A whole nine months since we became 100% employee owned

It’s been nine months since we became 100% employee-owned, and launched the Equal Experts Trustee Panel. What’s happened since then?

As a quick reminder, the panel includes myself, Thomas, Ryan, Alun and Sofie. We act in a non-operational capacity to ensure that EE operates in the best long-term interest of the network, customers and employees rather than focusing on day to day execution. I see us as a neutral sounding board for executives, providing a conscious pause before important decisions are made.

As a panel we’re going through the stages of team building – form, storm, norm and perform. So you start a team (form) and to begin with there’s lots of disagreement and discussion (storm) before things normalise (norm). Eventually, you build high trust and motivation and the team can start to focus on team needs rather than individual needs (perform). We’re probably just at the end of forming, and coming into storming. It’s certainly still early days.

The first change we’ve made is in the frequency of our meetings. At first, the panel would meet twice a year, but we quickly realised that by the time we’d caught up on all the news, our time was up! Going forward, the panel will meet six times a year, with a combination of virtual and in-person meetings. More frequent meetups mean it’s easier to track open threads, to follow up on recommended actions and remember the context of actions from previous discussions.

The second topic we’re focused on is agreeing how high or low level the updates should be when we get together. It’s very easy as trustees to go down a rabbit hole and discuss one thing in detail and before you know it, our two hour meeting is over. It’s for the executive team to focus on operational delivery – our responsibility is strategic oversight and taking a long-term perspective.

That’s a challenge because many of us are from a strong delivery background and naturally focus on action and operations, but we need to take a high-level, strategic perspective and focus on long-term sustainability and growth of the company. Sometimes that means asking Thomas or Ryan, “What hat are you wearing?” – are they coming at an issue from a delivery, exec or trustee perspective?

We’re currently in the process of figuring out a sort of dashboard that gives us a sense of the company’s health, using things like Miro boards, structured reports, one-page summaries and customer network analysis. Company health can include financials but it’s also about things like employee satisfaction, which has a huge impact. For example, we’ve recently discussed both the Glassdoor Best Places to Work award, and the success of the new customer network.

In future, I’d also like to include a formal agile retrospective element to the panel’s work, to help the trustees be more effective.

In the past it was pretty much Thomas and the executive team running the show, but what I think personally is that we’re now providing a forum to discuss and support those ideas, giving an outside perspective and an opportunity to review things before the company acts. That’s going to be hugely valuable in time. We’re lucky to have Sam McGregor to act as a neutral mediator in these discussions, and he ensures we stay on track with things like legal and compliance issues.

Of course we’re learning as we go – we’ve already changed quite a lot in terms of how we talk and work. We’ll never say we’ve got it all figured out, but it already feels better. We’re always open to questions.