Our culture

We’re on a committed course to go from good to great! Even with the best people and all the passion in the world, we figured we needed an honest and objective outsider’s view on how to get there. A few years ago, we asked Denis Beckett to take a trek through our company and tell us what he saw so we could polish up the good bits and panel-beat the not-so-good bits.

South Africa is such an exciting and ever-changing country that we constantly need to make sure we’re focussed on the right stuff at the right time. Enter Beckett once more to tell it like it is and help guide our journey...

Where exactly do you find a corporate culture? A manual?
Insert efficiency rod A into camaraderie slot B, install discipline plate C and adjust ethics screw D. Hard to see. Maybe a recipe book? Peel fresh goodwill, marinade sliced ambition, sprinkle loyalty and a dash of rebellious spirit, stir vigorously and heat over slow flame. Maybe not.

Can you order a culture? Some companies try. I once visited a firm where notice-boards declared “As of Monday, company culture will switch to open-neck.” The CEO was proud of that. He said: “see, we’re progressing.” I couldn’t agree. A culture isn’t a shirt; it’s an attitude. Progress isn’t about re-designing uniforms; it’s about freeing minds. To me that CEO is like Idi Amin, who passed a law to make unemployment a crime.

Imagine trying to even define a company culture: Total transparency; except where (1) Temptation is very very large and risk is quite low. (1b) Temptation is quite large and risk is very very low. (1c) You can pass it off as a mistake…Etcetera. You could have a100-page checklist; make your BEE scorecard look simple, but you wouldn’t achieve much, because a culture isn’t numbered paragraphs. It lives in people or it doesn’t live at all.

In that case, what lives in Hollard’s people? A couple of years ago I took a stab at that question, and ended with a large assumption:

Hollard has taken more steps than anyone towards what could be the Next Big Thing – a business model for the 21st century. This model will contain transparency, integrity, fun, stimulus and an as yet unformed new relationship between money-contributor and effort-contributor. It could not only make a big bucket of profit. It could also make history.

Now I am invited to revisit that subject. Where has Hollard’s culture gone since then? Is it any closer to this Promised-Land vision? Is the vision a valid vision?

Ja no well fine. Part One is the Disclaimer.

It’s fine for outsiders to shout the odds. Insiders are career-sensitive. They tend to bottle up their gripes, in the bosses’ hearing. Outsiders can sound off freer. That’s good, if everyone remembers that people who say “you should….” have a lesser bestaansreg than people who say “we should”. Outsiders can misunderstand, can misinterpret, can see wrong. The best you can ask is that they say it as they see it. If their wrong sight stimulates you to refine your own views, value has been added.

Re-looking at the Hollard I see some terrific sights and some other sights. If Hollard merely want a pat on the back they wouldn’t have asked my opinion. So I start with brickbats, and we can end up happy and huggy with the nice bits.

Gripe 1, the biggest: Hollard is in a state of confusion about this culture thing. When I came here in 2001, most people were strong on the idea that Hollard had a special way of doing things. It was not just another company, it was a special place. Nowadays… everybody says it’s a good place, alright – more on that later – but this notion of “special” has receded.

Once upon a time I routinely met newcomers who had fought to get into Hollard. One person had worked at another insurance company, where her colleagues said “you’re keen and smart and on the ball, you’re too good to work here, you should be at Hollard.” That was a large statement, né? For a company to be seen that way by its rivals… that’s something.

And now…? I mainly hear people who came here because it was convenient, or their husbands were transferred. Some have never heard about any kind of “specialness”. Many a company, maybe even “the average” company, is a place where people drudge through the day, don't like what they do, aren’t that fond of their bosses, and put on a phoney “happy family” smile as a public facade. When a company acquires a repute as a magnet for go-ahead people, energetic people, people with extra, I’d say it’s wrong to let that repute trickle away.

