Xledger: Creating a Cultural Compass with Mark Pullen and Ian Halliwell

Remote and hybrid working, the war on talent, sustainability and ESG... the last few years have thrown challenge after challenge at businesses. How do the best businesses thrive when faced with constantly changing circumstances?

A key attribute shared by many is the deliberate creation of a cultural compass – a shared vision and intrinsic values which give employees a sense of belonging and a united purpose. From finding a new home in the heart of the pandemic to winning Business Leader’s Employer of The Year award, Xledger have navigated the pandemic with a clear eye on the importance of community and workplace culture.

In this episode we’ll discuss what it takes to create a cultural compass that can help businesses steer through the most turbulent times.

Show Notes

Xledger UK 

Mark Pullen, CEO at Xledger on LinkedIn

Ian Halliwell, Sales & Marketing Director at Xledger on LinkedIn

Xledger’s new Bristol office

Thanks for listening! Check out Interaction's website for more workplace culture content and case studies (or just follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter).

Transcript

Mark Pullen: [00:00:00] Ultimately you're either the Mercedes on the inside lane of a motorway or as we like to be. Remember when you had your first car? Mine was a mini and you get as many mates in that as I possibly could. Go from Burscough to Hemel Hempstead to Visage in the outside lane as fast as this stupid little thing would go, which is about 40 miles an hour. We're going this way. We understand our objective and we're all going to do that together. So we want the guys that will pile into the mini and come on, let's go this way. 

Toby Brown: [00:00:37] Hi and welcome to Thrivalism I'm Toby, Head of Marketing at Interaction, and I'm here today with Mark and Ian from Xledger.

I guess it would be useful to get an overview of Xledger before we get into all the stuff I want to talk about, which is culture, people, how you've built the best place to work. Give us a brief overview of your roles there and your background. 

Ian Halliwell: [00:01:01]  We're obviously part of the Xledger Group. There are four key countries in that Norway, Sweden, USA and ourselves and don't forget the Finnish, the new the new Finnish guys that have joined just recently. We're expanding at a rapid rate. I joined the business just over two years ago, I think a month after Mark.  Business at that point was really in a stage of start up. We needed to take that business from start up to scale up. Both of us have previously run businesses, so we wanted to bring our experience into the business what's good, what's not so good, what mistakes we've made and grow the business forward from there.

Mark Pullen: We have a vision of growth to become, to coin a phrase of our illustrious leader, the dominant mid-market financial management tool. In order to do that, you need to be of a certain size to fund fairly hefty R&D. So we took the business over in 2019 and have quite aggressive but managed growth plans between now and 2025. We called it in our genius, the road to a billion, that is Norwegian kroner, not GBP. It's about £120 million, something like that. Over that five years now, we could probably grow faster. But this is our legacy business. This is the one that is the one we want to stay in our kids to work in and and to really continue so very much a focus on managed growth, not an army of sales people, which is fairly easy to do, creating a nice, healthy wake of chaos behind them .

We're doing this with a focus on the customer service. The quality. Retaining those customers for 7 to 10 years is our average. So super important to focus on the right people, building the right culture to facilitate that, which is the mission we're on between now and 2025. So it's a long way away.

Toby Brown: So talking about people and culture, you've won loads of awards recently, almost all of the awards. Best Place to work. Employer of the Year, Best Workplace for Wellbeing. Bristol Live. Best Place to Work Tech.

Ian Halliwell: The best place for women to work as well.

Toby Brown: Obviously that isn't a fluke or a coincidence. You must have had some very deliberate thoughts in how to create your culture and how to keep it going. But when you come in here and you walk around and talk to people, it doesn't feel forced or it doesn't feel cult like or inauthentic. So what are some of the things you've put in place? What were the first steps you took when you start to think about your culture? 

