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Episode Overview
In this episode, Luke speaks with Richard Taylor, Deputy CEO for Operations at Leigh Academies Trust, to explore the critical role of culture and engagement in the education sector. Richard discusses how their “Stay and Grow” strategy, built on professional development, relational trust, and improved working conditions, directly impacts teacher retention and student outcomes. The conversation delves into leveraging technology, including AI, for real-time engagement insights, personalised learning journeys for both students and staff, and fostering better communication across multiple academy sites. Richard also shares his perspectives on the future of AI in the workplace, emphasising personalisation at scale and the importance of psychological safety amidst technological advancements

Episode Transcript
Luke: Hi everybody. I’m here with Richard Taylor today, who is a wonderful Mo customer, and I’m really delighted to talk to him a little bit about what culture engagement means in the education sector. So, Richard, if you wouldn’t mind just telling us a little bit about yourself to get us started, please.
Richard Taylor: Of course. Hi Luke. My name’s Richard Taylor. I’m the Deputy CEO for Operations for Leigh Academy’s Trust. I’ve been with the trust just over a decade now. And I was previously the People Director, so in my previous role engagement was absolutely critical for us as an organisation. We are a network of 33 academies, both primary, secondary, and special education needs. We employ just under 4,000 staff, and every day we educate around 25,000 students. So we have a big footprint in the Southeast covering Kent, Medway, and Southeast London. It’s really exciting to be here today.
Luke: Great. Thank you so much. I’m going to jump right in at the deep end, and it’s a big assumption for me, but I believe it is true, which is retention and people really make your business, right? Or your organisation, I should say, sorry, in that you are people powered. They teach, they support, they help. And therefore keeping hold of them, especially the good ones, feels like it would be vital. So it would be really useful to just get a sense of how you think about your people strategy and how in turn that might inform your engagement and retention strategies that you look to understand and improve on.
Richard Taylor: Absolutely, Luke. For us, you’re right, we are a people organisation. We are nothing without our people. We don’t manufacture anything other than excellent students that go on and transform the world. So for us retention is absolutely vital. And actually for us, we’ve discovered and documented and evidenced that retention is directly linked to better outcomes for students. So teachers that stay longer with us, they build stronger relationships, they contribute better performance across our academies, and create better continuity in learning for our students. So retention is absolutely a strategic focus for us. One of the things we did this year, we launched a new side strategy specifically around retention, called our “Stay and Grow” strategy. That sort of bolts onto our main people strategy, but it recognises that retention is quite a complex matter. When we developed that, we looked at two particular areas. We looked externally at research that the Education Endowment Foundation had done around what were the critical elements that leaders could do to drive teacher retention. And we also took about half a million data points of surveys that we’d done over the last seven years and used that to critically design a strategy that we felt would retain people in the long term. It built around three key themes, consistent with the research. It was around things like prioritising professional development.
Luke: If you’re in education, you’d probably like to be educated.
Richard Taylor: Yeah.
Luke: Developed.
Richard Taylor: And schools traditionally do a lot of inset days. If you’re a parent, you’ll know that. But actually, a lot of that is kind of the same learning for everybody. So we looked at how we prioritise individual professional development and actually target what people actually need. The other key strand was around building relational trust. This is a really important dynamic for both driving engagement and therefore retention. How do you build that transparent communication, that shared decision-making, and really importantly, the meaningful recognition of achievement? That was how we first got involved with Mo, looking at that recognition strategy. We were already doing bits here, bits there; we’d give out an award for a member of staff in an assembly, but actually, how do we embed it? How do we make it part of our everyday practices? So that was a real key aspect of the strategy. And then the final bit was around improving working conditions. If you’ve opened any newspaper in the last 20 years, you’ll probably read teachers’ working conditions, workload, are problematic. And it’s one of the main drivers why people leave the profession. So it made sense. If we’re going to try and retain people, we have to meaningfully tackle the workload that particular teachers have to endure. Many people have tried, and it’s been a long battle over the last 10, 15 years for the DfE as well. But fundamentally, we’ve tried to look at what would shift the dial the most. I’m going to get onto technology.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: That has been a big part of that. We’ve tried to be on the cutting edge, I think, of deploying AI technologies.
Luke: Yeah, that’s useful. There are definitely questions relating to that ’cause I know it’s a passion area for you too. If I may, just a couple of connected questions, which is half a million data points through surveys, lots of research around what matters to people. Did you craft, I guess, elements of this employer brand and this strategy to attract and retain and help people grow with you? Is it built around your strength areas, things that you’re already good at, and therefore you were doubling down on? Or was it really and truly centred around the people? ‘Cause that probably tells us how far you had to transform the company in order to meet those areas.
