Interview with Robert O'Brien
Guy Flouch explores how Londis HR Director, Robert O’Brien, is meeting the challenges of managing training and development in a fast-growing company
Growth at ADM Londis
ADM Londis is one of Ireland’s leading symbol groups of retailers. In October, joint chief executive Stephen O’Riordan, announced that the group is due to break its target of recruiting fourty new shops for its network for 2007. The company has signed up more than 70 new shops over the past 18 months, including 32 in the nine months leading up to September 2007. Interestingly, as Irelands only unlisted plc, ADM Londis is the only Irish symbol group where retailers can own the company through share holdings and realise the value in their shares at market price.
In further news, the group has recently invested nearly €7 million in its new headquarters at Johnstown, near Naas, Co. Kildare. The new headquarters have been built alongside the company\\\'s existing warehouse and distribution facility. ADM Londis has over 380 independently owned stores in its network nationwide and employs nearly 8,000 people.
The company moved to its new HQ in Johnstown in October. The plush new premises houses up to 140 admin and sales staff, including its HR Director and Group Company Secretary, Robert O’Brien. According to O’Neill, ‘ADM Londis is Ireland’s fastest growing premier symbol group. Training is at the core of our growth: heavy emphasis is based on the high standard of training given to all of our franchisees. Training is provided for all retailers and their staff. More specialised courses are also arranged to cover areas such as; Food Hygiene, Computer Training, Off-Licence Training and Customer Services Training.’
Best of Fresh Awards
An example of how this franchisee training pays off is the group’s success in the recent annual Best of Fresh Awards made by leading retail magazine Checkout. Two Londis retailers scooped awards in their respective categories. The ever popular Donnybrook Fair, Dublin 4, was crowned Best in Fresh retailer in the category of ‘Foodmarkets under 7,000 sq foot’ while Hernon’s Londis, Bandon, was awarded the top prize for Best Forecourt Fresh Food offering. In addition to the Fresh Food head office purchasing function, a team of Fresh Food Specialists conduct regular training sessions with Londis retailers ensuring that they are fully briefed on market developments and up to date consumer trends. These seminars pay particular attention to the variety of cues which impact on the perception a consumer forms regarding the fresh food offering within a store, including the display and quality of fresh product and the growing requirement to display an increasingly diverse range of products.
O’Brien on HR
For O’Brien, ‘Human Resource Management is about people delivering for the business. HR don’t manage people, line managers do. In HR, we are standard bearers. We’re observers. We’re measurers.’ His no-nonsense attitude clearly impacts on his attitudes to training. ‘Our employees are trained in systems skills sets. Our training is very functional: we train people to do the job and role that they are recruited to fulfill.’
O’Brien suggests that ‘if anyone is thinking of building a career in HR, they need to look primarily at how their role can add to the bottom-line of the business’, he dismisses ‘the out-moded concept of HR as a touch-feely; career’ and explains that ‘though people in HR clearly need good skills set as an influencer, they also need to balance an analytical aptitude with a well-developed conceptual side. Conceptually, HR people, these days, need a sense of what objectives their organisation are seeking to achieve, the culture and processes required to achieve them and how people need to interact within the organisation to achieve these objectives.’
O’Brien, when asked whether he was of the hard-nosed school of human resource management was very forthright when he described himself as ‘supportive on an individual basis but not on a collective basis. HR people have to move from the old-style Personnel Manager to being at the core of the organisation’s business model. This is reflected by increasing numbers of HR people appearing at director level on the boards of many companies.’
O’Brien on Training
In terms of training, whereas O’Brien would, in the past, have taken a softer attitude on training, in that he would be more likely to support training that benefited the employee but had no obvious benefit for the company, he has now taken a harder line. ‘For me to support training, it clearly and demonstrably needs to add value back to business’, he said.
At the same time, the company has identified a handful of ‘stars’ whom senior managers expect to play decisive roles in the company in the future. For these stars, the company is more likely to carry the expense of postgraduate and management development training.
The commitment of ADM Londis to training, however, is evident in that it employs five in-house trainers: one customer service trainer, two food safety trainers, one wine expert and one fresh food expert. O’Brien also contracts out training, particularly in the area of sales: selling skills, sales development and sales management. Further evidence of the company’s knowledge culture is its running of regular ‘Train the Trainer’ programmes whereby the internal expertise and knowledge of current staff is formalised by training them to pass on their experience and expertise.
O’Brien highlights on the company’s most recent training successes as ‘an excellent
Category Management Training programme delivered by sales finesse.’ The goal of the programme was to optimise the category mix within stores. For the unitiated, O’Brien defined ‘category mix’ as being ‘the amount of in-store space dedicated to different lines and brands. Tackled on how he measures return-on-investment from training, O’Brien commented that ‘when you talk about RoI from training, the reality is that you are only making up numbers’.
In line with current trickle-down trends in training, O’Brien sits in with trainees, on some of their sessions and facilitates other sessions.
When pushed to describe a poor training experience at Londis, O’Brien diplomatically answered that ‘it’s not so much that we’ve had any particularly poor training experiences, rather that we’ve bought in training that delivered information that we didn’t need to know!’
IT and the HR Manager
O’Brien, who commutes from the West, works over sixty hours a week in his combined role. He explains that about half of this time is dedicated to human resource management. His time challenges are reflected in his rapid-fire speech which attempted to compress the interview into the time it took to finish a single espresso. He has great hopes ‘not only for my own time management but also for the efficacy of HR systems group-wide’ of the imminent arrival of a new automated ‘Talent Management System’ (TMS): Executrack.‘The software will be built in with all deliverable competencies for ADM Londis’, he explained and ‘from the time the programme is implemented, all performance reviews can, largely, be automated. Things like annual bonus letters will be automated and employees can even check their bonus status on a daily basis.’
Another indication of the development of the company’s IT-driven knowledge culture is its introduction, last year, of retailer support software and the Londis Leader programme. The first resource of its kind within the Irish c-store sector, Leader is a web based online guide that allows retailers to access important information about Londis services, support and wider industry information to assist them in managing their business.
O’Brien is of the new breed of senior Human Resource people: excellent people skills, effective, hard-nosed and focused on the value that the good and timely management of human resources can bring to a company through, in his own words, ‘developing a culture of business performance and growth’.
