Ep. 018– Putting digital and experience at the heart of a car finance company
Just like ASOS for the fashion industry and Just Eat with their digital experience around food delivery. Oodle Car Finance started out with the intention to completely disrupt the car financing industry putting digital and experience at the very heart.
Ellie shares her own story and experience of working at Oodle. When during her first interview with the CEO, discussed the book ‘the power of moments’ by chip and dan heath. (well worth a read if you haven’t yet). She receiving a copy in the post that weekend with a hand written note saying how much he enjoyed the meeting and was looking forward to their next one. Nice touch!
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EP. 018 Transcription
[00:00:00] Steve: Hi, my name's Steve Usher and welcome to the Experience Designers podcast.
Why? Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of The Experience Designers. So today you're going to meet the lovely Ellie Brown head of People are Oodle Car Finance based in Oxfordshire in the uk. Now I know what some of you're thinking. Car finance. Really, Steve. We can all agree that the financing part of buying a car is probably the least exciting part, and in most cases, least considered from an experience perspective.
It's all paperwork, seeking out the cheapest deal, signing on the bottom line, and then hotly anticipating picking up your new car. But honestly, there's something that genuinely stood out when I was researching UL Car Finance. I think it's one of those organizations that has the benefit of a blank sheet of paper.
No legacy culture. No. This is how it's always been. Mindset. No dated technology. Holding them back and couple this with two founders who, in my mind completely understand the value of experiences and just like ASOS for the fashion industry. And just eat with their digital experience around food delivery.
Oodle Car Finance started out with the intention to completely disrupt the car financing industry, putting digital and experience at the very heart, and Ellie shares her own story and experience her working at Oodle when during her first interview with the ceo, discussed the book, the Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath.
Worth the read if you haven't already. And she received a copy in the post that weekend with a handwritten note saying how much they had enjoyed the meeting and was looking forward to their next one. Nice touch and this focus on experiences is for me, what stands Udo Car Fans Finance Out. It's that attention to detail when designing the digital experience for customers, the considered approach to the dealership experience a major stakeholder in the customer.
And of course, the commitment to creating an amazing employee experience too, all whilst going through major growth from what, hundred and 30 to 400 people in 12 months. So look, thanks ever so much for listening and enjoy the show. Ellie, welcome to the experienced designers. Thank you. So yeah, look, just in terms of a.
A very quick introduction today. So just for the audience tell us a little bit about yourself, your role and your background and what you do.
[00:02:42] Ellie: I work at a company called Oodle Car Finance. My role is head of people Ops, so my day-to-day is very much around. Setting up the right processes and the right employee experience around what it feels like to be an employee at oodle.
And in terms of the operational piece, it's around looking at our systems and the tech that we use and actually thinking long term around what we can automate so that the team can add a lot of value. So I joined in January of last year. Been here a year now, and in that time we've grown from 135 to 400 employees.
So the growth has meant we've had to fail very fast. Try lots of new things, see what sticks. See what goes down well within the teams. We've opened a couple of new offices in that time as well, but it means that we've got used to changing very quickly. .
[00:03:36] Steve: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And how is that, how is your kind of people ops team or that people ops function.
Developed over that time in the last year and obviously through that rapid growth, how's it evolved? It's
[00:03:48] Ellie: been huge growth. So when I joined, we had the head of people who's my manager. We then also had a HR advisor and I joined as HR and tech recruitment lead. So then we established the people ops team in September and by that time we had another HR administrator.
We then hired two further HR adminis. As well. So the team is now actually a team of five, including myself, and we've got someone that is focused all around onboarding, someone focused all around, referencing a HR advisor and then a HR administrator. That's much more generalist, and it just means that because we're onboarding so many people, if we've got someone focused on it, they can really be the face of onboarding.
Give people a really lovely welcome to.
[00:04:34] Steve: Wonderful. Wonderful. So we have today, I mean in terms of our kind of we'll hone in a little bit later, but just a bit of a focus in on onboarding today because obviously Yeah, there's lots of organizations out there. It seems to be a bit of a hot topic in the industry, which I thinks great.
