase the intensity of your workouts, which leads to better workouts, more gains, shredded physique. To sum up this video, in my opinion, a well-programmed workout routine has to have at least one-less training in there or a HIIT training. You need some form of cardio to elevate your physique. You cannot just do your bench press and your squats for months without cardio, because at some point you will plateau and if you increase some cardio, you might be able to push a little harder over here, which will increase your performance in whatever exercise it is. But to be healthy overall, my recommendation is to have at least one-less session a week and depending on your goals, have like two HIIT sessions in there and yeah. Or obviously if you're an endurance athlete, you need more HIIT sessions in there than HIIT training. If you're into fitness and you just wanna look better, I would suggest one-less training, two HIIT sessions and you're good to go on top of your normal bodybuilding routine. All right guys, this is it for today's video. If you are interested in some HIIT training, but you don't know how to program that, I have a workout plan on my website, bodybybattle.com. It's a 60-day body weight workout plan and all of the workouts are HIIT sessions. They're between 10 to 25 minutes long and they change every single day.  I promise you, you will lose a lot of weight. All right guys, that's it for today. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a comment and I'll see you next time.