Combatting Cyber Attacks with Laura Probert, Egress

In this HRchat episode, we welcome Laura Probert, Chief People Officer at Egress to share tips to help companies combat cyber attacks.

Laura is responsible for the company’s global people strategy. Her focus is on attracting, retaining, and developing world-class talent, including creating a high-performing culture that rewards and recognizes its people, provides flexibility, training and career development, and supports mental and physical wellbeing.

With over 25 years of experience, Laura is passionate about creating successful people development strategies and building agile, high-performing, diverse teams with high levels of engagement.

Questions for Laura include:

• Before joining Egress, you held senior HR positions in technology, advertising, retail, and entertainment, working with some of the world’s leading brands including Adobe and Bwin Sports. How have recent trends like the rise of AI, remote working, and more gig workers changed how HR leaders do their jobs?
• Egress helps companies combat various cyber attacks. Why does that matter and how severe is the threat?
• I can see you have a passion for creating a great culture. In your experience, what are some of the key elements that make a great culture?
• After launching a 4-day week initiative and noticing patchy delivery and customer support, you conducted a post-mortem and found that the inflexibility of the program was negatively impacting particular days of the week so you introduced a new concept to Egress employees known as eFlex. Tell us more
• The tech industry has been facing a skills shortage for some time, what advice or insights can you offer to attract and retain top talent?
• What does the Great Places to Work ranking from 88th to 50th mean to you and Egress? What does it say about the company?

We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast and Iceni Media Inc.

Chapters

• 0:03 Creating a Positive Company Culture
• 10:52 Creating a Feedback-Driven Organizational Culture
• 16:29 E-Flex
• 26:42 HR Chat Show

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Hello and welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. My name is Bill Bannum and I am your host today. Joining me on the show is Laura Probert, chief People Officer over at egress, where she is responsible for the company's global people strategy. Laura's focus is on attracting, retaining and developing world-class talent, which includes creating a high-performing culture that rewards and recognises its people, provides flexibility, training and career development, and support for mental and physical well-being. With over 25 years of experience, laura is passionate about creating successful people development strategies and building agile, high-performing, diverse teams with high levels of engagement. Laura, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the HR Chat Show today. Thank you, bill. Really great to be here. So be on my reintroduction just a moment ago. Laura, why don't you start by taking a couple of minutes and telling our listeners a bit about yourself, your career, background and what you get up to over at egress?

Speaker 3: 1:32

Yeah, sure. So yeah, I'm Laura Probert, chief People Officer at egress, and I've been here for two years. A little bit about me, obviously. I've been in HR for 27 years, so it's a very long time. So I will not bore you with a blow-by-blower count of that. But I was thinking about this interview and what I would say about it and I kind of fell into HR.

Speaker 3: 1:58

I think it was my second job. I was a cleaner and I was very good at cleaning other people's houses. It's not very good at cleaning my own. And then I was working in Gap, I think, in the West End, and I heard about this job come up in a big department store on Oxford Street which isn't there anymore, by the way Nothing to do with me and my time there, by the way and I fell into a really big job of like I had HR and finance and it was a department store. So it was crazy and it was really badly paid and I had to work Christmas and all the holidays and all of that and I absolutely loved it. I absolutely loved it and I just fell in love with people and being part of kind of people's strategy and obviously that was my first job and I probably had more reports then than I've had in many of my other jobs, but it really kind of set me up in that kind of with a customer service feel to it as well, obviously, which is a great place to start. And then I've worked for lots of kind of lots of completely different companies since then. I think the great thing about HR is that you don't have to pigeonhole yourself into any one particular industry. So I've worked in publishing, I worked for Nike, I've worked for Adobe, I worked for WPP in an agency within the group and I worked for 10 years in online gaming. So I've kind of done the full range, and 80% of those roles I'd say were in technology. So that's a kind of whistle-stop tour through.

Speaker 3: 3:36

You know my past in a way, and from a personal perspective. I'm a 52-year-old woman. I'm perimenopausal, so any women at my level probably are a similar age to me. I have a daughter, who's 20, who is at university in Manchester doing biomedicine, and my hobby is techno music. I absolutely love techno music and festivals, anything linked to that. So I think, yeah, my work and my kind of social life and my private life are quite different, which I think is wonderful. And then, yeah, I've worked for egress for two years. It's the best company I've ever worked for and the best job I've ever had. But we'll talk about more about that, I suppose, in a moment. But that's me.

Speaker 2: 4:29

So before joining egress, as you mentioned, you did hold lots of senior HR positions at companies like Adobe At a high level. I'm keen to take your take on the last few years. It's been a rollercoaster the last few years. A bunch of different reasons, of course, how recent trends and changes within the profession, such as the rise of AI, and how that's augmenting jobs, remote working and more gig workers entering the fore. How has that impacted the ways that HR leaders do their?

