Culture in Action | OVO Energy’s Agile Journey

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Luke interviews Alex Goodanew of OVO Energy, discussing their innovative culture. Alex explains how OVO successfully adapted Agile methodologies, traditionally tech-focused, for their operational and customer service teams, emphasising its role in customer satisfaction and continuous improvement.

He details how Agile rituals transformed team collaboration and communication, addressing initial challenges like leader buy-in and fostering psychological safety. This transition led to significant improvements: reduced customer complaints, higher CSAT scores, and increased employee engagement (from 6.9 to 8/10).

Alex highlights Mo’s “Boost” feature as crucial for consistent, positive recognition, reinforcing desired behaviours. He advises leaders to confidently embrace Agile and embed consistent rituals for sustainable change, driven by leadership and technology.

Episode Transcript

Luke: Alex, it is an absolute delight to be speaking to you again. We’ve spent lots of time together, so I know you very well now, it feels like. But for everyone else, it’d be lovely if you don’t mind just introducing yourself and a little about OVO.

Alex: Sure thing, Luke. Pleasure to be on a call with you again. I’ve had a great working relationship with you for the last few years, so pleased to keep that going. I’m Alex Goodanew. I work as the Employee Engagement Manager for our operational teams in OVO. OVO is an energy retail business. We came in as a challenger company about 15 years ago, trying to challenge the big six, doing energy differently and helping customers to decarbonize their homes.

Luke: Cool. And I love having you on these because OVO tends to push the boundaries, and I know you’ve won a whole bunch of awards for your culture. That’s exactly what we want to explore today: not theoretically what culture is, but practically how do you make interventions, especially in customer service-oriented teams like yours with a heavy operational focus? How do you intentionally lead change to impact your people, your processes, and ultimately your performance? One that I know very well, because I run a technology company, is Agile, but it’s probably less familiar to anybody that would think about energy and operations. So, do you mind just telling us a little bit about how and why you adopted Agile at OVO?

Alex: Absolutely. Firstly, what is Agile for those that don’t know? Agile is a way of working within guidelines but without boundaries in a conceptual sense. It focuses a lot on customer satisfaction, which is crucial, adaptability, and continuous improvement. Historically, it was used in software engineering teams. Applying it to a company like OVO, which is a big retail business, is a new approach to take, but for us, it was the right one. OVO has always been a fast-moving, evolving pace. It’s not a static business. You don’t come here to work the same process for 20 years. If you come and work for OVO, you know you’re going to be constantly challenged to drive improvement. The same principles were applied to the operations teams as they were to our tech teams. So it made sense then to try and bring in a model like Agile to really formalize that and bring structure to that way of working and mentality.

Luke: Okay, got it. And then, because I know it from a tech perspective and product, our product teams and technology teams use Agile methodologies and sprints and retros and so on. How does it adapt or change in a more service-oriented operational environment like yours?

Alex: Good question. Because we’re a back-office operation, for us, it’s still process, your working processes. The rituals stay the same. The principles still align to that. So whether it’s your daily standups, your fortnightly sprints, your end retros, or anything like that, all those rituals that exist are still helpful to operate within an operation team, particularly when you think that the first point is around customer satisfaction, which is one of the key drivers of Agile. Surely that’s nowhere more relevant than in your frontline teams, your customer-impacting teams, whether that’s front office, your field, or your back-office operations. Although we don’t contact customers directly, every account we’re working on, it’s the customer that’s behind that. It’s the customer’s experience we’re trying to improve. So it’s trying to bring that element to the forefront. We work on a constant approach of trying to challenge how we’re doing things and how we can improve it so that we offer a better experience for the customer.

Luke: At the heart of it is how do you collaborate more effectively, right? It gives you a bunch of frameworks to help do that. It would be really interesting to just, you’re two years into the journey now, so when you look at adoption, I came to your event actually and talked as you were launching it to some of your teams and the leaders there, to look at how do you really catalyze the change. What’s the moment of transition and now you’re two years in? Can you think back about what some of the key steps that you went through or some of the barriers that you might have faced? Because the heart of it is bringing about change in the organization, right?

