In conversation with Alex Baldock, CEO of Currys

Teresa Owusu Adjei:

Welcome to the latest episode of our Business in Focus Podcast. I am Teresa Owusu Adjei, and I am your host for today. With the release of our 25th annual CEO Survey, we're looking at what business leaders are focusing on with the road ahead. How has the trends of the pandemic shifted their parties, and how's it creating new momentum around their organisation's purpose and goals. I am delighted to be joined in the studio by Alex Baldock CEO of Currys PLC and Kevin Ellis, our Chairman and senior partner at PwC. Alex, do you want to just tell everybody a little bit about yourself?

Alex Baldock:

Yeah, hi Teresa and hi, Kevin, how you doing? I am Alex Baldock. I run Currys. Currys is the UK’s and the Nordic’s largest retailer of technology. We provide technology products and services, and we exist, if you like, to help everyone enjoy the benefits of amazing technology. My 35,000 colleagues and I have been devoted to that, particularly during this pandemic, which no doubt we can get on to and many people have discovered the joys of tech and how it can enrich their lives in so many important ways.

Teresa:

Absolutely thanks Alex, and Kevin?

Kevin Ellis:

Yeah, thanks very much Teresa, and good afternoon Alex as well. I am chairman and senior partner of PwC in the UK and the Middle East, professional services firm, employing 25,000 people. Our DNA really comes from the audit practice, but now we work on supporting clients in all areas. What we are seeing at the moment is this technology explosion, the digitisation that is going on is changing everyone's lives, it's changing our clients’ lives. Then when you add that to the complexity of the supply chain challenges, and ESG, and of course the pandemic, we are seeing huge client demand. Probably, a level that I've probably never seen in my lifetime, as everyone looks to transform, modernise and deal with supply chain challenges, at the same time as protecting their reputation on which effectively all their brand value is built, which I'm sure we'll get into in the later conversation.

Teresa:

Definitely and already from the intros, there's quite a bit of alignment there between what you both said. I just want to start really by setting the context for everybody, which I said is our 25th annual CEO Survey and the theme this year is no turning back, UK CEOs are approaching a purpose tipping point. That really reflects the fact that our surveys revealed a growing trend towards more purposeful business practices, including a greater focus on trust, transparency, and personal accountability from CEOs like you, Alex, on issues that Kevin has already picked up on, such as climate change and inequality. But just thinking back over the last couple of years, Alex, if I can start with you, how much of this sentiment that's come through from our survey do you think is as a result of the disruption over the last couple of years?

Alex:

It's certainly been accelerated by it, but it also predates it. Now that we live in so much more connected and transparent world, when consumers are informed so much better about the organisations that provide for them, they are accordingly more exacting about the standards they expect. The whole series of pressures, I suppose, stemming from this greater connectedness and transparency, and what you might call a decline in unquestioning trust, that is sharper, and sometimes harsher spotlight on organisations, and organisations have had to learn how to respond.

Teresa:

Thanks Alex, and just thinking about that and some of the communications that you put out, both externally and within PwC, Kevin, a lot of that resonates for me, just wanted to get your reflections on that too.

Kevin:

Alex rightly says, it does make you more uncomfortable because the light is shone very firmly on both what behaviours and what CEOs do as well as what they say. With social media, with the constant relentless social media interest in high profile individuals and companies and brands, then you can't just say something and expect everyone just to believe it, they'll watch all the actions and sit behind that. In a way the pandemic pulled that into sharper focus for all of us. Partly, driven by the uncertainty and fear at the start, which you really did feel both as an employer as well as being a citizen. Normally for a country like ours, to be focused on death rates and hospital rates every single night, when we look back 10 years from now, hopefully, and think, ‘wow, and what happened there?’

I remember at the time, we were just trying to get our heads around the technology challenge as well as the productivity challenge of moving at a time 22,000 people to work from home, having never done it before, when we had 10% of our workforce ever working from home before then. Then all of a sudden, you had to then follow that up with the communications to deal with the uncertainty and the fear that was taking over. We very deliberately, again going to the trust point realised quite quickly, we had to guarantee people's jobs, and basically say, ‘look there would’nt be redundancies, we wouldn’t use furlough, because we thought otherwise people currently we employ would immediately fear the worst and we could feel that as well from some of the staff surveys, the calls, the emails we were getting.