Speaker 3: 4:59

job. Oh my god, there's so many questions in there. I mean you could probably have a podcast about each of those topics alone.

Speaker 3: 5:10

I think the reason I love what I do is because I think you look at all of these world events and you feel very, very much out of control the cost of living crisis and global instability in wars and COVID and remote working and like, oh my God. When you look at it outside of the doors of the organisation that you're in, you feel like a speck of dust. You know you really feel like you're nobody and you have no control about. You know, control over things in your life. And the reason I love what I do so much is because you can create a microcosm of a world in which you do have control and you can kind of shut the door on some of those really horrible things that are going on in the world or some really difficult things or whatever, and you can have some semblance of control over it. So I'd say things like you know and most businesses felt like I think, through COVID and things like that was a really difficult time, but I think businesses that I heard about all really leaned into it.

Speaker 3: 6:25

Everyone went remote really quickly. They had loads of great kind of events online and people were certainly at egress. People were entertaining one another and they had videos and competitions and quizzes and all sorts of wonderful things, and I think that's a really great example of where you can take control. I think it's where businesses don't take that responsibility seriously and take control is where all of those difficult things seep into that microcosm and make life very difficult. So that's what I'm trying to create is this kind of almost a bubble of where we shut certain things out and we let certain wonderful things in. Now, we can't always shut everything out, but I think that's why I enjoy what I do so much is because we're able to create a really positive, wonderful environment for people. But it's difficult. It's really difficult to do that all the time and to always make people feel like they're in a safe world rather at work.

Speaker 2: 7:34

Okay, I myself, like lots of other people out there, fear getting hacked and I've got various different firewalls and VPNs and things in place to help me try to avoid those situations and the company being attacked. And egress, of course, helps companies combat various cyber attacks. Laura, why does that matter and how severe is the threat? What have you got to say around that?

Speaker 3: 8:00

I think it's probably one of the number one issues for businesses in the world right now, and certainly for Chief Security officers.

Speaker 3: 8:09

It's the thing that keeps them awake at night, and I suppose we all read our newspapers and see businesses that get hacked. I think a couple of weekends ago a business had gone down I think it was MasterCard wasn't working and I was in the queue in the supermarket and I thought, oh my God, what's happened? That can happen to a business as big as that is that it can be brought down by a cyber attack or, and that can affect whether your business is successful or even survives or not. So it's a massive thing and also the individual responsibility for that. I mean. Our strategy is about teaching employees and teachable moments so that we're all educated as to how to react in those situations, because quite often it could be one person opening an email and putting in some credentials and exposing their whole business, and that's really really scary. You're only as strong as your weakest point, and so that's really our strategy is to take people on that journey with us and make them feel empowered and equipped and educated to be able to fend off those attacks.

Speaker 2: 9:26

I see that you have a passion for creating a great culture, and I love that. If you didn't, why are you doing your job In your experience? What are some of the key elements that make for a great company culture?

Speaker 3: 9:39

Yes, so I was thinking, obviously preparing for this, but I was thinking about good analogies, because I love it when people talk in analogies. To me there's paints or vivid picture, but I often compare a great culture to a garden, for example. So there's fertile soil and there's wonderful lots of different plants, varieties of plants, and I suppose, if the plants were our people, every plant has a different need. Some plants need to be in the sunshine, other plants need to be in the shade, some indoor plants, some outdoor plants, etc. So this garden needs to cater for all of these different types of plants and their needs and I think the soil is really the kind of culture that needs to be fertile. Ie, these plants absolutely thrive in that garden. From that soil they grow to the brightest colours and the tallest that they can grow and they live as long as possible. So that's really for me, what a culture is about is creating that really fertile environment. Now, I'm alluding there to, obviously, diversity and inclusion, to make sure that everybody's needs are dealt with, but I'm also alluding to people's just general needs. So a great culture for me is built off great feedback, and you need to build trust in an organisation to get really good feedback, because quite often people go I can't be bothered. Or if I give you feedback, I don't know what's going to happen to that feedback. Or last time I gave you feedback, nothing just went into a black hole and nobody did anything. So there's a really important element of building trust in an organisation. That's a really important part of the culture as well, because our strategy is based very much on you said, we did, and so people then feel, oh my God, I'm creating this culture. I gave my feedback and that feedback was listened to, and now they're doing the thing that I asked for, and so a great culture is also about everybody feeling part of that and feeling that they contribute, their voices are heard, and that gets people really excited, because then they start thinking about really great ideas. So it's then not just the people team coming up with everything, which is quite exhausting and we don't know everything. So we've created certainly Egress a culture of feedback, which people really love, and because they know we act on that feedback. That feedback is constantly flowing and forthcoming and our whole strategy is very much based on that.