I think there's a lot of technology that's enabling. How organizations are delivering a service and somewhat an experience. So really keen to hear about how you've developed the onboarding program, particularly when you've, 400% correctly, literally a year in terms of number of people.
But just give us a bit of a walkthrough on the Oodle car finance story, cuz it was a, it's a really interesting one. And just a bit of a, just give a sense to the audience what the company does and it's the internal and the organization as a whole.
[00:05:13] Ellie: Yeah. So Oodle have a clear in the name they finance company.
But a lot of people traditionally get finance on their car, don't know who has provided that finance cuz they'll walk into a dealership, they'll get the lowest interest rate that was available at the time, and then they won't really hear from their finance provider again unless they're following up on any payments.
We saw a real opportunity to change that and build a customer experience around getting car. And we want to disrupt the market the same way that Assos disrupted the fashion market and just eat, for example, created a really digital experience around food delivery. So that's the opportunity that Johnny, our ceo, and Phil are MD saw three years ago when they set up food or, and they had a really strong network within the dealers in the uk.
So we now work with, I think it's over 250 dealer. And we are offered as one of a number of finance options. So it's not that those dealerships have to work exclusively with us, but where we hope to differentiate ourselves is around the tech piece and the speed and the efficiency of how quickly we can make a decision on financing cuz of our data science team and the credit decisioning that we've been able to automate.
And then, Further than that, it's also around the customer service piece, because we've got product teams that work not only on our external product, which is customer facing, but internally around what is it like to be a dealer that works with udl? What is the portal that you look at when you are working with UDL and how does that compare across the market so that hopefully the dealers also prefer us, and that's not based on the commission that they get through us.
It's the speed of the service. and actually that benefits the customer because then the customer's getting excellent service from us too. And then the further piece around differentiation of Oodle is really around the app that we're building. And that's the really exciting bit. So now that we've proved the business model through our dealer network, what we want to do is, Put the power back in the customer's hands and build an app where they can search for a car.
And we acquired a company called Carn in 2018 that have the largest car search engine in the uk. So we've got that technology now and then we want people, once they've searched for that car, to be able to pre-approve finance on that car and then eventually, hopefully get the car delivered to their door and they can just test it out.
And if they don't, they can return it within 14. So that's where we're heading, and the first version of the app has been released, but at the moment, that's for people to manage their existing finance. Amazing, exciting time to be in our tech
[00:07:51] Steve: team. My word amazing. I'm in terms of a focus, it's interesting from an experience point of view.
Sounds like you're really focusing on what that customer experience is in terms of the digital experience, in terms of the physical experience. Then you. Dealer experience, who shares that interaction as well in terms of how they're experiencing your business, cuz they're an important component of that journey.
Really fascinating. So tell me a little bit about Jonathan. Because I think it's when we spoke before, when we first spoke, we talked about CEOs and and Oatley milk obviously, in terms of the ceo, Tony, there being being complete, I think just a quantum leader these days in terms of their approach to business.
And How would you describe Jonathan in terms of his approach and where he's taken the business?
[00:08:30] Ellie: So Johnny is a very visionary leader. He's very inspirational. Everyone that meets him just comes away. Blown away by his enthusiasm for what he does. When I first interviewed with Johnny, he was very passionate about what Oodle was trying to achieve, and you can tell that he's got the determination to get there.
And we spoke about in that interview a book called The Power of Moments. And to my surprise, that weekend he decided to. Send it to me with a handwritten note saying how much he enjoyed the interview and he was looking forward to the next one. So that really speaks to what Johnny's as a person and he really does think about the people in his business and how to get the best out them.
And that carries through all of our teams, from the op to the tech teams, to his leadership team. He's really got his mind on where are people best placed to deliver what they need to deliver in order for Oodle to grow. He's not fussy about policy or process. If things need to change, it needs to change.
And we are very agile as a business. Things change all the time, but people get used to that and they see it as a really positive thing because one of our values is around. Being bravely honest and having nothing hidden. And so if we are changing something, Johnny's very transparent about why that is and what the benefit is of doing that.