Mark Pullen: [00:03:58] Ironically, it was a fluke. I made the mistakes because you remember the mistakes that you made and ensure that you know the culture you need to build. You need people to want to build the business for you. You've got to empower the people. And I think you can't do that if you don't build the right culture. What you want them to come into the office, you want them to naturally lead and you've got to allow them to do that. And there's many different ways you can do that. But as you grow with that's very, very difficult, you create avoiding these layers of management of just there, as we say, to piss in the corners and actually trying to get to the next level they actually need to do actually deliver and make the business work.

Toby Brown: So what are some mistakes you've made in terms of culture building previously.

Mark Pullen: So you mentioned it wasn't a fluke. It probably was. Originally, we had when we first took it over, both Ian and I, we knew each other previously and we come from a rugby background. So there is a certain type, you know, a rugger bugger, as they call them. But there's very much focus on ethics, cultural compass, things of that nature. It's all sounds very airy fairy. So we didn't really know how to translate that this time. 

We knew what we weren't going to do, didn't we? But and that premised on the mistake

Toby Brown: and is that when you say knew what you weren't going to do, that's create  a homogenous like what? we weren't going to do was more around the

Mark Pullen: We get told off for this, but we kind of have a "no dick" rule which makes it sound like we don't employ men. But it's not that's not the case. It means, you know, we used to get very basic analogies, but, you know, we used to get invited out for dinners with your own sort of staff. My previous companies have 4,000 people in it. And, you know, the admins that were looking after that process were very focussed on who do you not want to sit next to? And there was a long list. The design for this one was Don't care. We have to recruit people that we really want to spend time with that are thoroughly committed through being themselves to our mission and our design and what we wanted to do. We also then benchmarked that. So you mentioned the awards that was in a winning those are actually a by-product of a process. So we knew what we thought good looks like. But why not go out to these sorts of organisations who are impartial and have what we deemed as the best practise way of measuring and awarding companies that are dear and can conform to those sorts of guidelines. 

So the first time we did it was, was purely to understand the guidelines where our strengths, where are our weaknesses, what have we got and what are we going to improve on? And then came second in the whole country. So we figured that was like a honeymoon period because everyone was new and shiny and untainted. But that became the premise of saying, okay, these are the core areas. Things like mental wellbeing was super honed through COVID and so on. So we, we built these pillars around which we would measure ourselves and that fed back into recruitment. So the way we've done it is more that we know that we're going to fill this full of anecdotes, by the way, is put that fence at the top of the cliff rather than an ambulance at the bottom, isn't it? Instead of just hiring based on capability alone and willingness and availability to do the job, we were very focussed on 70% of that decision being cultural fit and the interview process is quite interesting to get to the real person, not the interview 101 formal version. It's quite obscure you're doing the interview to we had a cracking one actually where I did so we did some it sounds a bit stalker ish, but we tend to find out a few interesting things. 

 And I tend not to ask too many questions if they're in our panel interview at the end somebody else smarter than Ian and I has figured out they can do the job. It's for us to judge if they're going to fit in and augment the culture, not just, you know, upset it. And we had found a video from years ago where she had won Deal or no Deal. And the last thing where you got these two boxes on you and you've got there's £250,000 in one and five quid in the other or something. So they made an offer over like £60,000. And our our question was, how did you explain the bravery that it took to to make that decision  to risk such a huge amount of money? £60,000, I think she was 20 years old, 21 years old at the time of sort of being a contestant. And the conversation changed. And what we try and do in all of those interviews is find something that somebody talks passionately about. If they don't change from all the formality of an interview to when they're talking about their kids or or passions of cycling or whatever it might be, then they're not so much for us. We want to see that real individual because that's the person you're hiring. That's what you're going to get on an ongoing basis.

Everyone behaves themselves through probation periods and and all the rest of it. We need people to genuinely, you know, get on board, understand our vision, share our passion because we don't bark orders here. Everyone is autonomous. Everyone knows what they've got to do. Our job is to provide an environment and a leadership that's decisive but open and transparent. And we're quite good at talking about our mistakes, aren't we?