Speaker 3: 12:28

Another thing I would say is that you need to be really intentional about your culture. If you just go back to the garden analogy, if you just let your garden grow, you might water it or whatever, but let's see what happens, of course you get a tangled mess. You get some plants that kind of wind their way around, other plants strangle them. Some plants die because they're in the wrong place and some parts really thrive, but it might not be the plants that you want to thrive more than anyone else. So I think you have to be really intentional and thoughtful about your culture.

Speaker 3: 13:07

One of the first things I did that the founders asked me to do when I joined Egress was to look at their values, because they felt their values were not reflective of who Egress had become. Basically and I spent a great deal of time talking to the founders because it's a founder-led business they were there at the beginning. Obviously, they will be there all the way through. They're a constant and they're very much looked to by the organization and the people in it, and so I basically built values off their own values, and they had a lot of values that were very much aligned, which was really helpful. So, being intentional, this is who we are and this is how we behave and this is how we expect you to behave. Those things are really, really important. And then there are common factors that people are expecting from a culture, and that is that they want to do really well. So this has got to be a culture where people thrive.

Speaker 3: 14:12

So you've got to really be explicit about the paths and the routes that people can take to be successful in your organization, and I found in my career that a lot of organizations don't do that. They talk about career development but they don't actually. It's a bit like saying I want, I'd love you, to get to where you want to. You're, you're in central London and you want to get to Oxford. Go for it. And you go.

Speaker 3: 14:40

Well, I don't really know how to get there. What do you do? Have a map or or just figure it out on my own? And if virtually every business I've ever worked in, they haven't been explicit about that. So I think employees really want the business to not just be intentional but very transparent. Transparency also breeds trust. So, yeah, we, we try and be as explicit and as transparent as possible, and that's about everything not just about the easy stuff, like you know your career, but also about the difficult stuff, like like pay rises and how do they work and what happens behind the scenes around that, and those are difficult topics, and quite often, businesses stray away from the tricky, difficult topics and they're shrouded, often in secrecy, and so, yeah, transparency is a really really key part of the culture as well, I think.

Speaker 2: 15:41

Your team kindly sent over a very long bio for you because you've done lots of cool stuff over the years ahead of the interview to help me with with my prep, help me with my homework. And one thing I learned is that you launched a four day work week initiative, but you quickly noticed some patchy delivery and customer support issues and so you conducted a post-bortem and you found that the inflexibility of the program was was negatively impacting certain days of the week. So you pivoted, you learned and you changed and you introduced a new concept to Agress known as eFlex. Tell us more about that.

Speaker 3: 16:23

Yes, it was a scary time and an exciting time. I think the four day week is I would equate it to a bit like a genie out of a bottle, and once the genie is out of the bottle, it's very hard to get the genie back in the bottle. So I think if you're going to trial something like that, you need to fail. If you fail, fail fast. If you succeed, fantastic, brilliant, good on you, well done. And you know, and I think a lot of people will be hugely respectful of that but if you don't, failing fast is really important in a situation like that. And I had a dark time.

Speaker 3: 17:04

I quite like I don't mind failure, I'm not particularly scared of it, to be honest, and but I certainly had a few sleep this night over things not perhaps going to plan, and I remember kind of just going back to that, that rule of feedback and looking at all the feedback that we had from people as we'd gone through the pilot and then looking at that feedback of fresh and going what can we do with that? And this different way of doing what we did, but in a different way, emerged from from the ashes really, and so basically, people had said some really interesting things during during the pilot, things that this is why I love what I do, because people never say what you think they're going to say. They always say so it really you could say here's a million pounds and they go oh, I did, I don't really, you know, I'd rather have that and shares, or you know so. So people always surprised me. But people were like, well, we might not like that day off that week, we might want a Monday, or we might want to do this on that day, or, and it maybe starts to think, okay, well, how about we just give you time and we'll break it up into small chunks and then you could do what you want with it, because we don't really, it doesn't really matter, you know what you do with it, but we can, we can break it up, and I think for me, our pilot was a bit like again another analogy of visual was a bit like a jingar, where we kind of pulled out lots of pieces in one place and, of course, what happens is it creates instability, and so the structure was kind of swaying from side to side, whereas if we took pieces out from all over the structure, it stays stable, doesn't it?

Speaker 3: 19:06

And that's exactly what E-Flex is. It's basically we give all of our employees 15 days in addition to the annual leave and we break it up into small chunks and bigger chunks. And the small chunks are two, one hours a week where you can use wherever you want. By the way, this isn't for doctor's appointments or life admin. That we have to do this is for you as an employee of Egress, so you could have a lie-in one day. You could finish early. Another day you could have too long lunch break so you could go and get your hair cut. You could do whatever you want with them, but they're very, very flexible in the week. So it's two, one hours a week and then we give everybody six half days to take whenever they want.