And so people are always coming along for the journey, pardon the carpet. And it really does always work out for the best. And as someone that's new coming into that environment. You can be used to change being quite a bad thing or quite a secretive thing. So it can take people a little hard to get their head around, but once they do, they really are brought in to what Johnny's trying to achieve.
And yeah, they also aren't afraid to give their feedback on how that's affecting them. So that feedback loop is there, which is really important.
[00:10:20] Steve: Yeah. Amazing. And I think how, I was gonna ask you the question actually, you just, you touched on it there. So how does the company. Maybe even during the onboarding phase.
How, because ultimately it sounds to me like Udo is one of those organizations that and through the benefit of being relatively new and with a very fresh minded ceo is that they've set it come into a, probably quite a traditional market and just set a completely different way of doing business, which, and disrupted in some way.
. So I think there's loads of benefits to that. So as people come into the organization, , how are you supporting that, that transition for people? Because if we talk about the power moments as an example in the book. Yeah. One of, one of the moments that they talk about in the book is around transition moments.
So people who are transitioning. So how is, how does the company adapt that to the people coming and they have to adapt to your culture? Seems very different. It
[00:11:10] Ellie: Starts before they join and we were thinking about how can. Differentiate ourselves from other companies that people might be talking to.
And actually it's just around making it quite painless process in order to join. Silly things like making our onboarding form from a Word document they have to fill out and send back to us, and then we might send them loads of follow up questions and keep pestering them for our email. Actually, we've just made it a Microsoft form.
Once they submit it, we get an email and it looks branded to Oodle. People know. Exactly what we're doing with that information. They submit it once, then we've got it, everything's right on their first day. So firstly it's around the boring stuff, really around HR making. Them seamlessly in the background cuz then we can get people to focus on what's exciting and we make sure they feel really welcome.
So we send them before they start some person. Biscuits saying Congratulations on the new job. And that has a letter from Johnny included and they get to know a bit about what we're trying to achieve and how excited we are that they're joining us. And then in the run up to the first day, we keep in touch.
We try and get the manager to keep in touch with them as well. Cause it's all well and good that as a HR team we are staying in touch. But it's quite powerful when the manager themselves are building that relat. If there's anything social going on. For example, we have Oodle Fest every year, which is a big staff festival in the summer.
So if we've got any new starters around that time, we'll invite them ahead of time and ask them if they wanna turn up, and that can be quite a lot of pressure for people. So we say, if you just wanna actually just pop along with your friends and family and see what we're about, you don't have to stay the whole thing.
We make it quite easy for people to get involved and then once they're in the door we actually run cohorts of inductions now so that people have a group that they feel that they can speak to about how it's. Feeling for them joining Udo as a new company, we create a Slack channel of each cohort of new starters so that they can chat about how they're finding things, or even just if an induction session has moved rooms, we can let them know really quickly and just make that really seamless.
This is the worst thing that. We would want is for someone to turn up on their first day, not really know who they're meant to see what they're doing. Yeah. Out for that first week. And we create an induction that takes people through the whole process and customer journey of being a noodle customer. And each team talk about the part they have to play in that.
So it's crystal clear to a new starter coming in where they fit into the Oodle journey and they get a welcome tour. They get a new starter, tea and cake with Johnny again, the ceo. Just that in terms of the power of moments, we're trying to break the mold and do things that maybe they won't have experienced anywhere else, and when they go home to their friends and family and have that chat about how was your first week at your new job?
They have something really positive to say rather than saying, I wasn't really sure what I was doing and I didn't have my laptop yet. Yeah. So I think it's something we really pride ourselves on and we're definitely not perfect, but that's part fun. Trying to work out how to do it better.
[00:14:14] Steve: Yeah. Okay, 2, 2, 2 thoughts on this.
So first one is have you got anything to share around, cuz you talked about the organization's cultures around failing fast. . So have you got any examples? You have failed cuz it's all, we can talk about all the great stuff, but I think also it's all about the stuff maybe where things have concretely No, obviously we never completely failed.
