Defining Best Practice, Mapping Capability, Developing People

AXA Wealth Management sought to develop their people in to ‘one of the most effective relationship sales forces in the country’. AXA had begun to develop a competency framework using spreadsheets. This had resulted in an immense administrative burden for sales management and a failure to inspire or motivate them to take an active lead in the new people development initiative.

AXA sought a consulting partner to provide ‘rigour and vision’ around the desired changes and to provide a web based system to alleviate the administrative burden and drive value from the competency frameworks.

Bigrock’s leading change consultants helped champion the new initiative, entitled Project Luxembourg, throughout AXA Wealth Management. Through workshops, interviews and discussions, we worked with AXA to identify best practice and build a clear map of what could be reasonably expected of each role. With the competency grid complete, we assigned development solutions from our extensive library and AXA’s own resources to each competency.

Employees, and their managers, then mapped their own capabilities against the frameworks. Employees were required to submit evidence for each capability on to the system or schedule an observation by a manager, before their achievement could be approved. The cloud based system, allowed employees to submit information and evidence anywhere, anytime, reducing the paper trail and the difficulties associated with managing sales people dispersed across the country. The software provided reminders for observations, 1:2:1 reviews and to revisit particular modules, ensuring the capability frameworks were used and remained relevant.

Bigrock showed the leadership team how to generate reports from the capability frameworks that would enable them to see, at a glance, the capabilities within AXA Wealth Management and what areas might require further development in order to complete a particular project.

AXA were delighted with the opportunities their engagement with Bigrock and the resultant capability management system brought.

Mark Steers, when leading the AXA Winthetur division, found that when the system was deployed to tackle poor record keeping and a high incidence of contested disciplinary action, it produced outstanding results. Using OX Core’s reporting, evidence and learning functionalities, Mark was able to swiftly manage people back to required performance standards or, if this was not possible, to manage them out of the organisation. Mark calculated that OX Core sped up this performance management process by 3-4 months per person, which resulted in a quantified annual bottom line profit increase of £1,050,000, in a 100 person division.

In the years that followed, the OX Core capability management systems were deployed across AXA Underwriting, AXA Surveyors, AXA HR and AXA Overseers.