Old Mutual Wealth: Extending a small L&D team with capacity and talent on demand

Old Mutual Wealth: Extending a small L&D team with capacity and talent on demand

About Old Mutual Wealth
In 2015, multi-channeled wealth management business Old Mutual Wealth celebrated its 170th birthday. The company provides financial advice on insurance and investments and also offers a range of financial products and services including pensions and asset management. It is headquartered in London and has 4,000 employees. Ennis Reid, the Head of Learning & Development at OMW supports the organisation with a team of 5.

The Challenge: High Demand, Small Core team…

Throughout the year, the Learning & Development (L&D) team face peak periods where they have an increased workload and quick turnarounds meaning they can find themselves stretched to capacity. “At performance review time, our work really does increase, even though we don’t increase in my team’s headcount.” Ennis’ team, though talented, is small and a small team has a less diverse range of skills and knowledge. This means, at times, the L&D team need access to external skills and consultancy expertise.

The Solution: Tapping into the Talent Economy for Digital Learning Expertise

Old Mutual Wealth approached Jam Pan to develop a different model for providing talent and capacity on demand. Using a flexible resourcing model, Jam Pan enables Old Mutual Wealth to fulfill requirements when demand peaks. This delivers key benefits to Old Mutual Wealth:

On-demand Skills:

Jam Pan enables Ennis to fulfill requirements when demand peaks. “It gives us instant capacity to deliver at times when there’s added pressure, at cyclical times in the HR calendar, such as performance review time.” Not only does accessing skills through Jam Pan help Ennis and his team to meet these heightened demands and pressures, it also gives them access to a level of expertise and experience that they do not necessarily possess in-house. Accessing the expert freelancers has broadened and increased the skills set of the L&D team as a whole. The importance of that cannot be overstated – having the right skills at the right time is critical to success.

Learning Consultancy Expertise:

The experts provided via Jam Pan fulfill a consultancy role, allowing the internal L&D team to talk through any ideas and issues, set out what is required and ascertain any potential problem areas before going live. “We are able to bring in the expertise that helps us to build that modular task (performance review),” says Ennis. “They understand the consequences of what we are doing because they’ve done it before. They can prepare us and help us prepare the business when we are new at doing something. We have been able to tap into expert knowledge to help us understand the consequence of decisions, whenever we need it.” With something like performance review, particularly at year-end when it’s all tied into pay rises and bonuses, there is no leeway for mistakes. The L&D team has to get it right. Jam Pan’s experts help to assure this.

Business Analysis Talent:

Performance review is not the only area that has required Ennis to draft in extra resources. He has also tapped into Jam Pan to find someone to do some analysis of the organisation’s compliance learning. That person had to ensure that the learning met with legislative requirements, that it was consistent across six businesses and to also improve the user experience. By accessing external talent, this project was completed much more quickly than would have otherwise happened.

Results

Old Mutual Wealth have seen a range of benefits from this fresh approach to resourcing:

Slashes Delivery Times and Costs:
Speed of service is vital for Old Mutual Wealth’s internal clients and stakeholders. Getting talented freelancers and agencies in to manage projects on an individual process, rather than doing them in-house or outsourcing them, can vastly speed up the process.

“We had a recent request for an anti-money-laundering course and the freelancer turned it around in a couple of days and we published it into our system. If we had gone to an organisation to do it, there would have been contracts to sign, a 12-week wait time, etc. This way speeds up the process and cuts through all of the red tape.”

Builds Team Capacity and Skills:
A small core L&D team means reduced capacity and a less diverse range of skills and knowledge. By tapping into this broader talent pool, he not only accesses the skills he needs, but also widens the diversity and mindset of his existing team. “Freelancers bring diversity to the team, not just from an ethnic point of view. Using freelancers brings in a good mix of different people from different backgrounds and I think that’s also healthy. They also bring in a healthy energy and sense of challenge.”

Delivers Continuous Improvements to Projects:
When Ennis talks of this healthy energy and challenge, what he means is that freelancers might have done a project before – which is why you have brought them in – but they always want to do this new project more successfully than the last one. They always want to improve. That in itself is a huge benefit to organisations.

How can we help you add talent and capacity to your core L&D team on demand? Get in touch to find out more.