[00:14:34] Ellie: One piece was around referencing cuz we're a financial services company. One of the things that doesn't fit in with our business model and the speed of. How we generally work is the regulatory checks and things that we need to do in order to bring someone on board to do quite extensive referencing.
And we were using a provider that on paper said they did all of that for us, but actually it was really slowing us down and a lot of things were coming back with further queries and we were having to. Push people's start dates back. So actually this is one area where technology wasn't helping us. So we realized that and we hired someone to come in and just focus on the referencing piece.
And that's quite an investment. But actually, if that means that we can get people on boarded quicker and we can get really critical roles in the business. That investment was worth it to us, and we're now building the technology around how we can automate the admin parts of her roles so that she can focus on uncovering all of those blockers around referencing and you can never truly automate a referencing journey because companies have got to respond to those requests and there's lots of different moving parts.
And it might sound really quite boring, but the fact that we focused in on it looked at where the blocker was and just solved the problem means that the rest of the business see that we're doing that and they see that we know what's important to them as well. So it seems like an internal thing to just hr, but it's had loads of impact.
[00:15:56] Steve: Yeah. Amazing. And so referring back to the kind of the power moments, if you looked at how have you approached with this? with this book of mindset in, in the back of mind now. So if you look at your kind of onboarding or employee journey into your organization , what would you say, how have you designed that?
Has it been a progressive thing? Did you actually do a project save, let's reimagine it completely. How did it evolve? How did you develop it? So
[00:16:21] Ellie: we, We always get feedback from everyone that goes through that induction week, which is every other week at Oodles. So we've got lots of feedback coming in.
That's great. Get to know a bit about how that's feeling for employees and we always make little tweaks based on that. So an example would be when we open our Manchester office in April, at the moment, we still bring people over to Oxford for that first week because that's where the team managers who are running.
Sessions are based, we want them to be able to meet Johnny. We want them to see where their office is heading in terms of scope and size. But we were making their sessions run quite late into Friday and trained from Manchester as at least two hours, 45 to Oxford. So we were ruining their Friday evening when they wanted to be.
At home with their friends and talking about their first week at work. So things like that. Taking on board the feedback and changing things has been really important. But who's our onboarding assistant and then Claire, our head of talent experience have actually gone round and done the induction through the eyes of a candidate, so spent time.
Sitting in each session and they created an induction scorecard and they've been in and looked at, is this interactive, is this still informative? Is this even the right branding anymore? Cause we've changed brand and silly little things, but over time that's the stuff that can really get left behind when you're busy and you've got loads of stuff going on.
And actually that makes a really big first impression on employees when they're joining. So Ellie and Claire have done a fantastic piece of work around. Looking at what we've already got and then sitting down and reimagining how does that need to feel? Now that we've gone from 135 to 400 employees with multiple sites, and we've got very different sides of the business.
We've got the op side of the business, which are high volume roles, they're shift workers. And they're essentially in a call center. That's a really tricky role to do. Got some really senior tech hires, so how do you cater to two very different groups of people, but lump them all in one big induction week and make them all feel like they're part of the same journey in the same culture.
And I must say they've done a really fantastic job of That.
[00:18:33] Steve: Sounds amazing. I think the lesson to be shared here is, walking the shoes of your employees or your, your new, especially your new employees. I think it's My word. I I always see them as free consultancy as well.
Yeah. So it's a, they're a fresher, they don't care enough.
[00:18:46] Ellie: Yeah. They'll insult .
[00:18:49] Steve: Exactly. So it's okay. So there's an element here where there has been like walking through the journey, looking at some of the moments that matter. And then also there's looking at data and insight as well.
, how are you measuring that insight right now? What kind of things have you been doing just to listen and have that kind of quantitative research ongoing? What do you do in terms of listening posts? So we
[00:19:07] Ellie: have a survey that goes out at the end of every induction, but then company wide, we have a monthly poll survey that we run and we split that down by department.
And there are just five questions around that, which cover culture, work-life balance. Whether you feel supported by your manager. And then there's also a free text box in that survey every month where people can just ask any questions that they have and that goes to us as a team. But also Johnny is very interested in knowing what these questions are, and if anything directly concerns him or he'd be best placed to answer it, he very happily will.
