A NEW BREED

on the case
board guys and a few other guys,
who immediately saw the value,’
says Gillespie.
The positive feedback allowed
Gillespie and his team to trial the
app with agents and managers in
Provident’s Dewsbury branch.
‘There were mixed views, as you
might expect,’ he says. ‘The guys
who were a bit younger or had
smartphones were “wow, let’s do
this now”, but the people who had
been agents for more than 30 years
and had a smartphone but didn’t
necessarily know all of its functions
had much more trepidation about
what might happen.’
Agent of change
Around that time, a staff reshuffle
saw Mark Stevens, who was
previously the division’s commercial
director, become the new managing
director. This marked a clear
turning point.
‘Mark was much more digitally
minded and very supportive of me to
give it a go,’ says Gillespie. ‘So we set
up a pilot and took the wireframes
that we’d outsourced initially and
started to build it ourselves as a
relatively small team within my IT
and change team.’
Over a period of three to four
months, Gillespie’s team rolled out a
pilot to ten local branches and, slowly
‘Our recently published
interim results show
around a £14 million
annualised saving
going forward from
this project’
>> Jono Gillespie, technology and change
director, Provident Financial
but surely, created a culture change.
Agents soon realised the time
savings that the app allowed, as well
as the reduced room for error and
their new-found flexibility to work
at the hours that suited them.
Well, half of them did, anyway.
Inevitably, there was resistance – and
Gillespie found that at five of the
branches all of the agents were using
the app, but at the other five there
was barely any usage at all.
‘So we went to those branches to
chat to them about it, and it was just a
genuine fear of change because they’d
been doing it the same way for ten
years,’ he says. ‘We were really
patient, and I think we communicated
really well. Then, when they did start
using it and enjoying it, we used them
as advocates.
‘We had a couple of handfuls of
people who really just didn’t fancy
the challenge and change – although
I suspected they might have been
looking to leave anyway, and this
was an opportunity – but it was a
tiny minority.’
In February 2014, Gillespie and his
team were ready to roll out the app to
all of Provident’s branches.
Around the same time, they also
decided they wanted to change the
way that Provident’s branch managers
worked as well.
Having realised that every branch
had their own favoured ways of
doing things, operations director
Andy Parkinson launched a culture
programme called ‘One Best Way’
to get everybody using the same
processes.
‘Working with Andy, we looked at
our managers and realised they were
very much branch-based and had
pretty old-fashioned desktop
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