Alex: Absolutely. The same principles apply in any change you’re driving. It’s a lot about buy-in. You need to get buy-in, but that has to start with your people leaders. You need to get them on board and onto the journey. Be really clear in understanding what it is, why you’re doing it, and how it looks. Once you get that message on board and brought in through that population, that’s when you can roll it out more broadly. So we kicked off with a big event for all of our people leaders within the operational space. We had you along as a guest speaker. Always grateful for that. But to really set the stall out of what Agile is and how it looks. Some of the core principles, because we need them to lead by example. So we’re talking things like developing psychological safety, which as a people leader, you’re really responsible for creating that space, particularly from senior down. We talk about devolved leadership. That’s a change to how you operate as a people leader and how you are comfortable with devolving that leadership and empowering others to take ownership. Failing fast and iterative working, all these characteristics are a shift to how we work normally. So we put a lot of time into getting our people leaders on board. From there, we could then roll these concepts out to our wider teams. In the rollout across the teams, it’s really about embracing the Agile principles to roll Agile because Agile is about that change and improvement. That’s what you’re doing here.

Luke: Forever evolved.

Alex: So it’s not trying to get it perfect the first time. Leaning into it, knowing that let’s just get the ball rolling and we can iterate as we go. By the messaging complementing the action, I think that’s what helped it to be quite successful. Really clear on that messaging. Then you see that we’re working through this. The principles fit what you are doing at the time.

Luke: It is a morphing object, right, of the way that you think about the process. As a consequence, you can’t really be wrong.

Alex: Right.

Luke: It will always be more right by design. Therefore it can help fit the context more effectively and the barriers faced, and how you use things like retros to eke out what are some of the core problems with an operations team adopting these new ways of working? What are the things that people were shouting loudest about? What got in the way of this really flourishing like I suspect it is now?

Alex: I guess it’s just anything new like this because it is a big change in terms of the way that we’re operating, the rhythms and the rituals that you’re trying to embed. We had a fair bit around, in the retros, people having constructive conversations, challenging. You work Agile to create high-performing teams to provide a better product for your customers. I’ve run sessions since trying to understand these elements we aren’t quite getting right, which is the psychological safety element. It’s such a hard one to really nail down because we’ve got an amazing culture here at OVO. People are just a bit too nice. No one wants to hurt anyone’s feelings, and that’s great. But what it means is that challenging in the right way was something that we weren’t great at either.

Luke: Yeah.

Alex: That’s a big thing we’ve identified here, helping people to understand that challenging your colleagues is a positive thing. It’s a productive thing as long as we make sure we do it in the right way and we work through what that looks like. But then it’s so important because that helps you to call out where we are not doing things right, constantly challenging to be better. It’s not that you’re challenging the individual; you’re just challenging the approaches we always should. What more can we do? How better could we do that? That’s how you develop high performance within your teams and a culture where you never rest, never think, “Brilliant, we’ve done that, that’s perfect.” What more can we do?

Luke: Yeah, it’s never personal, right?

Alex: Mm-hmm.

Luke: It’s about adherence to the process and the rituals and the frameworks that give you, I guess, just the drumbeat to how you communicate, how you align, how you give feedback to each other. It would be useful to explore that a little bit about how you found the teams’ ways of working and their communication patterns evolve. Because some of these are quite brutal adjustments, right? All of a sudden you have a daily standup. So how did you find that those kind of communication patterns changed as a consequence of some of the rituals?

Alex: It brought so much more structure into the way that we operate and the way that we communicate too. Particularly in the hybrid world that we’re working in now, it really complimented it because you’re having these daily standups. Before, people would ask about wanting to have necessary interaction with people and wanting to have a catch-up. But now you’ve got a real purpose to doing that. So you’re having those daily interactions at the start of each day. Also, what you’re doing is setting real clear focus and guidance so that communication has real value and meaning to it. That’s one of the real positives we’ve seen from this. Your daily standups, then your sprint reviews fortnightly, and your playbacks, your monthly or quarterly, like the retros that you do at the end. All of this collaborative and communicative work. The other real value of it is that it means everybody’s really kept in the loop about what each other are doing. That’s one of the big things that we struggled with previously was getting people to care as much about and understanding why it’s important to know what other people are doing because when you do, you’re able to identify crossovers, reduce duplication. On top of that, identify opportunities for collaboration and for improvement, which we are still exploring and improving at. There’s definitely still a lot of improvement to go when you then scale up as you can do that within a team. But how do you do that within a department or how do you do that cross-functionally? So that’s something we are continuing to improve on as part of that classic Agile iteration.

Luke: Nice. And you’ve now got two years worth of learning of impact. Can you talk to us just a little bit about that? How has it impacted both the customer outcomes that this was all centered around, but maybe also the team’s performance, their engagement, and the culture of the organization now?

