Marcel Prins, Chief Operating Officer at APG Asset Management

The key emerging theme that we fundamentally believe will gather new focus, is cultural resilience.

This new normal will force us all to start thinking about this, paying attention to it and more importantly, managing it.

Managing cultural resilience and making sure that it is up to the standard that is required for each and all of our companies, will require persistent attention to elements that have previously had little.

For instance, a question I would ask is, what makes my laptop an APG laptop, company and culture versus your laptop which might be for another financial institute or asset manager, healthcare, retail, etc.

“How do we ensure that people feel engaged with the purpose of the company”

If they are the same, and have the same applications like zoom, how can we ensure that the identity of the company can be shaped?

In this hybrid work environment, with either full work from home or a mixture of office and home working, how do we ensure that people feel engaged with the purpose of the company that will guarantee cohesion and connection between people?

Communication, collaboration, and the impact on creative processes are key points. I felt lucky that we weren’t going through any big reorganisation and I wasn’t working with new management teams or building new teams.

Many of the meetings carried out online have been extremely efficient. We can connect at a convenient time and get to the point in a timely manner.

“There are questions around onboarding and training with new employees joining the company”

However, I do miss the conversations at the coffee machine or walking around the office and being able to connect with the undercurrent through the organisation.

This was tolerable for the first few months but since then there have been challenges around creating a resilient culture. There are questions around onboarding and training with new employees joining the company.

We have taken the approach to allow new joiners to go, at a minimum, for their first day to the office to get their laptops, but also to meet our managers and one colleague.

Of course, this depends on the circumstances and the regulations that are being applied in the Netherlands at the time.

This first moment of contact is of extreme importance in ensuring that people have a sense of belonging but can also motivate new people by giving them a cultural imprint and identity sharing as a company.

“This first moment of contact is of extreme importance in ensuring that people have a sense of belonging”

 If you neglect this, over time the coherency of the culture will further disperse and will introduce new risks.

There is also the issue of talent and retention. As an example, the feedback from one of our engagement surveys, was that people have the sense that they get less recognition for individual contributions in this current work from home, digital setting.

When people aren’t collaborating and discussing things on the work floor and many of the processes and interactions might be invisible for you as a manager.

There are questions around how to give recognition and to identify the individual contributions of true talents within your organisations.

Also, if you have a mixture of work from home and office working, what does this do for promotions? Will there be more of a bias towards people who are in the office on the same day as the manager and therefore more visible and able to build a relationship?

“If you have a mixture of work from home and office working, what does this do for promotions?”

Or is there sufficient trust in the broader organisation that promotions and recognitions will truly be unbiased, based on merit and contribution, not only on relationships?  This will require trust and a formal culture in order to work effectively.

The reality is that for many financial institutes, including us, the office was the place where you worked and needed to be in order to contribute.

We have all discovered that we can be equally effective in a work from home setting in some areas and much more effective in others.

What we also notice and wonder about is what the impact on retention will be.

“Existing employees are wondering if they can go back to their families in other countries”

We have already had interest from people in different countries in new positions and questions, such as whether it would be mandatory for them to move to the Netherlands.

Existing employees are wondering if they can go back to their families in other countries, which may be in the same time zone.

The technical aspects of this are the fiscal rules, but the risky bit is around the stickiness of the culture for your employees.

There is a greater risk of your whole investment management team joining a US investment manager or different company without having to move to a different country.

“Existing employees are wondering if they can go back to their families in other countries”

We believe that having a strong culture, identity, and mastering the element of cultural resilience will be of extreme relevance for companies going forward – even more predominantly than it has been in the past.

One of the big lessons we have learned in the last year is that although we were prepared with transactional and operational resilience, we will need to master the cultural resiliency too.

The new normal will shape how we and the rest of society collaborates and what the role of the workplace will be.

If you are not doing this, there will be different operational risks associated with your people and ultimately, we know that the aggregated success is the aggregated contribution of the people there.

Marcel Prins, Chief Operating Officer at APG Asset Management spoke about managing risk amid natural disasters and market turmoil in our research report Fund Technology, Data & Operations, Europe 2021. You can download the report and read more on this theme here.

 

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