Hollard seems to be on a see-saw between “we really are special” and “we’re pretty good, it’s enough”. Some Hollardites got here expecting a specialness they don’t find. As one guy said “It’s no more wideawake than where I was before; I was surprised.” All companies tell their staff “we’re great, we’re the best”. In most companies everyone takes that with a pinch of salt. Hollard is rare in having many people who take it seriously, and who give the company an uncommon potential to be a real full-tilt pacemaker – in new ideas, as place to work, as ethical benchmark, the lot. But the rival sentiment is also strong: “we’re doing fine, we don’t want to be freaks, that greatness stuff is for show”.

So there is Gripe 1: does Hollard want to be great or does it want to be able to say “we’re great”? That most Hollardites don’t know the answer, is sad.

Gripe 2. What happened to Sorted? Hollard took a common Seffrican word and captured it. In completely remote places, every time someone said “Sorted”, someone else would think “Hollard” and “Sorted” as synonyms. And Hollard people chanted “Sorted” as a mantra and a constant stimulus to get things right. That was two whammys – remarkable.

Is “Sorted” still a Hollard slogan? Hollardites seem unsure. Non-Hollardites have forgotten it, or confused it with painfully mutant animals. It’s as if the cops did a brilliant job rounding up an elusive desperado, and then the warders forgot to lock the door. I’d submit there’s a case for a reinstatement of “Sorted”.

Gripe 3. Ethics. The insurance industry contains many people who apologise for being in insurance. I often hear old hands tell newcomers “sorry you’ve got into a despised industry”. This is nonsense to me. Insurance is the most vital industry in the pantheon. If it did not exist, no other industry would exist. There should be unequivocal pride. But I see why the industry gets a bad name. There are areas where slipping and sliding is tempting; ways of selling people clauses you know they don’t need, of keeping premiums at superfluous levels, of using the letter of the law to evade equitable claims, and so on.

The high level of temptation comes from the unique nature of the product on sale – a promise, to be tested at some unknown future date. I suggest that this unique characteristic requires insurance to reach for higher and fiercer ethical standards than other industries. I don’t know that it does that.

I think the industry is heading for, sooner or later, a wholesale raising of the ethical bar. I’m expecting to see Hollard leading the way, openly, publicly, expressly.

Gripe 4. Some time in the lives of most people now at Hollard, it will cease to be a source of pride to double profit every year. Questions will creep in. What is the relationship between the profit and payroll, owners’ share and workers’ share? Where are clients paying more than is just or receiving less than is just? Where does magnifying the wealth of the wealthy marry with a squarer deal for the wealthless? What are the limits of transparency? Which of today’s conventional practices will become embarrassing memories?

From my perspective, seeing Hollard as a stand-out candidate to pioneer the next levels of business advance, I’d hope to find more signs of exploration in these arenas.

The trouble with criticism is that people can feel “oops, attacks, moans; are things alright?” Actually, critics are more useful than praise-singers (at the price of being less popular). To give criticism is to respect the thing you criticise, and to honour it by taking it seriously.

Still, some people think “oh oh, he can’t like Hollard very much.” No, I do like Hollard, very much. Every time I walk in that front door I get a good feeling. When I tell Hollard people there is a unique mood in this company, some think I’m schmoozing. I’m not. I know several companies; not one has as encouraging a soul as this one. At one well-known place everybody is miserable all the time. At another, they’re tense and on guard against each other. At another, a virtual race war is on the go, everyone of every colour claiming to be done down by everyone of any other colour.

At Hollard the sense of friendship and respect and go-ahead is palpable. Many Hollardites have no idea how privileged they are.

Then, there is the boldness. What company would buy a run-down historic mansion on half a farm and create the most individual headquarters in the country? What company would pile 1 200 people into airplanes for a djoll of beach and aquarium and sea and luxury? What company would commandeer half the taxis in Durban to send staff on mystery tours with unexpected friends in unlikely places, giving most a growth experience never to forget?

And what company invites an undisciplined outsider to peer around and shoot his mouth on how things look to him?

Only one kind of company does a thing like that; a company with a lot of ambition and a rock-solid core, the kind of company you’d like to invest in over a long term.

Denis Beckett