So we're listening all the time, and that poll survey performs really well. We've got everything over a four out of five at the moment, and it does the it dips, but when it does, we'll ask people what's going on and ask managers to speak to their teams and find out the root cause of that issue. And it's never dipped for very long because we are very quickly back to that data.
Can we just be more data driven? So we've just. A business intelligence tool called Looker, and we are working with our data team as to how we can use that because our worst nightmare is to use data in the wrong, collect data for the sake of having it think that we're drawing insight out of it, but not be analyzing it in the right way.
So the way that we want to do it is work with the people that are working with much larger data sets and have much more experience than we're Yeah. And collaborate with them rather than struggle on our own and try and do something maybe in a spreadsheet that's not actually telling us anything.
[00:20:39] Steve: Yeah. So in terms of, just to understand that, so basically you, you are gonna, you're you're looking at using Looker as an example to elevate the. Yeah, elevate the amount of data you're capturing as well as how you're interpreting it and analyzing it, and then drawing conclusions or outcomes from it.
Then to draw, to make decisions on.
[00:20:56] Ellie: and also communicating it to the rest of the business in a really credible way. Because if collecting data, we want to be seen to be drawing credible insight from it rather than just sharing what that data was. I think it's really powerful to say here's the trend line of that data and we are listening to you and here's a dashboard that we've created that you can look at any time saying that you can look at data across our dealer network on.
look a dashboard. I think it's really important as a HR team to be where the business already is and think about if we've got that capability elsewhere, why can't we strive to be the same? And that's what's gonna make people think that we have that credibility and we do care about being at the level the rest of the businesses, rather than being quite anular team that has a lot of data.
But what are we doing about it? So there's a big project to do around that, but that runs through everything that we want to achieve. We just want to bring the business in as much as possible and be really transparent.
[00:21:54] Steve: Yeah. Amazing. And could I just in terms of the in terms of the, the business side of things.
So when you collect this data, so when you've, I know it's probably been a little bit. manual in terms of Excels and pulling that those feedback pulling it together, what, how have you acted as a team or as a business, how are you draw, do you draw on resource internally to help deliver some of the out, improve some of those outcomes?
How do you then go about it practically, it's just to, for organizations that are probably. Thinking about doing listening. Which there, I'm sure there will be out there. But then also, listening's one part. But then I think the most fundamental thing is that in order to then gain for employees to gain confidence in that you are listening, is that then seeing the action off the back of it.
So how are you ensuring that's being done? And how'd you go about that practically? Are we really intrigued? Just to understand how you go about that internally.
[00:22:42] Ellie: . So in terms of the actions coming out of it with the poll survey we meet. All managers across the business monthly on a one-to-one basis.
So each manager will have an assigned person in the people team that is their point of contact. And we have standing meetings every month just to go through things like this and talk about this was low on your whole survey this month, so what have you done about that? How can we help you explore that further if you don't know why that.
But to look at the data we have always involved other teams because historically it's been a bit of a blind spot for us in terms of how do we analyze that data. I remember with our annual survey last year, Claire, who's our head of talent experience. Asked our finance team, just because they had so much Excel experience to help her analyze that data, and overnight our fp and a manager had heat matched the entire thing and made it so that you could compare it across departments, compare it to the company, and that attitude to how we work has carried through, even as our own knowledge has increased in our own capability as a team has.
So the survey that we run we still have a live dashboard in Salesforce, which is used very heavily as a business for customer data. And we've got our Salesforce administrator to send out automated emails every month to managers with their post survey data compared to the rest of the business.
That's something that we don't have the capability within our team to build, but ultimately, Took us asking the right people the question, and within a month we had that built. And it's sustainable now because it's sorted. So it really could have been something that we tried to do on our own for maybe three months, decided it took too long and that data would've stayed in our own team.
But I really encourage people to think about who they can involve because we're, as a people ops team, are helping other people all the time. , we should ask other people to help us out too, .