Richard Taylor: I think we were moving in the right direction with some things. We’d invested quite a bit in learning and development. It’s quite bizarre. I came into education from the private sector, worked in lots of different commercial organisations where L&D has always been a core part of most teams. Actually, if you go into most schools, multi-academy trusts, L&D doesn’t exist as a function. So one of the things we did, we created that function to add that professionalism to learning, which sounds crazy in education.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: But it’s one thing teaching students, it’s another thing teaching and developing adults. So that was something that we built on, and we introduced a new learning platform called Thrive, which we’ve really used to embed a lot of our virtual learning, but we’ve also been looking at the impact of our programmes as well. So we had some threads in place, but this strategy helped us to develop some of those a bit further. So we looked at, for instance, building professional learning journeys, so pathways that apply to particular people at stages of their career that could help give them more of a bespoke strategy. We’re also launching in September what we call Flight Plan, which is our career advisory service for adults.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: We do career advice for students, as you would expect. But actually, we want to provide that service to our staff as well. Often we might have a, for instance, a teaching assistant wants to become a teacher. What’s the pathway? What’s the route? What are the courses? What are the qualifications that they need to do? So we, using our internal resources and a bit of AI mixed into the balance, we are going to create that advisory service and help them to develop on the career paths that they want to.
Luke: Very cool. And then do you mind just talking to me a bit about the monitoring system? So you have these core pillars to
Richard Taylor: Mm.
Luke: How you’ve defined what it means to work for the organisation. You have a sense of what mattered to people. But the world changes at quite a rapid pace these days. So how do you go about understanding retention and engagement and these elements that remain important to people?
Richard Taylor: I think this is the crux of it. Everyone has got people strategies that they’re implementing, but how do you actually measure their impact? Traditionally we look at staff surveys, and whether you do them as pulse surveys every month. I know some organisations do them weekly, but you’re still having to analyse that data, use that data to get decent insights, to work out what you need to do next. I think where we are hopefully going with technology is to get more real-time understanding of how engaged our staff are. I spoke to a company last year that designs and puts in place. Have you ever been into a retail shop, those smiley faces?
Luke: Or not? Yeah. Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Or not. And we looked at that for staff to measure that engagement as they leave the building every day. That’s still something we might look at in the future. But that kind of in-the-moment feedback I think is really important. And I think if you can hook that into AI to understand what went on that day, was student behaviour particularly positive, negative. For me that’s the future of understanding engagement is that real-time analysis of it so you can adjust and adapt accordingly.
Luke: I agree. I think it is the pace of the feedback loop needs to evolve, right? Because a lot influences how you think and feel, and also act on a daily basis, especially in a tense educational setting. I suspect with children that could drastically influence your mood, if you like, rather than your engagement with the organisation. I guess how you’re feeling that day could be quite heavily influenced by a lot of events around you.
Richard Taylor: You never quite know what can happen in a school on any typical day. Like I say,
Luke: Like yesterday.
Richard Taylor: Yesterday, we had an air ambulance landing yesterday for one of our students who managed to fall over in the playground. And that can completely change the dynamic of the day, what leaders are having to deal with. And every day, even the wind can change how a school behaves. So if you have a particularly windy day, it is a well-known factor. Most teachers will agree with this, that students’ behaviour changes.
Luke: Really, how fascinating.
Richard Taylor: It is a funny world we live in, but.
Luke: Yeah, indeed.
Richard Taylor: The biological link to that, but.
Luke: No, true. Very true. One last topic before we just dig into technology a little bit more in a second would just be around. So, you have this promise to your people. It’s monitored and measured through the engagement survey on an ongoing basis, but measurement for me is only ever half the equation. The improvement and how you drive change, it becomes vitally important and the threads of the series that we’re doing is around culture change and how you shift some of the behaviours in order to improve things like the engagement results. Have you got an example for me? Maybe the most memorable one for you of a change. You’ve got the insight, you’ve learned something new that could be from a survey or some feedback, and you’ve decided to make a change around it.
Richard Taylor: Yeah, and it’s a slightly odd one, but it came, we did a staff survey just before Christmas, and we found that staff started to answer the questions in a different way than we expected. They used it as an output to give us feedback on things that we weren’t asking about. And when your staff do that, it generally means that that’s really important to them. And because we were getting it from lots of different areas, we said actually this is kind of really critical feedback. And actually what teachers were telling us wasn’t that workload wasn’t the most important thing that was necessarily impacting on their day. It was other more operational issues. Really simple stuff like how they log a support ticket with IT. That was causing them more pressure and more stress than actually the workload of being a teacher. And we didn’t ask that question, but that’s the response that we got. And as a result, we made a number of changes to our support services to try and respond to that. So it’s sort of, I mean, partly it was a human change, but partly it was technological as well. So some of the
Luke: Hmm.