Ian Halliwell: And I think that's really important that that recruitment process from from day one, for us, it's what's helped drive that culture. We are involved in every single every single interview. And, you know, whether they're anywhere in our department or wherever to look at that person as an individual. We also invite other people into those interviews who are there to meet and greet this. Do they fit in the team? Will they disrupt the team? It's not just about capability, but we also make sure there's always females in the interview process. So we get two aspects. They see a very different person to the male. It's it's fact.

Toby Brown: If you go into those interviews and you're in there and someone else from the team in there and they disagree with you on your verdict on the person, who gets the final say?

Mark Pullen: it's a hell yes or it's a no. And that's got to be a communal yes. Now that that's awkward, isn't it? Because there might be something we've not seen. So sometimes that manifests itself with a let's understand why. What were the reservations? If it's cultural, it's a simple, it's just a straight no. But the beauty of that is we've recruited all similar personalities and very diverse backgrounds and different experiences, but they have the same shared beliefs, an ethical structure and so on. So that's not often somebody they don't get to that point. The first two interviews about culture, you know, then there's a capability type one and then it's final panel. So normally specifics around non response to questions, whatever it might be. So we'll propose a follow up call if that's if some people are on the fence about it. But at the end of that process, if it's not right, it's not right.

Ian Halliwell: I don't think anyone you know, no one carries any more weight than the others. Everyone will argue either way. To discuss the ways you basically. Yeah, that's right. That sounds quite dramatic, of course, but I think that's the key thing. Again, goes back to what I said. It's empowering the business. You're empowering the people to make decisions. They feel they're part of the recruitment process as well. And that's really key because they are the ones that they are the custodians of the culture. 

Toby Brown: So it sounds like you've managed to create a real alignment between your organisational culture and your vision for the business. And those two things mesh really well. That's quite difficult to do. Not many companies manage that. So although you've covered it a bit, how do you approach getting everyone on board with the shared vision for the company, but also having their autonomy and their freedom and the ability to manage their own day.

Mark Pullen: So two key things. One is the style with which we do that. So I'm going to tell another story, but what we use is another sort of anecdote for how we how we describe this is there are businesses in our position, software companies, you get lots of VC money and not that we've used our own, which makes us a little bit more frugal. But ultimately, you're either the Mercedes on the inside lane of a motorway or as we like to be. Remember when you had your first car? Mine was a mini and you get as many mates in that as I possibly could. Go from Burscough to Hemel Hempstead to Visage in the outside lane as fast as their stupid little thing would go, which is about 40 miles an hour. We go in this way. We understand their objective and we're all going to do that together. So we want the guys that will pile into the mini and come on, let's go this way. What happens in reality is you have to have a level of transparency to that. So we have a thorough process twice a year that starts at global level. So we sit on the global board, we look at the objectives of the business. They tend to be monetary. You know, you're looking at what are the KPIs and the targets by which we measure our spend and ROI. So pretty fundamental we then build in and I build out to UK version. What are the UK going to achieve this year or this half year? We then work with every manager and then every employee. So by the end of that process, every employee has a set of objectives that they can see exactly how that fits into their teams, their departments, the UK and globally. Those objectives. We don't actually give them any monetary targets. Obviously we do the sales guys, they're simpler sales. They need that sort of monetary and it's attached to a commission programme, so you need that there. 

But for everybody else, including them, to be fair, there's far more of a if we do these things, if you select great customers, if you do fantastic marketing, if you're authentic with your corporate social responsibility, if you treat your people well, if we hire effectively, if we don't set crazy utilisation targets for consultants, you know, ours is 60%, not %110.

If you do all of those things and provide an environment where people are happy, they feel safe, it provides balance to work life. The by-product is is you grow the business and the revenue comes from that activity first. We're quite good at sticking with that and prioritising our ethical standpoint of treating people really, really well, all the other stuff tends to happen.

Toby Brown: So that's really interesting because when you when talks about those targets layering down through the business and then laying out to the global one, I thought they would all be revenue based and target based, but in fact, they end up in very different areas completely ethics and social and culture.  That's really interesting perspective. I don't hear that much. And one thing we haven't mentioned is sort of values and those sort of things which often come up in chats like this. Have you got company values?