[00:24:37] Steve: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, and fortunately there are these silos which which occur in organizations and that's uh, that's one of the things to break down. So look in terms of as the kind of as head of people, ops and the team, around you, you're the you are the kind of I call it that kind of the custodian of the brand and the business and the people really.
Yeah. . So what does what does that future look like? How are you seeing now the future and where it's going? So you've gone through this kind of crazy period of growth , and some of the challenges that come with that. What does that kind of next phase look like?
How is that developing or looking like from your perspective? I think it's really
[00:25:10] Ellie: exciting. So at the moment, we are looking at. And thinking quite inspirationally about what does it mean to now move to a 500 to a thousand person company that needs to think about the systems that they have in place, the processes, how you onboard people at that scale, how you have an employee experience that still feels very individual.
But that can be done very simply and quickly because the worst thing we want to do is now lose that. So we're thinking. More so the systems right now and getting the right systems in place so that the team can focus on doing the value add stuff rather than anything that's paperwork related. Cause I think at this stage a lot can creep in and a lot of admin and policy and process can creep in.
So a big project for us this year is to completely tear Ted ham apart and start again and make it very simple in very human language. We've already sat down with our lean in circle, for example, and given them our family leave policies, and they've, in a really good way, just completely ripped them apart and said, I'm sorry, but I've got absolutely no idea what all of these acronyms mean, what this means, because our policies were written.
When we are in a hundred person company by an external consultant, and they're just written in exactly the way that the legal speak requires it to be, and it talks about SMP and statutory maternity pay. People don't know what that means, and if you're having your first baby, God only knows what these policies mean to you, so actually it causes more confusion.
And our as a company is 33. So we've got people going through all of these life stages and really exciting times in their life. And if we can build a really good handbook around how we're supporting and hand holding people through those processes and then hopefully supporting them to return after they go through these exciting times in their life, the retention will.
Fantastic off the back of that, and I think it's easy to think about onboarding lots of new employees and how you're doing that experience, but actually how are you rewarding the people that have stuck with you through all of that change? So tearing apart the handbook is gonna be really exciting for us.
Very cool indeed. To get groups of people together and actually just get them to really shit on it. . Yeah. Yeah. What is crap about it? So that when we then launch the new one, we've got loads of people bought into it. It's simple. People know where to find what they need to. To find and we can focus on really business partnering with the people that need our support and adding lots of value, hopefully to grow.
[00:27:46] Steve: Yeah. And also you've got it's a wonderful example. I think it's it's one of those, isn't it? You have one to start off, you get the best that you think you, you need at that moment in time, but then obviously your culture and everything changes, immeasurably over that period of time.
With growth with obviously growth in numbers. I think what's. I think what's interesting there is around. Probably tone of voice and I'm putting your own tone of voice in it as a brand and as a business, rather than probably some very legal insurance or, exactly financially driven kind of words that are used in these types of documents sometimes.
Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. What, anything else that you anything else that you think, yeah any big kind of other projects.
[00:28:24] Ellie: Yeah, so we're gonna do a company-wide benefits review. I think, again, when you're at a hundred employees, what you can offer is limited very much by budget. And the fact that you're a startup that's still proving the model.
We proved the model, now we're gonna, we've hit already 700 million on our books in terms of what we funded through finance. So we can't have employees seeing all of that and not feeling that they're reaping some kind of rewards. So we've already put it out to the business and asked them what benefits would they like to see, and now we're doing a big piece of work around how can we create something that truly is best in class as a benefits offering to give back to the people who have spent a lot of time helping us build this business.
So that's gonna be great for us. To work on. We've actually got a learning and development manager starting today, and she comes from Netflix and Laine Espresso. So we are thinking about those big companies and what it wow could look like. And employee development is something that inherently has happened due to our size, whereas now again, we need to formalize that and build some exciting career pathways for people and really spell out if they stay at Oodle, where could that take for them?
Cause. We know it's super exciting, but no longer is. It's so clear what that looks like, and that ambiguity for me is a real opportunity. But for an employee that wants to see where they could be in six months time, if we don't spell it out, they're probably gonna find that somewhere else. Yeah, we just have some real opportunity here to build some people.