Richard Taylor: And like most organisations, we switched on to multi-factor authentication.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: That created challenges for our staff in being able to engage with us. So we had to address that and make it easier to sort of, and that in itself, it’s surprising ’cause I mean, you would expect that workload would be the biggest issue for staff. And it probably feeds into the fact we’ve done a lot of work improving workload, that it’s
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Not there on the top 10 list of issues. So,
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: It’s funny what happens when you’re dealing with lots of the different elements of engagement, when you reduce the big ones, what then comes up to the surface? And sometimes it’s quite trivial things that can be the biggest distractors for staff as well.
Luke: Yeah, for me it’s that interesting intersection between like, the experience that people have with you and that blend of like employee experience almost being an input to engagement, being the output of like, if there is friction in their world.
Richard Taylor: Yeah.
Luke: That is causing, it’s not additional workload, it’s just a simple job that’s been made hard somehow. It just, the experience just rubs and just gets in the way of actually the good outcomes that you ordinarily feel. If you think about that in a checkout experience, for example, like self-service checkouts are one of the things that get me all of the time. Love the idea. Often don’t want to speak to anybody when I’m going through the checkout process, but when it doesn’t work, it absolutely kills me. And support tickets are kind of the same thing, right? And if they reoccur and reoccur, it just gets in the way of the experience.
Richard Taylor: Yeah, that’s it. And when you are driving people to perform in terms of resolving tickets, it creates the wrong kind of cultures where people then try and resolve or close tickets ahead of it actually being dealt with because they’re worried about their performance. So you create this kind of perfect storm of technology working against you.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: And, and, and technology really. And I quoted the Microsoft CEO the other day in a session, because we were introducing a new kind of project management platform, Satya Nadella.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Tools don’t create culture, but they can shape it.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Platforms can enable
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Speed, and trust. And it’s so true. Technology doesn’t create engagement, but it can help you create the culture that can drive it in the right direction. Launching Mo was really positive. But that hasn’t.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Driven staff engagement in itself. The change in behaviour and the recognition that is now instant and system-wide across the organisation. That is the real shift. So it’s, technology has a part to play, but it, it can’t create that culture for you.
Luke: Yeah, I completely agree. I often have this conversation. You created me a wonderful segue to what I wanted to talk to you about next, which is technology is an enabler because it is rarely ever the tool.
Richard Taylor: Yep.
Luke: That, that solves all of the problems, but it does go a very long way to either making it easier or giving you access to things that make you 10 times smarter or, you can output 10 times the better quality or whatever it might be. Generally when you view technology through that lens, it can be super duper helpful. So I wondered, we’ve talked a little bit about retention being critical to you as an organisation, the role of how you shape that culture to foster highly engaged people. Just wanted to get a sense of your views on how technology as an enabler is starting to shape that. More and more.
Richard Taylor: Yeah.
Luke: Advancements or things that you think are worth calling out.
Richard Taylor: I, I think it is, as we embed technology in our day-to-day working practices, it has that ability to help shape culture and, and shape and drive engagement. When we introduced Mo into our organisation, we call, we call it LAT moments. So if I, if I call it something different, that’s, that’s
Luke: Okay. Yeah.
Richard Taylor: We, we were going to call it something completely different, but we got so obsessed with the concept of moments. And actually, culturally that is, that is a really important concept, isn’t it? It’s
Luke: Absolutely.
Richard Taylor: In the moment. So, so that moments as we, our, our staff recognition platform. So it is not the reason people go above and beyond in their job, but it, it shapes how that effort is now seen and how it’s acknowledged and how it’s valued by, by leaders. And peers across our organisation. It, it gives us such a, a simple way to recognise colleagues in that kind of real time way. And we, we, we sort of had bits of it. Before, but we didn’t bring it all together in, in one place. Now it’s much more visible, much more consistent, and fair as well. People can see that. And it’s, it’s helpful that we, we’ve integrated the, the sort of financial element of the reward as well, which is always like the cherry on the top.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Peer-to-peer element is probably the most important for staff. But that just gave us that kind of ease of, so it is a good example of how technology is enabling that sort of cultural change. In the, in the same way that if we put the wrong platform in. It, it could have actually done the
Luke: Inhibited it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Richard Taylor: That kind of culture from, from going. It’s, it’s that the, the beauty of having a platform for it rather than just standing up in assembly. It, it sort of direct and immediate and it cuts through some of the noise and delay that you would get with a traditional recognition scheme. And of course, across, 33 geographically dispersed academies. Celebrating a teaching assistant who’s working in a primary and Maidstone a secondary in Greenwich is, is fantastic that they are much more, aware of, they are being recognised by a much bigger audience than ever before. So, and, and that transforms part of our culture. And, and, and every organisation that has multi-sites will have the same challenge.
Luke: Yeah. How do
Richard Taylor: You create that consistency of culture across all those different organisational units? We often talk about our schools as being siblings of each other rather than clones. ‘Cause they’ve
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Own unique personality and,
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: And aspirations, values. But actually creating a culture where recognition is, is treated equally across all schools is really important to us. You know, so staff feel that they’re getting treated, equally. We’re also very heavily unionised, so when we start to treat, staff in one school better than another, the unions will always, pick us up on it. So,
Luke: Yeah, indeed.