Mark Pullen: [00:14:29] Oh, yes, we do. They're written on the wall somewhere. So I think it's a really good question because we spend a long time sort of defining them as as companies do and trying to steer away from what's the output of that. People tend to do that from a perspective of winning business or communicating an identity outwardly. We started with who are we and what should we do in everyday life as opposed to just in work? And then you marry those values to actual character traits. So for example, a maze is one of those. Don't be boring, don't be mediocre, go and do something amazing. It sounds corny, but it's pretty easy then to go. That's not only amazing that we've got do good, which we live and breathe. You know, we do a huge amount with charity, which we all thoroughly enjoy and we tend to pick things in arenas such as sport, a lot to do with youth, foundational work with disadvantaged kids, things like that. But people are crazy passionate about that here, so they're not trying to live up to a value. They are that value. You just do it. We've got win win. That's an ethic which is just. Be fair. You know, we build coming back to the quality and the managed growth of a business if you're chasing the coin. If we're getting Jerry Maguire. Yeah, show me the money. 

I'm not concerned about that statement, but the win win is looking for fair outcome. Even if things don't go exactly as you want, what's fair? Not always focusing on the monetary gain. Passion is something that we have an abundance of but can. Not like bringing a puppy dog into the office that's passionately running around the place humping everybody's legs. They do. It's a controlled. It's a focussed passion. That means that people genuinely enjoy what they do. If you go out and talk to anyone here, you get the same feeling. There's no judgement, there's no friction. Everyone's doing their thing. Everyone's extraordinarily capable, but they're passionate about the bit that they do. The point of joining up those objectives and sharing that across every member of staff and every team and every manager, we do that. We took them into the wilderness, didn't we? We Bear Grylls last time and did a whole core team building activity, but it's all about me being courteous to you. I'm passionate about my bit, but not to the detriment of what you're trying to achieve in your area of the business. Everyone knows everyone is intrinsically linked. Their success is based on each other, just being passionate and amazing at what they do. That's what works for us. So those values, they are written up on a wall, but we need those reflected in character traits. Then it's your core value, not something we adhere to as a company.

Ian Halliwell: So yeah, and I think it is intrinsic and it's intrinsic to the brand Xledger. You have to have people have to believe in those values. And I go taking a step back two years ago, one of the things that Xledger didn't actually have is an identity. People came to work and it was just coming to work. There was what was Xledger to them. It was just a job and you've got to make that much bigger. That's why we did why we create an identity through working with Bristol Sport. There are various elements to that. There's yes, there's a commercial branding exercise, but there's also the community side of it, which is very important to us and very important to all of them. There's getting involved with the Bears women, which are where 54% is it now 54, we are outnumbered 54% women, 54% white, which is really unusual in our industry. It's about 13% normally. So it's it's about having those values underpin the identity of the business. And they need to be proud of that. They need to be proud when they say Xledger. I really am proud to work in that business because it delivers on all those aspects, not just the outwardly bringing in a new customer, but the actual intrinsic part of the business. 

Toby Brown: And an additional layer to that is how you look after your staff. What are some of the things you do to ensure your staff are looked after? And I think it'd be interesting to hear what other people should copy from you.
 

Mark Pullen: Empower them through enablement. We send alcohol all the time at home didn't we. We had to adapt very quickly as did everyone else and we wanted to do our own version of events and retain an element of control. So when that first lockdown happened back in March, wasn't it 2020, we'd actually sent everyone home a week before just to say, if you got the set up at home, have you got the kit you need? Let's send screens and laptops and make sure that you're comfortably set up and prepared. And if you're not, you've still got a week before those things aren't options. We also did an audit of everyone's work at home conditions. Everyone's pandemic was different, everyone's lockdown was different. I remember thinking, This is brilliant as I sat in my garden with a bit of sun, you know, watching the puppy run around and all that sort of thing. Some people have a puppy group, everyone had a different version. 

