Getting under the hood in the first 90 days

The first 90 days of any new role – especially that of a CEO – is always a whirlwind. There are new systems and processes to get to grips with, people to meet – employees, partners, and customers – relationship to forge, and plans to make. But taking the time in those first 90 days to build the foundations is critical to long-term success, and building a company that not only is a brilliant place to work for our people, but also that delivers amazing HR systems and experiences for our customers.??

?

I’m fortunate to be building on the hard work of our teams in recent years, who have done a great job in getting the Ciphr business and its suite of HR, payroll, recruitment and learning software to this point. But there is work to do in solidifying the basics, to give us a platform for future growth. And that’s what I have focused on in my first 90 days as CEO.??

?

What do those basics look like? For me, it’s twofold: understanding what’s going on, and making sure that I have the right people supporting me on this transformation journey.??

?

To find out what’s really going on in a company – or with any single customer’s organisation – I believe you have to go right to the source, whether that source is an individual or a set of data. That’s why I’ve been spending lots of time in our Marlow head office (and on Microsoft Teams), talking to people from across the organisation. I’ve also been out and about across the UK, meeting over 30? HR professionals and fellow C-suite leaders at customers such as home improvement company Kingfisher plc , waste management services provider Reconomy , and TRL , experts in the future of transport, to understand how Ciphr’s products support their people management goals, what they want from us as a software partner, and how we can provide an even better experience in the future.??

?

Every meeting has been valuable. So far, the message has been: keep doing what you’re doing, but do it better. Already, in the past 18 months, we’ve placed a significant emphasis on refining and improving our implementation services, improving how we support clients through our customer success team, and have relaunched our digital training platform, Ciphr Academy. There are also other projects underway to help stabilise our systems and deliver an even better user experience, which are already starting to produce results and improve customer satisfaction levels. Hearing directly from our customers how our solutions – their strategic source of people data – save them time, operate more efficiently, and make better, people-focused decisions, reminds our teams that our work is incredibly valuable, and that their hard work is making a difference for thousands of people. In fact, we regularly record more than one million active sessions per month across our HR and LMS software, and process just under ￡2bn per year through our outsourced payroll service.??

?

I’ve also been diving deep into our own data, to understand what’s really going on under the surface. That process has included creating a new set of KPIs, which my executive leadership team (ELT) reviews weekly, as well as reading open support tickets to identify the root causes of ongoing issues. We’ve also created new customer-focused reports that bring together data from across the organisation – encompassing customer success, customer care and account management teams – to help us gain a holistic view of our interactions with individual client organisations, so we can understand where we can be more proactive at offering support.??

?

Another aspect of getting the basics right, for me, is getting the right team in place. That’s why we’ve recently made several senior appointments, including chief marketing officer, Chris Boddice , chief sales officer Gerald Byrne , Neal Morris , director of data science and analytics, and a soon to be announced VP of product, many of whom I’ve worked with previously and can trust to help me shepherd Ciphr in the right direction.??

?

In April, we also welcomed Marshall E-Learning into the Ciphr Group, bolstering our provision of learning and development content. Learning and development initiatives are, of course, critical to the success of any organisation. Partnering with a professional provider such as Marshall E-Learning Consultancy , that has years of expertise and uses a combination of learning formats and activities to create high-quality eLearning courses, helps to engage learners with dozens of critical topics such as diversity, equality, and inclusion; mental health; neurodiversity; managing remote teams; and much more.??

?

Our people team has also recently undertaken some rigorous internal HR work, helping us clarify and align job profiles and descriptions, which will help us not only hire the right people in the future, but also enable us to support our existing employees with better-defined career progression opportunities.??

?

Other challenges that I’ve just started leaning into include better engaging Ciphr’s hybrid workforce and improving cross-functional collaboration; getting under the skin of ongoing projects that are going to transform how we deliver our products; and defining the mission that drives us to deliver an outstanding product and service to our customers. Unleashing the Ciphr Hedgehog (explained here, if you’re not familiar with Jim Collins’ concept) is another subject, among many others, that I look forward to discussing in future blogs. In the meantime, if you want to talk more, please connect with me on LinkedIn.??