Richard Taylor: Really important that technology helps to be the enabler of that, that kind of cultural shift.
Luke: Yeah, I, I often talk to moments as the things that shape the employee experience and then they showcase your, your culture. Because they’re small, little micro stories, if you like, that boost visibility of what culture means, culture through. Past generations and generations and generations have been told through stories. And I think that’s kind of what you’re getting, with, with moments being shared and celebrated is a flavour for what it looks and feels like to be a part of that particular, school. Which is, which is great. I, I think to pick up on your, sorry, go on. You’re gonna say something more.
Richard Taylor: I was just gonna say, we’ve also embedded it in our, we’ve got an, like an annual award ceremony, and we’ve used, Mo to, to drive all of the nominations as well. So you’ve got this, this kind of online nomination process, but then you’ve got. What is our kind of end of year in-person ceremony. Which, is, is about as a, as big as an event as, there is in our, school calendar. It is,
Luke: Cool.
Richard Taylor: A big, celebration of staff and it’s sort of grown over the, over the years. But again, it’s part of that culture, isn’t it?
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Staff to feel special, so we put on. And, and, and, and a and a, it’s a, it’s a night that last year we, we used the Oscar’s menu to, to help design our menu for this year. That’s the, that’s the
Luke: Very cool.
Richard Taylor: At. Yeah.
Luke: Yeah. Very, very cool. I love that. And I think it, it talks to the, the perfect blend that you need to get through human connection, real life, and how technology can help you, make it even better. You, you said one thing, as we were talking about. Visibility being one thing. We’ve just touched upon that, but the consistency being very, very key. And often what we find as a technology company is that, you will always have people championing the job to be done. In your organisation, you will have had, before you introduce us or before you introduce your project management tool or whatever it might be, people championing the cause. The challenge is that they are normally the two and a half percent of the far right hand side of the normal distribution curve. And it’s the scaling of that that is the difference between individual leadership and behaviours and culture in the organisation. I find, and it’s often how you make consistently doing that job, very, very easy to capture the 58 odd percent that sit under that middle chunk, the, the meaty bit of the, normal distribution curve. And I think that tends to be, in my mind, the role of technology in organisations is how you shift the masses. Because that’s where you really make your high performance leaps is when you can drive change there, not in the two point half percent because the numbers are always so small.
Richard Taylor: Yeah.
Luke: So it would be interesting if we, if you don’t mind, to go to, the role of. Other technologies that probably everybody is talking about in the minute and the likes of AI.
Richard Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Luke: And getting a flavour from you on where you think we are in that adoption cycle, and whether it is just reserved for those individual leaders that are powering a new way, or whether you are starting to see signs already of the masses adopting and, and what that might look like within your organisation today.
Richard Taylor: Yeah, I mean, is fascinating. I mean, we’ve been on the, the journey for a few years now and, I remember I went to a, a, a, an event, about two years ago with a number of big. High Street names. I won’t name them on the podcast, but, the kind of people that you, you would recognise.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: We were talking about, how we were using AI in developing, learning and development. And I said, oh, we’ve been doing it for a few months. We’re using it to develop content. We’re using it to create individual, kind of. The tailored content. And the, L&D director from a, from a large organisation said, oh, we don’t use it ’cause we’re not allowed. And, I just felt for, for once, education has.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Been leading the way in in this. Been some announcements this week. I don’t know if you’re watching the news around AI investment within education, because I think the government has also seen the huge potential that it, that it can have on, on, on dramatically improving educational outcomes for, for, for young people. But also in terms of. Making schools more efficient in, in, in how they work. We’ve, we’ve used a number of, AI technologies over the last few years, and we’re kind of, now with the stage we’re working with partners to develop new ones as well. So we’ve got some exciting things happening in our student space, where students based on their, so students will do mock exams. The system that we are developing will look at how they’ve performed in every one of those individual questions, and then we will tailor a online curriculum for them to then use to, kind of fill the gaps in their knowledge and they’ll be able to do that as part of their homework as part of, kind of. Revision sessions, and just really, kind of get them significantly further on with, with their studies potentially to two grade points above where they would’ve been, which is, is.
Luke: Wow.
Richard Taylor: Research is, is looking like it could deliver, which is massive. To go from, not getting a, a, I’m sorry, I’ll, the grade system has changed, since, since most people probably listen to this podcast, went to school. So
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: If you, if you’ve got young children, you’ll, you’ll know. But it’s now basically, a one to nine and, a four is a equivalent of a C. So, shifting somebody from a four to a six, is quite significant, and takes a lot of effort and a lot of time. But, the AI we, we are using is. Potentially going to get students, to that kind of level. And from a workload point of view, it go back to the, kind of how we keep people engaged and for staff, being able to, to set homework. So with the platform, we, we’ve set it up and developed it so a teacher can set homework for the entire year in a couple of hours.