Speaker 3: 19:55

Again, people, what did I do? Our last time I used a half day flex was I went and had cream tea with a really good friend of mine. She traveled up from Brighton and we went and had a cream tea together. It's those kind of things where it was short notice. I didn't really want to use your holiday for all of these lovely little things, and so I used half a day flex and we had a wonderful time, and then I was back at work the next day, but you can also tack them on to holidays.

Speaker 3: 20:28

So, although we had kind of, it was a fine scrape to kind of come through the four-day week and, as I say, the genie, we had to come up with something and, as always, if it's based on feedback, you can't go wrong. You said that's what you wanted to do with your time, or we're gonna let you do that, and so it's been phenomenally successful. We did a survey, the Great Place to Work survey, in November last year. We had 300 people respond to that survey and half I would say good half of the comments at the end were about eFlex and how great it was and how helpful it was and how useful it was and what it's done as well is it's enabled us to attract really great talent. Maybe talent I don't know that we might not have been able to attract before, I don't know, but people really, really like eFlex and they can see it's a business where we're generous with time.

Speaker 3: 21:32

The other beautiful thing about eFlex is that time and productivity are not directly linked, actually, so up to a point anyway. So we all know people who work maybe four days a week and quite often they'll still do five days work in four days. It's a bit like when you go on holiday you do loads of work before you go on holiday and you do loads of work when you get back from holiday because you're kind of catching up on the time that you've had out. And so actually our business is, I'd say, more productive, more highly engaged, more motivated, more successful, with people doing 15 days less time. Not everybody takes every hour and everything that they get, but the beauty of it is that it doesn't make you less productive by giving people time back. It actually can make you more productive, and so for me, that's the beauty of it. Yeah, so very proud of that scheme.

Speaker 2: 22:40

Well, as you should be. Okay, just a few more questions for you for today. The next one I'm going to challenge you to answer in 90 seconds or less. What build do this to me? Well, I like to mix things up sometimes. You guys are in the tech industry, of course, and the tech industry has been facing a bit of a skills shortage for some time. Ai has come in and stepped in and replaced lots of rules, but in other rules, it's a struggle to fill them. What advice or insights can you offer to retract and retain top talent? In 90 seconds or less? Go.

Speaker 3: 23:16

Yeah, I mean, I don't think AI is there yet. I think we're on the precipice of it being there, but I don't think it's really in every business. Probably, I'd say, 20 or 30% of businesses may be around the world, but I would say that the trends are very similar to what they've always been is that people want great careers, they want flexibility and work-life balance and they want things like great benefits. I think fall further down the list, but they want a business to be ethical and they want a business to have great diversity and inclusion. They want to feel a sense of belonging when they join, and that has probably been the top three for really quite some time. So I tend not to get too drawn into the noise of AI. It's changing everything and people don't change quite as quickly as we think they do. And yeah, those are my three, I would say.

Speaker 2: 24:25

I'm gonna challenge you again 90 seconds or less. Well, what does the great places to work ranking so you guys sorry the contacts here, listeners is Egress has gone from 88th in the world to 50th in the great places to work rankings, which is extraordinary congratulations. What does that mean to you and what does that mean to Egress? And just generally, what does that say about the company as an employer?

Speaker 3: 24:50

Yes, I think I've always done engagement surveys in every role I've ever been in, but I've never done one with an external organisation and I think the beauty of it is it really holds your feet to the fire. You can't just go oh God, that was a bad survey. We'll go out with an email and then we'll cover it up and forget about that one and move on. It's out there in the world and actually, the bit of competition you wanna do really well. I think employees are really proud of what we've done and our new result comes out. It's for large companies, by the way, in the UK the results come out in March, the 14th, so we'll see where we've gone from 50th. We're hoping to do a lot better, because our survey was phenomenal this year, so, oh, sorry last year. So it really really means a lot to us for a lot of reasons, but I think our employees love it as well. We got a 95% response rate because people really do wanna feed into it. So, yeah, it holds us to account, which is really important.

Speaker 2: 25:55

Wonderful. And just finally for today, laura, how can our listeners connect with you? So maybe that's email, maybe LinkedIn I bet you're super cool in all over places like TikTok and, of course, how can they learn more about all the cool things happening over at egress?

Speaker 3: 26:11

So we have a great presence on LinkedIn. I keep my social media to myself. I think nobody needs to know about that. I hate TikTok personally because I'm self-diagnosed ADHD, and so it sends my brain to a frazzle, but LinkedIn would be a great place to connect with me if you'd like to. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 26:35

Excellent. Well, that just leads me to say for today, Laura, Thank you very much for being my guest on this episode of the HR Chat Show.

Speaker 3: 26:42

Wonderful. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, bill.

Speaker 2: 26:46

And listeners as always, until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1: 26:51

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HR Gazettecom.