ANZ HR gets agile, risk and finance could be next

600 more ANZ employees join bank’s ‘New Ways of Working’ transformation

The 600 employees in ANZ’s Talent & Culture division are moving to adopt agile ways of organising themselves as part of the bank’s ‘New Ways of Working’ (NWOW) transformation program.

The bank is looking at risk and finance as two groups that are candidates for transitioning to NWOW, according to ANZ’s general manager, group technology transformation, Robert Marchiori.

T&C is now organised into “squads” and “tribes”, Marchiori, yesterday told the Agile Australia conference in Sydney. Like the rest of ANZ, T&C is now significantly flatter, he said: “We were typically an organisation that was 10 or 11 layers now we’re closer to five or six from CEO to the most junior person.”

However, the move to NWOW won’t see T&C’s squads operate in an identical fashion to Agile teams in the bank’s technology division, Marchiori said. There’s a “whole kind of nuance” between “New Ways of Working and Agile, and small ‘A’ agile and capital ‘A’ Agile,” he told the conference.

“The methodology that they use underneath... they’re not going to be necessarily doing Scrum or Lean per se,” he said. “They also have operational functions, which are in squads but they’re using obviously more Lean than Agile, because they’re based on queues and things like that.”

“I think there has very much been a real emphasis on doing what works,” said ANZ tribe coach Jen Brice. “It’s the idea that we have that NWOW is about a set of principles and it’s about living out those principles, and I think that’s something that the T&C guys are living with.”

T&C made the NWOW shift a few weeks ago, Marchiori said. “We really felt it was important that our enablement functions go on the journey next,” he said.

T&C is “in the midst of change, probably our biggest change to date,” ANZ group executive talent and culture Kathryn van der Merwe wrote late last month in a LinkedIn post.

“So far we’ve tossed out the book on ANZ’s dress code, we’ve been supporting ANZ’s shift to new ways of working, we’re supporting our leaders to grow and thrive by introducing new ways to lead programs, and we’re making sure our people have access to the latest and greatest digital learning platforms,” the HR leader wrote. “And, really, that’s just the beginning.

“We’ve radically redesigned the way we’re structured. We’re using Agile practices to deliver more value for our employees more quickly.”

Marchiori also told Agile Australia that the bank was looking at the OKR framework to help provide a greater level of direction for squads.

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