Luke: Wow. Okay.
Richard Taylor: And
Luke: Huge.
Richard Taylor: The homework, but also mark all the homework. So actually it takes homework out of the equation for teachers. They can design it all the start of the year, and it, it will constantly mark the homework and keep kind of creating, heat maps.
Luke: Wow.
Richard Taylor: Of where the gaps and the knowledge are, which is, almost unheard of, without. Kind of AI and, and, and some of the technologies. So that’s, that’s just one of the platforms that we’re kind of investing in. And, hopefully, we’ll, we’ll see some, some good progress. It benefits both students and staff kind of in.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Which is great.
Luke: That’s great. And it makes me think back actually to your people promise around the career pathways and homework and the opportunity to build your own personalised learning journey. Are you applying any of that yet on the inside of the organisation for your people too?
Richard Taylor: Yeah, we, we are just able to develop more content at, at sort of speed really. I mean, we, we had a lot of feedback around, kind of leadership skills, line management skills. Traditionally not huge areas of focus for, for schools. So, we were able to develop an entire podcast series for about, I think it’s about 30 episodes.
Luke: Wow. Okay.
Richard Taylor: And, yeah, some, some, some bit of editing, afterwards. But, yeah, fundamentally we, we were able to get that and that that whole programme is bespoke to being a, a people manager within a school. So it’s not content that we’ve picked off the internet.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Specific culturally to us. It talks about our values, it talks about how we operate, and it very much is reflective of roles within schools. So, without AI it would’ve been a lot more challenging. We, we fed lots and lots of documents into lots of different AI platforms and, turned out some, some pretty decent scripts at the end.
Luke: That’s very cool. Very, very cool. And if I can also then maybe go to your next pillar around, forgive me, it was related to relational dynamics within teams. What did you, what’s the pillar called?
Richard Taylor: So building relational trust. So,
Luke: Trust. Okay.
Richard Taylor: And that there’s, there’s elements of, psychological safety in that, which is, is really key. And we’ve done a lot of training with our, the senior leaders. Around psychological safety over the last few years. But also around recognition, and communication as well. And that transparency and openness. It’s quite difficult being a teacher ’cause you’re often in a classroom with children all day. So you feel that all the other adults in the school are talking about things that you are not. Included in, so trying to keep staff, kind of connected is, is kind of like a constant challenge. So we, again, we, we’ve got some technological solutions to that. So we, we also rolled out, Viva Engage this year.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Which a lot of, businesses. Will, will use, as part of the Microsoft, suite. And that’s just been really helpful in connecting, not just colleagues across within the academy, but also across academies as well. So now, if you are a, a science teacher in our school, in,. Say Medway, and you’ve got some resources you want to share, you can share those. And other science teachers across trust can, can benefit from that. So, how we, how we connect across schools has been a challenge that we’ve been trying to, to solve for a while and trying to find, the right kind of technology platform to do that.
Luke: Interesting.
Richard Taylor: It helped with that.
Luke: And now just thinking about the big retailer that you mentioned and the, we are not allowed, comment that you made, not, not to draw on their individual situation, but thinking others that might be listening to this may well be in the same position. So I just, just wanted to get a sense from you of like any of the key mindset. Changes or kind of cultural shifts in which you need to drive to get the most out of it because you’re doing some really cool things.
Richard Taylor: Yeah. And, and I think you’re, you’re right, there are some, some mind shift changes. I think you’ve got to. Embrace an element of, kind of risk to some extent, but you’ve also got to be keen to innovate and take chances on, on new technologies, even if they’re perhaps not perfect. There’s a lot of talk about AI hallucination and the challenges that brings, and there was some classic ones in the early days where you could ask the question and it would always give you the wrong answer no matter how you ask.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: And it, it’s got better. It hallucinates less, but you’ve always got to, to be aware of that and, and, you know, you could, you could say, oh, well we’re not going to use it ’cause it’s not perfect. Or you could say, let’s train people in how to spot hallucinations. How to try and eliminate them. And that’s, that’s going to be a skill set for, for the future. So when we’re talking to our children and our students about AI. We, we are encouraging them to embrace it in a positive way, but also to understand its limitations, as well as obviously utilising it in, a kind of ethical way. Obviously, academic integrity of, coursework, is probably the biggest challenge for educational institutes, and, and that’s enough of a reason to run away from AI and, and bury your head in the sand. But you’ve, you’ve got to be realistic. You can’t stop, students from using it one way or another. So
Luke: That’s true.