In addition to that, we already had 3000 job offers out there in the wider marketplace for the next cohort of school leavers, graduates and apprentices to come in. They were panicking as well as what would happen to their jobs at that point we were in March, no one really knew what was happening, the exam coming through, and so we guaranteed their jobs as well. Everyone is going to start on time, we're not going to change anything, which was a brave thing to do, but we just thought we had to somehow, for trust reason, reach through and provide certainty. Actually, it paid us back, because giving them certainty, certainly meant that we came through that first lockdown with much higher productivity levels. It's the right thing to do societally, but actually, it's the right thing to do economically, because unless we provide certainty people won't be productive, unless we provide certainty about job, people won't join us. Therefore, there is a line through from the communications to the societally right things to do from a trust point of view, but most importantly, we wouldn't be doing it unless it made business sense too.

It is interesting, when you read Larry Fink's letter last week, that whole point about stakeholder capitalism, you've got to anchor your moves and your strategy in the economic good of the business, as well as societal one; otherwise, it actually looks a bit empty. That was quite an interesting learning for me, if you like, in the eye of the storm in March 2020.

Teresa:

Kevin just listening to you, it just takes me back to those heady days, the stormy days of March 2020. Actually, some of the big questions that both partners and our people were asking of you and the board. If I reflect on what Kevin has just said, and Alex, I turn to you thinking of some of the big decisions that you had to make at that point in time, just how did the purpose that Currys has as an organisation, how did that really drive some of the decisions that you had to make?

Alex:

I am not sure we would have come through it without it. I'd be that stated, and we certainly wouldn't have come through it strongly as we've been fortunate enough to do. It was with our purpose in mind. You have to have a first line of the strategy, you have to have a guiding light for decision making. Here we are faced with this potentially existential crisis. Right there and then, we resolved not just to keep colleagues and customers safe, which obviously became every business's primary duty, but to keep helping customers. We believed in what we were doing, that technology was going to help people stay connected with loved ones during this extraordinary time, was going to help keep their families safe, fed, healthy, clean, entertained, it was going to help people work from home, it was going to help people home-school the kids. All the things that suddenly everyone had to adjust to doing during a lockdown, we saw a vital role for what we could provide as an online only business temporarily, and to keep the wheels of society moving at a time when everyone was stuck at home. This was both powerfully uplifting from purpose lens, but it was also a lifeline for the business commercially. This was how we could not only get through a pandemic commercially, but prosper commercially through it, and preserve the 35,000 livelihoods that depend on us.

To do that, it's amazing what you can do when you have to, isn't it, doubling the size of the online business in short order and innovating ways to use our store colleagues on video shopping services to help customers at home. Much as Kevin had to improvise a home way of working in very short order, one example from us. Our contact centres were deluged with calls by customers at the very time when we had to send all our contacts in to work at home and improvise a home working solution for them from scratch in less than 24 hours when we previously been told it was impossible in less than 3 months. All of these things came to a head literally in the same week, obviously it was a very testing time for many people, but in a strange way, it was quite an intoxicating one as well. Of course an uplifting one, when you saw how people came together in a crisis to help their colleagues and to continue to help millions of people.

Coming back to your original question, Teresa, for us a purpose isn't some statement pasted onto the wall, somewhere near the loos, which you might be able to remember half the words on a good day if you're lucky. It's not some abstract thing, it's not some separate thing, it's the heart of our strategy. This isn't just because we believe in being good citizens, we do believe in all of those things, but even if we didn't, it would still be the beating heart of our commercial agenda as well.

Kevin:

The point that Alex makes there is very interesting, the things that were meant to take three months when you have to do it, then you got to do in 24 hours. There are a lot of things changed at speed, because we had to and that in the past we never would, and that's a really interesting point Alex makes there. It's something that most CEOs would recognise that we changed a lot of things that won't change back now, they've moved forever. We would have taken years, probably moved things forward a long way because we had a need.