We switched on a very keen focus on mental wellbeing and aligned our HR to looking at how do we maintain the things that we think we're going to lose. So those human interactions we're going to lose fear factor that safety is suddenly lost the unknowing once we've got through this fun part of it's new, none of which was particularly fun, but it was novel. What are we going to do to keep people engaged? True to style we put a huge effort in and it's amazing. The output is somebody receives a home marshmallow, champagne flavoured toasting kit. The effort that's gone into trying to be creative about what do we do and how do we formulate interaction from that to keep people connected, to keep people sane, to have the opportunity to see that everyone's fit and well without being formal about it. We did wine tastings. We had this brilliant lady who was a sommelier. She chose us some wine. We sent that to everybody's home. We all we had about 50 people, didn't we. All of them from work. Gradually getting merrily pissed on their Zoom. And that worked, but it stuck with our cultural compass. We said, we people look at you as the leaders of a business to have all the answers. And although we don't normally we definitely didn't in that period because we were sort of we were in the unknown. 

[00:20:51] There's no precedent. There's no data that tells us what to do or how to deal with this. So we kind of just stuck with our version of things. What feels right? What would you want to have happen to you genuinely having an empathy for everybody's individual circumstance and focussing on it and then making sure that we kept a level of engagement. The effort was was huge but massively worth it. We actually recruited 25. We doubled the size of the headcount in the first year of pandemic. We doubled the size of it again and everyone still fits within what we wanted.

Ian Halliwell: That was a tough time. There's a lot of learning from that and we now take a lot of what we did then and continue to do that. You create FOMO by doing that and people want to be back in the office. So we're consistently doing that, but we're doing it here now.

Toby Brown: That's what I wanted to come into, because obviously people are really struggling to keep a cohesive culture when some people are at home and some people aren't, and they're trying to figure out how that works. So what do you do now? That's all settled down a bit to keep your culture together.

Mark Pullen: Yeah, well, first of all, we, we put the fence at the top, didn't we? We hired people that were had a desire to interact with other human beings that didn't go away, that did change. We all got a bit lazier didn't we, in terms of our. Do I want to bother to travel to London? God, no, not through laziness, actually. That's unfair to say more just through inconvenience and productivity is way better. 

But we looked at we changed the design of the office part way through. We were fortuitous enough to be to be building that from scratch. So we tweaked, we thought about what what are we going to need when people come back from from this pandemic. And it was a hub, wasn't it? And we came up with this or even came up with this concept that was, you've got to collaborate. The problem solving and the momentum were the things that were lost, the inconvenience of having to schedule a FaceTime call or whatever it might be to those coffee conversations that everything happens instantly. We've packed the office full of booze pub, you know, we've got a couple of bars, shuffleboard, tables, table tennis, all of that, loads of cool areas to interact. We offset our carbon footprint by putting 250 real plants in. We created an environment where everyone wants to be. 

We wanted people to choose to come back. To this day we've never had to tell anyone. We're doing a hybrid. We're doing a three and two. We're doing a one on four, whatever it might be. On the day that we came back just recently with the Monday where we could all 100% of everyone came in. We have about 90% of people in all the time now. Productivity, however, in some areas was massively improved, so most of them do a day a week at home. But you see that productivity, you see the benefit of it. They don't do Mondays and Fridays. You know, there's none of those patterns that as a business leader, you might question the sort of motivation behind it.

Toby Brown: You've sort of ended up organically where I think a lot of businesses will settle over the next couple of years anyway. And obviously it's been thought put into that at the beginning, but you haven't really forced it. You just allowed people to create.

Mark Pullen: That was the design. What can we do so that we don't have to force it because you can't.

Ian Halliwell: And it is organic and as I say, you then end up in this position where it's FOMO. I want to be in I want to be in the hub or the hub really. It's a place to come and work, but also to to socialise and engage. And, you know, people are great friends as well. There are people that socialise outside of work. There's a lot of people that joined, as we said, in COVID, that had no idea that people have met each other for the first time, you know, at the end of last year. So it's fascinating to watch. It's great, actually.