Richard Taylor: How do you teach them the right way to use it? How, how to reference where they’ve used AI in coursework or writing an, an assignment. And, and there is, there is, there’s been guidance published, which has, which has helped us do that. But, we, we’ve, you’ve got to openly embrace it. And I know big organisations have the same challenges that we’ve had around things like GDPR, cybersecurity, they’re all things that you have to, to accept. We have the added challenge that certain AI platforms aren’t. For children. So chat, GPT for instance, you have to be 18 to use it. So we don’t deploy it within school. In fact, we actively block it within school.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Whereas Gemini teens is designed for, I think it’s children 13 and up. So we are, we are using it in those appropriate year groups. And in primary, we are using things like Adobe, Firefly, is it Firefly, and, and things like Canva, which are,
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Kind of image generation using AI to do Photoshopping and that, that kind of thing. So they are getting access to those technologies, but only at age appropriate times.
Luke: Yeah, it comes back to, for me, that technology is the enabler rather than the answer, right? And anything that’s helping you get to the answer, with individual judgement. Is, should be seen that way rather than the answer. Right? Which means, at least for the next couple of months, we’re all, all right because there needs some individual judgement. It brings me onto the next question actually, which is, given the rapid pace of technological change that we’re experiencing at the moment, I’d love some predictions from you over two different time intervals and, and I’d ask that you keep it tightly focused on the evolution of workplace culture and employee engagement. So the first one is in 12 months time, what are your predictions of some of the, the, the biggest evolutions or changes when it comes to culture and engagement?
Richard Taylor: I think, it goes back to something I said earlier. I think in the next year we’ll start to see AI being used to improve the, the kind of quality and speed of feedback, particularly in things like performance management.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Back, we, we used to accept that performance management was a, was a twice a year activity. We then moved to continuous performance management and said, actually we need to do this more regularly, but actually. Performance management is an everyday activity. So, technology I think will, will start to become much more about the speed of feedback. And I think we’ll see the more. Of, of sort of digital tools to, to kind of support everyday people management activities like recognition, communication, things like recruitment particularly. There’s a lot going on with that, but onboarding as well. When you introduce technologies. Fairly straightforward into the onboarding process to personalise it. I mean, we, we’ve been experimenting with writing, individual welcome letters. So in the past we had a very standard welcome letter to the trust, talked about our history, our values. But what we’ve been experimenting with is actually talking about the individual and how they will fit into our organisation and what opportunities it will have for them. I wouldn’t have wanted to write 700 of those previously, but.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: With AI, it could happen. And those, those are things that can happen in the next 12 months. I think that those, if they’re not already, within some organisations now.
Luke: Yeah, I completely agree. And then the next one, maybe a little harder given the pace, but at five in five years time, what are you thinking are the key kind of evolutions that we’ve then seen?
Richard Taylor: I think with the interconnectedness of, of, of data, and we’ve seen, platforms this week introducing connectors into your inbox, into your file systems. So ChatGPT can now reference all of your emails if you want it to. If you give it that kind of power and that kind of data, it can probably pick up from the tone of the communications that I’m, I’m sending how I feel.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: And, and probably, we’re talking five years time, it could probably start to adapt my work. It could probably help me a bit more. It could probably, suggest some, wellbeing tools. I’m having a bad day. I think it will be this embedding of, artificial in intelligence and, potentially artificial super intelligence, which, I think people are struggling to conceptualise what that could actually look like in the future. In five years time it will be here, it will know. Pretty much what we’re thinking, and, and be able to, to help us, not just with our tasks, but with the tasks that we haven’t even thought about.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: At the moment when you interact with, artificial general, generative intelligence, you’re, you’re basically asking it to do a task that you want it to do. But actually
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Where it will get to is that it will work out the tasks that you forgot about or you didn’t think about to make sure that you deliver to your best, possible outcomes. So I think, I think it will, will come from being a, a kind of a, a copilot, which is sort of what it is now, to actually being a critical friend and, and actually help people. Develop, I mean, or it will replace us all and, we’ll all be, just farming or, and picking fruit, which is, is.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Entirely possible.
Luke: Indeed. I think, at the heart of what you are saying is a leap towards high degrees of personalisation, I think is the opportunity that organisations have really struggled to do, because there has been an inability to process the sheer volume of variables, whereas I think the opportunity. In the employee experience is transformational, which is if you can get to a truly personalised experience as a consequence of these capabilities, it really starts to change the game on, how people think about whether they’re engaged or not, or what their experience is like or not.
Richard Taylor: 110% is personalisation at scale is possibly the biggest area for, for engagement to, to, benefit for from AI. And if you think about it, it could be across all sorts of different ways. Generic CPD sheep dipping people through the same course will effectively disappear. So
Luke: Yep.
Richard Taylor: That we’ll do will be much more bespoke. But even things like, even like an employee survey, why are you asking me all the same questions that you’re asking everybody else? Why don’t you ask me the
Luke: Yep.
Richard Taylor: That make the most difference to my role? Or ask, ask me. In the last survey I said that I was unhappy with this. Why don’t you ask me? What’s changed? Has it improved?
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: The technology could do that. I, I don’t think, I don’t know if there is a platform out there that could do it if, if there isn’t that, that’s a business opportunity.