Alex: From a customer perspective, as you say, fundamentally, that’s always the driver, right? That’s what we’re here. We are here to deliver the best service we can for our customers. It’s always been a really important part of OVO, but we went through a challenging transitional period through the acquisition of SSE. Through that change, of course, standards dropped slightly. So this has really helped us to refocus, to realign on that journey. Consistently now, our metrics are moving in the right direction. Our volumes of complaints are coming down significantly. Our CSAT scores, customer satisfaction scores, are heading up in the right direction. It’s one of our top three objectives, but probably the top objective, right? We’re seeing consistent, positive movement in all of our metrics in that way, particularly over the last six to twelve months. There’s going to be that embedding period. You’re not going to see the results immediately, but you stick with the process, you work through the situations. Now we’re really starting to see the fruits of that, which is great. From a people perspective, and from our employees, the scores, our people scores really reflect the impact that sort of thing is having. Engagement, which I think is a key one, that’s the market. You’ve got to get that right to get everything else moving in the right direction. That moved from 6.9 to 8 on our score out of a score of 10.

Luke: Yep.

Alex: Our peer relationships held at 8.8. We’re proud of where they were. That’s always been OVO’s real USP, as it were, is the amazing culture and relationships we have here. But then we used tooling to help drive some of this behavior as well. So we’ve seen positive movements in recognition, which went from 7.9 up to 8.5, and from reward from 7.1 up to 7.9.

Luke: Okay, nice. So you are seeing pretty much across the board all results in terms of business outcomes and in terms of employee engagement. I guess performance is a proxy to your customer results going up too.

Alex: Absolutely.

Luke: In the positive direction, and at the heart of that seems to be these enhanced ways of working that you and I know as rituals. So it’d be great to just dig into those a little bit, if you don’t mind, and get a sense of what are those? I often think of team habits, rituals, and routines as the foundation to your culture, because it just becomes the way we do things around here, which is often how people describe culture. It would be good to get a sense of those golden rituals, the ones that have to happen that you almost couldn’t live without now. Have you got any of those that either from the Agile methodology and framework or some rituals that now you really must keep, come hell or high water?

Alex: Certainly. In the Agile framework, it’s really black and white, right? It’s the daily standups, your fortnightly sprints, and your quarterly retros. So those have to stay in place to really make sure that that way of working is effective. Consistency, I believe, is one of the most important things for an effective employee experience as well. Really delivering a consistent experience so that people know what to expect. As you say, it’s part of the behavior, it’s just how we do things. That’s how you get great results. One of the changes that we brought in that I’ve embedded well is utilizing a Boost to help drive our overall recognition strategy so that on a weekly basis, we’re calling for that engagement in peer-to-peer recognition and top-down reward. In a way that really focuses around the work that our people are doing and the way that they’re collaborating and supporting each other and helping each other, building that culture that we’re trying to drive, using this Boost ritual on a weekly basis to then facilitate and reward that behavior.

Luke: And what do you call it? What is the ritual named?

Alex: Well, for each department, they’ve got their own.

Luke: Oh, they’ve got their own?

Alex: Yes.

Luke: Okay, tell me a little bit about the language then and how that fits, because I often find language is a really underestimated tie to what feels cultural because a lot of it’s about identity.

Alex: Yes.

Luke: That sense of attachment to, “we do these things our way,” and it’s a variant on the same thing, which is how do you boost visibility and how do you enhance communication and how do you get the feedback there? But could you give us some really practical examples of how teams went about even naming what they are and what some of them are called?

Alex: I’m a sucker for alliteration. The identity piece is a really important one. You’ve got to break down the team’s insular identity and really try and connect people up to at least their departmental identity. Really make sure that they understand how they fit in that bigger picture because then you’re able to tie that into the wider function or business. So it is about trying to get them to really connect with their identity as a department, not just a team. Taking the departmental names and then whatever positive language you want to use associated with that. For example, I’m in the strategy and delivery team, so it’s the “Strategy and Delivery Superstars.” Nice and simple, right? It doesn’t have to be.

Luke: Yeah.

Alex: What I like is that the platform we use gives us the option to be creative with it. Don’t get me wrong, you know, you’re making your sixth or your seventh different one because there’s a lot of departments to look after, and it gets a bit challenging. You’re trying to think, “How can I be creative and come up with something new?” But thankfully, working with the HODs and the senior management team, we did. Definitely there’s a different approach: put it out to your people and get them to come up with the names. But we took this one and tried to keep a level of consistency across the board too.

Luke: Oh, really nice. You talked right at the head of the call about using technology as an enabler to help you, and this feels like a really good example of just that. Can you walk us through, in practice, what that really looks like then from a rhythm standpoint for the team?