Careers of a lifetime, hopefully Absolutely reward them for
[00:29:59] Steve: that work, I hope. Wonderful. wonderful. Not a bad job to have in in life. Definitely. It's very exciting. and just so just for the audience, Ellie, so what would, in terms of kind of anybody listening who. Is either in an organization that's about to go on some form of high level growth or yeah, or perhaps, looking to re-review their kind of employee journey or onboarding journey specifically. , what kind of advice would you give somebody sitting in kind of some kind of people ops or HR or even leadership roles, in terms of having gone through some of this yourself in recent, in the last year?
[00:30:30] Ellie: Yeah. I think you have to do a couple of things. I think you have to sit down. Really get post-it notes and get a whiteboard out and map out the entire journey that an employee has from start to finish. And at every point what is involved in making that happen? How many people are involved? What paperwork do you have to do?
Is it manual or is it automated? And. and actually just get the whole team in a room. That's what we did. And it was a very valuable exercise. And even if you don't have a team, just sit and do it yourself and you'll start to realize just how much goes into these things. And you'll start to spot pockets of opportunity to create those moments or where you've already got those moments, how are you amplifying them and really getting the focus around those.
So that's a big. To start off with because once you know where you already are in the current state, you can start to think about where you'd like to be, and then in terms of convincing other stakeholders about the importance of it, a really simple exercise is normally just to work out how much it's costing you to onboard someone.
For example, when we send out those biscuits, how much are they costing us? When people get their Oodle hoodie on their first day, how much are we paying for those? How much does it cost us to do the psychometric assessment that we use when we recruit someone? So going through every little thing that comes into onboarding and actually being able to be a bit more commercial to the business and say, every time that we get this wrong, this is the amount of money that we've wasted, let alone the time of everyone.
Put time into trying to make that really positive experience for someone. So be really crucial that we get it right and getting them to be part of the solution. So sitting them down and saying, think about your worst ever onboarding experience that you had. And getting people just to relate to how that feels, because it's a terrifying time starting a new job.
And as much as we wanna be really excited for it, it's really scary. You've got to be making a great first impression all the time. You've got to come across as credible. In a new role, maybe a new industry, maybe your first ever role. So the more that we can do to get people to relate to how that might feel, and just create a really safe environment for people to get up to speed super quickly and feel really safe, then we are doing our job right.
If we can do
[00:32:46] Steve: that. Yeah, absolutely. I think I think in terms of the the power moment stuff and that amplification of a particular moment, I think one of my learnings from that book was around stop focusing on all the things that aren't working, and of course there's always gonna be some that needs improving.
Why exclusively focus your energy on that. Why not choose a couple one or even just two moments and focus on amplifying that and make that your peak moment in the journey. So then that gets people talking and it just encourages people and it's, it creates the marketing potentially.
Yeah. So Ellie, if you hack. To choose a moment. So thinking about some of the recommendations that you've shared. So yeah. If you were to recommend to somebody listening at one moment in the onboarding journey where you'd say, look, just really focus on that, cause that's a really important moment what would you recommend?
Where would you say to kind as a good starting point?
[00:33:35] Ellie: It sounds like a really obvious one, but day one for. You just can't replace that impression that leaves. And sometimes you have managers that are super busy and they completely forget until the day before that they've got this person starting and then everything's really rushed.
Whereas actually we create a lot of excitement around the first day, and we are constantly communicating with managers as well, so that managers can't possibly forget that it's happening. They're not on annual leave, they're not in meetings all day. We build in lots and lots of structure around that day.
Behind the scenes, an employee wouldn't necessarily know that, but an employee's first day. Always follows the same process, which is they start at 10 o'clock in the morning so that they get to have a lion. They miss the traffic. They can have some time at home to chill and think about the day ahead of them.
They'll have had their schedule in advance. When they arrive, they're greeted at reception. They have a welcome tour of our buildings. They're shown everything that they need to be shown. and then they have some sessions with the rest of the cohort of people that they're doing induction with. And one of those sessions includes a wellbeing session from Ellie and my team who talks about how important it's to look after yourself and talks about mental health.