Alex:

Some of those things, Kevin, you kick yourself in retrospect, and how thick was I not to think of this before, it seems so blindingly obvious, with the benefit of hindsight. Just one example from our world, one of the things that customers come to our stores for, above all else, is the face to face advice from the expert colleagues. That's the enduring role of the store, has our expert colleagues at the heart of it. They've never been able to get that online, which for all its strengths, is one of the weaknesses of buying stuff online in our space anyway. We just looked at each other and thought, ‘well, we've got all these store colleagues, they can't work in stores, customers online need this help, let's just give it to them.’ Afterall, my 88-year-old dad has got used to VC technology during this pandemic, and he is not alone. This tech has just taken off as everyone gets used to zooming each other. Why don't we just use that, and shop live, are now central channelled in the business, our 24/7 video shopping service which lets customers from their own home speak to a colleague via video link. The colleague helps them make the right choices in what can be confusing as well as exciting category tech that we sell. This is a permanent feature of the business now, to Kevin's point that, what was an emergency innovation is now just part of the fabric.

Kevin:

Yeah, we've always had about 10% of our people work from home, and we would assume that was, with the next 5 or 10 years they would have gone to 20%. Now we're talking about hybrid working as a natural thing. We just didn't think we can make that work. We just had to, but not quite dramatically as you Alex, but things we had to do now work and they seem second nature. In March 2020, it seemed like a cliff edge. The other one was really easy for me as well was, how you tried to reach through, because we originally said, what I said earlier, jobs are safe, we weren’t going to furlough and all those things. I was told by my secretary at that time, no one believes you. They don't actually believe you. They believe you are going to make people redundant, but you're not going to say it today. We actually reached through by using the external media. I did an interview with Sky at lunchtime, and we did something in the Daily Mail as well as the FT to, if you like, wrap around the employees that worked for us, not just them directly through internal comms, but their moms and dads, their boyfriends and girlfriends, their children to say jobs are safe. Because once people read it in the newspaper or hear on Sky, they believe it more than they believe the internal comms surprisingly enough. That was the only way we could do it, but it is interesting how you used every single medium available to you in a crisis to get your messages out and try and change the way people are thinking about things.

Teresa:

Kevin, that actually brings me to, as you were both talking something I wanted to pick up on, when I think of what we say our purposes in PwC, that really during that the two years was the first time that I thought actually everybody can see is living on purpose. Alex, when I was thinking of what you were saying and just the way that you transformed and worked with your people, have you had that same experience, that you talked about being such a purposeful organisation, how is that now permeating through the rest of Currys through your employees?

Alex:

Well, in one sense, we had a bit of a head start on this because it was December 2018 when we launched the new strategy with the purpose, the first line of it. The first line of our purpose is we help everyone enjoy amazing technology. As I’ve said, this isn't something pasted on, this is something that we tried to make sure that every decision we make in the business, every business unit plan, every individual objectives, all of it stems from that. We've placed a lot of emphasis, particularly during the pandemic on storytelling here. We do well to get 35,000 people focused on that, because then we are all marching in the same direction and we're marching in the direction that's going to make the business money, unapologetically. This is about generating value for our shareholders, but is also about a bit more than that. I mentioned before, this is about trying to animate our people with a sense of social purpose, and during the pandemic this was particularly important. When I was out in distribution centres or in warehouses, and I am talking to colleagues who were concerned for their health, obviously, particularly during the early stages of the pandemic. We are talking to them about why we are asking them to leave their homes, why we are asking them to carry on coming to work, to keep delivering washing machines and installing fridge freezers, and cookers in customers’ homes. It’s so the pensioner doesn't have to have cold food. It's so the doctor can continue their practice and keep that practice going because without those laptops, they wouldn't have been able.

Being able to tell those stories to colleagues about, this is the impact you're having on millions of lives. Currys is fortunate, 25 pounds out of every 100 spent on technology in the UK is spent with us, we are the market leader, and we got 12 and a half million customers in the UK. We can have an impact, an outsized impact, and during the pandemic we could see it. We just got much better at connecting the work that all of our people do every day with the impact they have on millions of lives. We just started publishing internally on our internal social media, some of the emails and some of the comments that we're getting from customers, saying, ‘without you, I'd be sitting in the cold,’ ‘without you, I wouldn't be able to feed my family.’ ‘without you, my Brixton GP’s practice,’ for example, ‘would have folded by now.’ That gave people some extra sustenance and an extra spring in their step to keep going to work every day when they were frankly worried. Equally, it was also about the business. At the same time we are unapologetic about, this is how we secure this business's future, this is how we secure all of our livelihoods, this is how we make this a successful organisation and a place where you're going to want to make your career and you can advance your ambitions. The two went hand in hand as Kevin was talking about before as they have to, as profit and purpose have to, because profit is how we win the right with our owners to continue fulfilling our purpose and the two are sometimes talked about as if they're in opposition, and I would take issue with that.