Alex: Certainly. I just remembered as well, “High Fives and Good Vibes,” that’s another one.

Luke: I thought you might!

Alex: I’m a fan of that one. Yes, she’s a good manager, she’s more creative than I am.

So, what the rituals look like. We have a call to action at the start of each week on a Monday morning. It goes out to everybody within that department, asking them over the course of the week to take the opportunity to get onto the platform and call out your colleagues, recognize your colleagues, those that you’ve collaborated with and helped you deliver, those who have supported you when you’ve had troubles with it. Basically, people that have helped you enable to deliver against what your objectives are, your sprint goal. It works in that weekly ritual, but it aligns to your sprints. It’s keeping you connected to what I’m working on this week, what I’m here to deliver through this sprint, and then who has helped to act as an enabler for that. Then I can use this as a platform to recognize them and call that out. The main thing we’ve really tried to drive is a culture of recognition, of positive interactions between colleagues. This Boost is trying to do that.

At the same time, it helps to showcase the way that they’ve helped you and what you’ve been working on. It helps others to see what you’re working on and improves that visibility of what everyone’s doing. It helps you to always keep in focus what you are here to do and what you are trying to achieve. There are many reminders and triggers that you could create. I think repetition, I’m learning more and more, is invaluable. You can never say anything too much. You can never remind people too much about stuff, and this is a good way to subtly do that while they’re really engaging in how they’re delivering and who’s helping them do that. Then we add a reward element to it because we really like to incentivize the right behavior, right? So at the end of each week, of those that are called out and recognized on this Boost, the senior leader in that area can then choose those that have been recognized, or those that have done good recognition, and reward them.

Luke: Cool. So you’ve got these core Agile rituals that are driving the focus on the work that needs to be done and the goals. And then in order to sustain a positive environment and really build on the people elements of collaboration, you’ve got High Fives and Good Vibes or the Superstars. You’ve used ‘Boost’ a lot. I know what a Boost is. Anyone that’s listening, what on earth is a Boost? Do you want to just give a quick 30 seconds on how a Boost fits into our life and what it is for you?

Alex: Sure thing. A Boost is a functionality on the Mo platform, which is a reward and recognition platform that we use across our function. The Boost is just a trigger. It happens, set up by the leader of that area, and it runs automatically whenever you set it to. So we set it for once a week. It is that call to action to that whole population to get them to go on and recognize their colleagues. That pulls it into a sub-feed, which is one of the features we really like about it because it helps to hone in that activity that’s most relevant to your closest population, that department that you sit under. You can see all the positive actions and work that people are doing and the positive behaviors of people supporting, collaborating with each other. That’s recognized, and people can comment, they can like, interact with it. It has been a tool that’s really helped us to drive the right kind of culture and the right environment that we wanted to here at OVO.

I would say it was an evolution. Historically, we got Mo as a platform to help meet a lot of my needs from a broader recognition perspective. We initially used it for a peer-to-peer reward and recognition scheme that we ran for a few years. But as time moved on and we evolved to this Agile way of working, we were able to shift and adapt how we used it. So again, it’s always challenging, what more can we do? We were looking at Mo and thinking, what more can we do with this platform? How can we get more value out of it? With the Boost functionality, we thought we can use this to really align those rituals. Rather than it being a scheme that runs over the course of a month, a bit loose and free, and relying on everybody to do the rewarding side of it too, we thought we can bring some real good framework and structure to it, embedded into a way of working that we are launching, an additional ritual that compliments the other rituals that we have as part of Agile.

Luke: Yeah.

Alex: Then we move to this top-down rewarding side of things. We know that although the P2P rewarding scheme was a great and innovative scheme, the more impactful rewarding is that which comes top-down. It feels like that recognition from your manager, from more senior people, has more weight to it. So we took the shift there to move to that. But because of the way that the Boost works with that automated trigger and the consistent frequency to it, it meant that it made our managers engaging with it a much easier process rather than this unstable “Here’s all the good stuff that’s happening. Which of this stuff do you think is standout? There you go, reward it.” Nice and simple. Makes a big difference.

Luke: Yes. Nice. Okay, cool. Very cool. And I think you’ve talked a little bit to, one of the areas that I love about OVO and working with you is that you are always really intentional about the changes in behavior that you want to try and create, whether it’s progressive and the adoption of Agile, or seeing the benefit of shaping habits, rituals, routines, in the way that people work to create that consistent employee experience like we just talked about with the recognition one. Post adoption of Agile and some of these enabling rituals around recognition and the bits that you needed to drive improvement on and clearly have on your Peakon results. Have you got any other snippets around the impact that these things have generated on engagement or retention or maybe even performance?