Luke: I was thinking exactly the same thing. ‘Cause I know most of the survey companies very well and I’m like, Hmm, I wonder if that’s, that’s got to be on their roadmaps. You would hope.
Richard Taylor: And, and that correlation as well between, how engaged are you versus what is your performance, measuring that strength of that, that correlation, so you can see what are the drivers of engagement. ‘Cause actually and
Luke: For me as well, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, completely.
Richard Taylor: I mean, we, we, like many organisations have been trying to, to understand what the drivers of engagement are. I’ve got the booklet somewhere on it. But,
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Again, you, you can only really, do that across the whole organisation. You could say, for, for us, one of the things that we, we found over the years is that, when a manager cares about your wellbeing, that’s a massive positive correlation in terms of your engagement. But maybe that’s not everybody. And getting those individual drivers of engagement would be huge. Could, could you, I imagine for the people that you, you manage, that this person wants to be, treated in this way, this person is really focused on their developments. That’s, and actually having that, that kind of more personalisation of, engagement strategies. That’s, that, that for me is probably the exciting bit of the future.
Luke: Yeah, I would completely agree. I have one last question for you and then I’m going to jump into a lightning round, which is a lot of what we’ve talked about, earlier on, is in this, relational trust and key to that being psychological safety.
Richard Taylor: Yeah.
Luke: And the links to creating a high performing team and so on. A, a lot of these. Innovations, particularly around AI, often are perceived as quite, mechanical and therefore quite transactional. And human beings are quite emotional, whether we believe it or not, or whether we say it or acknowledge it or not. We’re, largely driven by our emotions. So I’m keen to just get a sense of from you of like how do we sustain or even increase this sense of human connection, psychological safety as we immerse ourselves in these new technologies. Is there a magic answer or some kind of key things that you hold yourself true to?
Richard Taylor: A fantastic question. I don’t know if there is an answer. I think, I think the reality is the, I mean, there have been other challenges to this as well. Hybrid working has, has had a huge impact on that kind of personal relationship with, with, with colleagues. And we’re sort of seeing a bit of a shift back to that. It’s, it’s not one that the education sector is particularly. Bothered with, because we’ve been here.
Luke: It doesn’t impact. Yeah.
Richard Taylor: A few, few, a few head office staff might work from home one day a week, but pretty much if you ask a teacher about it, they’ll, they’ll say, well, I’ve, I’ve been in school and, and haven’t worked from home and since COVID. So,
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: I think, I think the, the only way, I mean technology. Can, can also create some challenges to psychological safety. ‘Cause it can create a kind of perception that there’s more surveillance.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: The more interconnected your work is to technology, the more opportunity there is for the unscrupulous boss to, to actually work out how effective you are at your job. So. You’ve got to re almost balance that off with more transparency. Why are we using these AI technologies? How do we use them? What’s the benefit for you? What’s the benefit for the organisation? Psychological safety, ultimately its heart relies on that kind of trust and openness. And you’ve got to almost do more of that to offset the potential challenges with, with technology. I mean, we’re all, we’re all a little bit paranoid when we use AI that it’s all going to someday be published.
Luke: I come back and yeah.
Richard Taylor: And, so, you
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: How do, how, how do you get, psychological safety from AI? That, that, that’s probably the, the other question is, it’s one thing getting it from human human, but how does, AI reassure us that, it is, on our side.
Luke: A lot of it comes back down to,
Richard Taylor: They say that it is, and it’s really supportive, but you don’t quite know what it’s thinking in the background.
Luke: Yeah. That, that is antitrust behaviour in its own right. Cool. Let’s go onto this lightning round then. This one’s fun for me. So, one tech tool that you can’t live without. You don’t have to say Mo by any means.
Richard Taylor: I, I love Mo. It is an integral part of our organisation. But you with, for me. And, and, and I think. I probably would’ve said something different yesterday, but yesterday chatGPT went down for a few hours. I had a number of things that I needed it for, I almost got into a cold sweat about it. So I, I, I hate saying this, but I think chatGPT, I’m just being honest. I
Luke: No, this is good. This is good.
Richard Taylor: I had to use Gemini for a, for a period of time, so no, no dissing to Gemini, but it, it’s, it’s, it’s.
Luke: It wasn’t quite the same. Yeah.
Richard Taylor: ChatGPT I’ve had a relationship with for over near three years. So it knows me inside out. It, it knows when I ask something what I actually mean. So
Luke: Exactly that.
Richard Taylor: It’s the best PA you could have.
Luke: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Richard Taylor: My actual PA would not to say that!
Luke: Yeah. Who is more wonderful. Next, next one is, a book or a thinker that has shaped your views on organisational culture.
