Ahead of EHS Congress 2021, which takes place in Berlin from 9-10 November 2021, SHP, an event media partner, discusses how leaders will need to adapt to new ways of working, with Vice President EHS Renewable at GE, and speaker at this year’s event, Claus Rose.
Claus is a motivated leadership and management professional with over 20 years of combined experience impacting corporate performances. His background is business management and leadership. He spent many years in the armed forces and has a proven track record of designing and facilitating highly effective training programs on a global scale and an extensive background in renewable energy sector.
You have a vast experience in your career in leading and building teams, how much more challenging has that been over the last 18 months and how will leaders need to adapt to managing teams of hybrid workers, moving forward?
Claus Rose (CR): “That’s going to be an absolute core requirement. It’s a very new dimension, first and foremost, let’s be very clear on that. And it requires that you allow people to do more on their own.
“One of the things that we’ve done, is to adapt one of these models called Holacracy, which is essentially a system without a manager. So, the team knows exactly what they have to do by when. You have some governance, but very few meetings, to allow people to get aligned with the colleagues that they need to get aligned with. It means it’s very targeted.
“That’s one side of the story. The other side of the story, a part that we tend to forget, is the fact that their health dimension of hybrid working is having a significant impact on individuals. So, you have to do check-ins, and those check-ins cannot be about work, they should be about ‘how are you?’ ‘Is there anything that you want to talk about?’ Is there anything that you need help with?’ Because people get completely disconnected from their co-workers. We have to realise it’s putting a tremendous amount of stress on people.
“Another issue is that people are working a lot more than they are used to. Previously people were traveling and when they travelled, it was a way to get disconnected from computers, teams and things like that. That is completely now been mixed into people’s private life. That is why you need to help set some boundaries, for the team to be effective.”
You are speaking at EHS Congress in Berlin in November how much are you looking forward to a return to face-to-face events and how important is it that we get over the hurdle as we look for a return to the new normal?
(CR): “I think it’s really important, because everyone has missed that interaction. It’s going to be nice to get back to listening to other people’s perspective.
“I think one of the things that I’m also hoping for, is to see people challenging the status quo. Because, in my mind, there’s still too much mainstream. We’ve seen it before; it hasn’t really changed anything. So, what are we really doing to drive change? And how can we support that?”
You will be discussing vision safe and exploring the importance of understanding your customers at the event, what can you us about your session?
(CR): “It’s really about who gives the direction. Is the population, or is it the people that are on the front line? And let’s be very clear, if it doesn’t work for the frontline, we can do as much as we like. It won’t work. You have to understand how that is linked into it.
“What we did, was to ask the front-line, our customers, for very honest and open feedback. That was scary because it tore everything that we thought was good apart. So, we just said, ‘ok, that’s fine’. Let’s just stop those things. So, we stopped them. Literally all that stuff. We stopped it.
“Then we said, ‘ok, now you have given us very good feedback, the joke is on you. You now have to come back and tell us what we need to do instead.’ And they did.
“That is what Vision Safe is all about, being told they want to do things to be more successful. It’s about driving highly effective teams. We looked at a model called SQDC, safety, quality, quality, delivery, and costs. You must understand how the model that you have implemented can be used by any function. It’s all to do with driving successful teams, because if we do that then we are also mitigating the fact that we cannot change. The biggest flaw of any human being is the fact that they make mistakes. Every human being makes about six or seven mistakes an hour. What we’re trying to do is minimize the impact of those mistakes that people make.
“That is where we see a difference and it’s very interesting to see where people have embraced this. I do this daily. ‘They’ve had zero incidents, practically no quality issues, they deliver on time and at a lower cost.’ So, there is no reason why we want wouldn’t want to do that, and what we’ve done is we’ve said, OK, this is something that we’ve created. We want to make sure that we give it to everybody, our contractors, our customers, so they can access the information and disseminate whatever they want to.”
What do you hope that delegates will go away and think about and try and implement in their own business?
(CR): “Challenge the status quo. I think that’s really what I’m hoping that they can take away from it. Because, if you continue doing what you did yesterday, just in a different way, nothing is going to change. It’s really that simple and the scary part here is if you make change, you don’t know the outcome. This is where human beings are often afraid of taking that massive jump. You are jumping into the unknown unknown and you have no idea what’s going be the outcome and, more importantly, if you do that, you then constantly have to live with the fact that you’ve now changed the magnitude of how we operate.
“The front-line is constantly coming back with ideas and suggestions that you then have to implement. You are no longer in control, they are in control, but you are helping them. So, you get a different value as an organisation than you had before. You’re of moving away from being, in financial terms, just an overhead cost allocation discussion, you’ve become something that is seen as an in an immense value to the business and it drives change.”
Hear more from Claus Rose on day one of EHS Congress 2021 in his talk, ‘Vision Safe – understanding your customers’, on 9 November.
Click here for more from EHS Congress on SHP.
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