Alex: From a performance perspective, that’s something that’s really clear. When you have the right culture, the right mentality, performance is a byproduct of that. You get your house in order, and what is your house? It’s your people. So you get that right. You get the culture where, particularly through Agile, that psychological safety that you build in, and a culture of recognition, celebrating each other, knowing that behaviors like collaboration are what we praise here, supporting each other, helping each other to do better and to succeed, is the culture that we want to nurture and recognize.

Establishing that, as a result, you see that come through in processes and the performance of our people. And later, the adaptability to change. That is something that a lot of businesses struggle with. It’s a big thing, and it takes so much additional support and time to navigate through. But with OVO, we are fast-paced, and change is constant here. But by getting those other things in line, which working Agile helped us to do, and having the right tooling and building the right cultures has helped us to do, it means that resilience is in place. You’re working with it rather than fighting against it because you understand it, you understand the groove of it, and you understand the benefit of it. Because you understand the purpose of it and the outcome and the way that it can improve process and improve performance.

Luke: I’m intrigued how those outputs, the indicators of success, also inform the changes to behaviors that you want to drive. Because it’s a cycle, right? You try and change the behaviors, and then you see it in the outcomes. That’s a win. Then you want to change the outcomes, so you need to change the behaviors again. How do you use the tools or the frameworks to inform how and where you intervene?

Alex: That’s a good question. It’s a tough one, but I think what we utilize a lot is Peakon and the data that we get through that. When you see these dips in certain metrics, it’s a real indicator of what’s shifting, and then you dig in to understand why. We try and keep communication up as best we can with our people. We have different approaches to it. At a lot of engagement summits recently, there are a lot of people, a lot of products out there trying to sell me a lot of stuff. After I tell them about what we do, they don’t have a lot more to say. It’s a good two-pronged approach with Peakon, looking at the data, identifying the areas that you can see we need to drive improvement there.

That is an issue where we need to shift it, working with other people to understand what they want to see to change that. That helps to then influence our approaches, our strategies. From a behavioral perspective, it’s utilizing the tooling that we have to do so. The platforms we have like Mo, and the rituals like Boosts, help to really showcase that. You call the Boost what you want it to. You identify the behavior that you want to promote. As I say, rather than calling out what’s going wrong, it’s about really promoting and showcasing the good behaviors and reinforcing those. So, tagline it, promote that out there, and then reinforce that with the recognition and the rewarding.

Luke: Nice. Great. I’m going to go to one or two closing thoughts if you don’t mind. One is for teams that are obsessed about customer service, like you are, or an operational leader that might be listening to this, what would your advice be if they want to drive a similar change that both increases engagement, performance, and in turn, customer outcomes?

Alex: Looking at Agile, I’d say lean into it. That fundamental piece about improving customer experience. Your roles, your operational or frontline or field teams, that’s what you’re doing day to day. So why not explore how this new way of working can drive an improvement there? It’s not about getting it right the first time. It’s about being confident to fail, being confident to give it a go, knowing that in a psychologically safe environment, there’s no judgment. It’s not an environment of that; it’s one of encouragement and a safe space to give everything a go. So you’ve got, I’d say, the principles of it help to facilitate its engagement and rollout, and it’ll give you the impacts you’re looking for in the right places.

Luke: So pick it and stick with it.

Alex: Yes. Make a plan, stick to it, just like it says.

Luke: Yeah, indeed. And then maybe the very last question is how do you see the role of leaders, technology, and these kind of processes like Agile fitting together in enabling sustainable change rather than something that’s just a flash in the pan?

Alex: Sustainable change comes down to those rituals. It’s about embedding those rituals so that it isn’t short-lived, and then it’s the next thing. As I say, we move with constant change in OVO, but underneath that, the ways of working are consistent and allow us to do so, allows us to operate fast-paced change. Fundamentally, the way we’re working is consistent. Leaders being really clear on that and leading by example, having the tooling, the technology to facilitate that. And then the processes have to follow that structure and that way of working. Sticking to the rituals, that’s one thing I’ve been quite clear on and tried to make as clear as possible to our senior leadership team here. That consistency is fundamental to success and to buy-in.

Luke: Perfect. Let’s end it there. Alex, it’s been an absolute joy to have this conversation with you, and you are an absolute expert. So thank you ever so much, and I really appreciate your time.

Alex: Not at all. It’s a pleasure as always. Good to see you.