Toby Brown: Do you think what what employees need has changed over COVID or stuff just got more focussed or is it still roughly the same basic human things they needed before?

Mark Pullen: Yeah, it's the same. The working behaviours have changed because you get used to a different working pattern, don't you. And you know there's been a boom in dog ownership, you know, so there's the COVID pets or whatever you want to call it, because people that was the reason to get out, wasn't it? We were quite stifled in our ability to go and exercise and and get outside. So there was a lot of people now able to do that, whereas working lives didn't facilitate pets and that sort of thing. What you've got to do is embrace that as a work life balance. So they bring the dogs in here.  I mean, it's bedlam sometimes, especially with your 17 stone behemoth of a bear and a couple of dogs have peed on a few people, which is always a bit awkward. But you provide the same working environment. So where is the advantage to staying at home? Within the design of the office here, we've got big open spaces. It's open plan, but we have built booths aptly named after the various nightclubs of Bristol. So even through COVID, we were still in the Thekla, weren't we? But you provide the facility and the equipment and the the ease of which you can do it. We paid for everyone's parking. We took a subscription out of the NCP over the road so that they could conveniently travel in without using public transport, which was part of not wanting to spread COVID. We actually through COVID had our own licenced COVID testing centre, our training room. We turned into that so everyone could get tested here as we've moved back out of that. It's not back to business as usual, but it feels like we're keeping and maintaining the good bits of what we were forced to learn through COVID. But we're back to the it's a lot easier to have fun, it's a lot easier to problem solve and a meeting and seeing people that you actually enjoy being around. One of the common things they will talk about is everyone's capability is so high and their ability to impart knowledge. 

We've had to do this because there aren't many people that have been here even a year. You know, we'd doubled twice and that's a lot of new people. If you're trying to learn a complex product in finance management, you need proximity to the person who knows what they're doing. So they feel that obligation. I know what our mission is. I'm on that. I need to do my part. I need to be up to speed this month. So I'm going to go and sit next to Mike because he's going to enable me and help me do that. I can't do that from home as well. Equally, it's about being mature and treating them as grown ups, you know, you understand the mission. You know what your part of that objective is, how you go about achieving that. We trust you, you know, you figure that out, you know, whatever works for you, if it affects other people and their ability to do it, your work, then, then we might intervene. But ultimately they all know what they're doing.

Toby Brown: If there are similar companies in a similar area listening that could steal or should steal one thing from how you've created your culture, what's the most important thing each for you that other companies should be doing?

I think personally for me, transparency coupled with honesty, I know that's two things, but we're really transparent here. But being really transparent, this is what we're doing. Why are we going to do it? And then sharing the results of that constantly with nothing to hide. We're not doing very well at this bit and what you find is loads of people get on board that area of focus. We'll help. We reckon we can do something to help our colleague and our buddy. And it all comes from that, that transparency that starts at the top, but ultimately they demand that of us. Now, what's going on? What are we doing next? Where is the product going? What customers are we winning? Why are we winning so many, you know, and all those kinds of things so that real honesty and transparency works for us. What would you what would you say?

Ian Halliwell: I would say, going back to the cliché, but empowerment. Oh, we haven't had that one yet. You know, empower your people, let them take over and drive it. But you've got to trust them. It's trust, isn't it? We've talked about that. So empowerment and trust. I don't even know if that tells anyone anything.

Mark Pullen:  Empower the people. How do you do that? 

Ian Halliwell: [00:29:27] I want you to figure it out as well. 

Mark Pullen: [00:29:29] Bicker in the background. 

Ian Halliwell: [00:29:31] Exactly. 

Dieter Wood: [00:29:31]I hope you enjoyed that. And if you did, please give us a good rating on your platform of choice and be sure to subscribe to future episodes. And why are you doing that? Why not follow Interaction on all the usual socials? Thanks and see you on the next episode.