Richard Taylor: I, I, it was probably, when I, when I started in this role, making the transition from people director to deputy CEO and moving just from managing people to managing operations, I read a book, from a guy called Dan Heath, called “Reset.”. It’s, I don’t know if you’ve, if you’ve seen it, but I mean it was such a powerful book. ‘Cause it talks about, how you can create solutions from both technology and, and, and humans where you can effectively, for small amounts of effort, leave a huge changes in your organisation. I, I could bore you to death with it. I, I bought copies for loads of people. ‘Cause there’s some great examples in there. There’s, there’s a brilliant one. If you, if you, if you like cats, there’s a human solution to how they dealt with. The, the overpopulation of, of cats, which historically wasn’t very nice, they euthanised them. Whereas actually what they decided to do, I think this is in San Francisco, they decided to actually, neuter them, treat them and release them. And as a result, the problem. Decreased ’cause there
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Cats breeding, but there were healthy cats. And, it, it is such a, it is a beautiful story of, and actually it’s because one person, new employee that started said, what?. Why are we doing this? Why are we killing all these cats? Is there not a better way?
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: Person, right, asking the right question at the right time.
Luke: I’m, I’m pretty sure he also wrote The Power of Moments, which is also a very good book.
Richard Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. He is a great, great writer. Just it, it is quite a natural read. There’s lots of business textbooks that are quite, a little bit too academic or a little
Luke: Hard going.
Richard Taylor: Yeah. Whereas, whereas that,
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: As it was an audio book, as well, so I’ve, I’ve enjoyed it in the car as well. Some, some
Luke: Good stuff.
Richard Taylor: Stories in there.
Luke: Cool. Biggest myth about AI and education.
Richard Taylor: Oh, and this, I get this all the time. And particularly unions, whenever you talk about AI, they get a bit worried about this, that AI will eventually replace the teacher. It won’t.
Luke: Okay.
Richard Taylor: It will absolutely replace some of the pointless administrative work that they have to do, but it will never replace the skill, the expertise, the relationship that a teacher has with a student, that, that’s that human element that AI can never kind of replicate.
Luke: Yeah, completely agree. The culture trend that you are most excited about,
Richard Taylor: I, I think, we’ve, we’ve mentioned
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: But psychological safety as a sort of leadership currency. I. Particularly in, in, in times of, political changes and the, the rise of the right wing and Trump, I think psychological safety is more important than ever. And that’s what really I think, drives successful organisations. Google spent millions, coming up with the same answer.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: But fundamentally. In the teams that I’ve built, I’ve always ensured at the core there there is really strong psychological safety, and those teams are the best. It’s really powerful.
Luke: Good stuff. And then the very last question, so this one is a very weird one, but we’re trying it out, which is you’ve got no idea who the next speaker’s going to be,
Richard Taylor: Mm.
Luke: But if you can ask them one question to get their views on when it comes to culture change, what would it be?
Richard Taylor: Probably, probably not what they would do, but what they would not do. So what, do they think organisations should stop, do, stop doing on a day-to-day basis if they’re serious about staff engagement? I, I would, I would love to scrap email. I think
Luke: Yes.
Richard Taylor: The biggest, kind of elements of, of distraction and drain on people’s, psychological states. But unfortunately when you, you remove email, you tend to replace it with things like slack, which don’t,
Luke: Which do the same thing. Yeah, it’s somebody else’s to-do list, but in a different form.
Richard Taylor: I would probably, if you go back in time, and I, I’m, I’m just about old enough to remember when email came in and you used to send inter departmental memos, or you went to talk to somebody, or you picked up a phone and, and called them. And whilst the, the, the pace of progress was slower, it was much more human and it was much more, psychologically, beneficial I think, but,.
Luke: Yeah.
Richard Taylor: That I’ve answered the question as well as ask it now if that’s.
Luke: That’s great. Richard. It is been absolutely brilliant. For anyone that wants to stay connected to you, where’s the best platform or way to, to connect?
Richard Taylor: LinkedIn, I’m on there. So by all means, feel free to, to connect. If you’re not trying to sell me something, I will absolutely accept you. I’m, I’m meeting the, CEO of, of Amazon UK, next week. And, and that’s just an example of where we bring people from organisations in. To, to work with us, and we’re talking about how we develop future STEM leaders for a global market. So, if you’re the CEO of a, of a big organisation and you want to come and, meet the future of, your workforce, by all means, come and come and visit and see the good work that we we are doing. And likewise, if you, I’m, I’m also the chair of our, our, our KMT, our teacher training, organisation. So it’s probably right that I, I give them a plug and say that if you’re considering a, a career in teaching, an exciting, innovative world that it is, reach out and I’ll, I’ll put you in touch with, the biggest and arguably, ’cause I’m biased, best,
Luke: The best. Yeah.
Richard Taylor: In the, in the Southeast, which is KMT. So,
Luke: Perfect. Richard, thank you ever so much for your time ever. So much appreciated. And we’ll see you all soon.
Richard Taylor: Yeah. Thanks a lot. Cheers.