And that is okay to talk about mental health at ule and that first an interactive quiz so everyone can learn a bit more about each other, about mental health, some facts and figures around mental health in the work. And then they have lunch and that's provided by Oodle and all of the managers of that cohort of new starters come down and sit with them around a really big table in the kitchen and talk to them about how they're finding their first day.
So that's really structured and the sessions continue for the rest of the day, but it's done as a team. And Ellie, the onboarding assistant, is there alongside them for most of that day, just making sure that any questions they have are sorted. They'll have their IT set up and they have a presentation from it on how to get onto Slack, how to set up their email account.
So everything is really spelled out for them. But we also. , try and treat them very much like adults and we give them the autonomy to say, if you need to go back to your desk and speak to your manager at any point, just leave the session. That's absolutely fine. We also provide them with lots of goodies, but we've got a real focus on the environment at the moment and thinking about the impact that we are leaving on the environment.
So give people a helium. Tied to their chair with their name on it, saying, welcome to Udu, and we'd write their name on the balloon, and that was amazing. And it meant that you could spot where the new starters were in the business. Great. Those helium balloons take 400 years to decompose. So we've changed that and we've started to think about what are we doing from this?
Sustainability point of view when we're onboarding this volume of people. So now they get a tote bag that is branded and it's like their toolkit of things that they need for their first day. And in that tote bag, they get the oodle hoodie, which everyone always loves, and they get sens stationary and we've got things feel car.
So just building a real moment around that first day means that people are set up for a really incredible journey at Oodle. Yeah. Cliche, but it really does make the difference.
[00:36:59] Steve: Yeah. And I must, I have to comment given recent events in the UK through, obviously it's raised the whole mental health aspect, Generally in the press.
But but yeah, no, I think that's a really commendable, I think that's really important that yeah, that environment that you are creating there is safe for the people to have those conversations. I think on day one, walking into a company and then having that conversation is like my word. That's a really, I think that's really powerful and I think it shows very clearly, like really strong consideration for how employees feel and their welfare.
I think that's absolutely
[00:37:30] Ellie: brilliant. Absolutely. I think something that, Oodle do really is they just think of some really quite niche random things and absolutely run with it. So we've got a tea lady called Sue, who is just a retired local old lady who really wanted to stay and work after she retired.
So she comes in every single day. It's three o'clock. With her tea trolley and she will make every single person in the business their favorite hot drink. And she comes up the stairs with her trolley and she shouts tea free. And every single day people cheer and clap her . First time they'd ever seen her new starter.
Seeing that on your first day, it is absolutely bookers, but it's amazing. And Sue is one of. Celebrated employees at ule because, oh, that's amazing. Remember your name after the first time she meets you. She'll remember what your hot drink of choice is, and it just means that if you're not sure what you're doing that day, when you see Sue at three o'clock, you're like, yeah, I'm in the right place.
Amazing. Real friendly face. So that's part of our employee experience for sure.
[00:38:39] Steve: Amazing. Everyone needs to sue in their business. I've really, we've had
[00:38:42] Ellie: people copy it. We've had people copy three at tea at three, and I don't .
[00:38:46] Steve: Wonderful. Ellie, thank you. I think wonderful examples and a really amazing insight into Udo Car Finance.
I think it's I saw you, I saw the business from afar, and then I obviously I saw some of your releases on on LinkedIn. I was like, I'm, I was curious. Thank you so much and it's been a absolutely lovely meeting you and yeah, thank you for for joining me on the show.
[00:39:06] Ellie: Thank you. really appreciate it. All right.
[00:39:08] Steve: Have a good day. Take care. You too. And there you have it. Another episode of the Experience Designers podcast. Thank you so much to my guest, Ellie. Really appreciate your time and sharing your story and your journey into and with Oodle Car Finance.
And of course, as always, all of the links if you wish to connect with Ellie, will be on the podcast website. So thank you all again for listening, and until the next time, bye for now.