Kevin:

I totally agree with that because sometimes it is easier for the narrative to be, business is all about profit, and actually missing the fact that without business there isn't aspiration created for employees through work and a feeling of wellbeing. There isn't the opportunity to change lives for the contribution that Currys has made for the Brixton GP practice, but also for everything else we do. Imagine, if you look at it, this is the 25th year we've done the CEO Survey. I am sure in the first 5 years or 10 years, you wouldn't have found the word purpose, because we were performing a different role then, but sometimes the narrative on business has not kept up with what business is contributing. For us, our business, our purpose is to build trust in society and solve important problems, that's at the heart of what we do, but it goes beyond just what we do for clients, a bit like Alex's role with his people and telling the stories.

One of the things we are really proud about is our role as a social mobility employer. As a big employer, we recruit 4000 people every year, and 1500 to 2000 of those are school leavers, apprentices and graduates. We monitor and know exactly how many of those people come from a challenged background, a less fortunate background, and we've been rated externally as the number one social mobility employer over a number of years. I always seem to hear the government talking about levelling up. They can create the environment, but the opportunity and aspiration for change is down to business. It's the jobs that get created in our businesses that not only give people the livelihoods, but also the opportunity and aspiration to move through our businesses to other careers. 4000 people leave us every year, having had that opportunity. We are like a social mobility escalator, and sometimes people are talking about business, it stops at the word profit, and doesn't go through. People are cynical about the word purpose. When Alex was talking there about it being the heard of our business, I know people were hearing that, some of them will be quite cynical, saying I don’t think that's true, until you get the storytelling, until you get Alex’s stories or my stories about social mobility, your stories about effectively keeping the lights on and keeping the food warm, only then I think, does it bring it to life. I am not sure that business still gets the credit for that. Really through the pandemic it should do. People still see business, as our CEO Survey would have seen it 20 years ago rather than today.

Teresa:

Just that point, actually, that's reflected in the factors as I was reading through the survey report, the fact that in terms of the way that CEOs are remunerated, I am sure if you were to go back to the first few surveys, you wouldn't have what we're seeing today, which is the non-financial aspects and being having to take into account maybe what we might call ESG type, aspects of CEOs or in PwC terms partners, in terms of what's expected of us as well. That picks up from that as well. I don't know whether there was anything you wanted to tell.

Kevin:

No, that’s right, but I think it again goes to I was talking about at the very start, as well as having the contribution that business makes, the social mobility spotlight on CEOs behaviour is greater, in fact the bar is even higher as well. So, not only is it there in the pay, but it is there in the reputation, which you should be, and we are not ducking out of that, but sometimes when things go wrong, it's assumed that that's what business does, it makes profit and whatever, and all the other things that seems still slightly cynically. The CEOs survey the fact that 75% and the CEO is so focused on trust. It reflects what we're seeing as CEOs, rather than possibly the external narrative.

Teresa:

Yeah.

Alex:

That's right, and maybe it goes back to some of the things we were talking about at the start about this more connected, transparent, less deferential, less trusting environment that we're in now, which is a more bracing environment for people like Kevin and I, mostly as I say in a healthy way. But just take a couple of examples amongst my colleagues. I get more questions now from starting graduates about the social purpose, and the responsibility, and the climate change credentials and the governance of our business than ever I would have done, even three or four years ago, certainly before that. When we do Q&As in the business now, again thanks to modern digital technology, everybody can ask me a question, and I'm on stage in front of 35,000 colleagues and the 7.5 ton truck driver based up in Middlesbrough, who in previous generations would never have come anywhere near the CEO, now has an opportunity to take me to task and does. As I say is not always a comfortable experience, but it's fundamentally a healthy one.

Now the one thing, just to build on what Kevin was saying a moment ago about the cynicism that’s out there towards businesses only care about profit, and in many ways, we in business have been pretty poor advocates for what we do. It starts with this concept of profit, which is not something to gloss over with a slightly shamed face while we get on and talk about all the good works that we do, it's at the heart of how we’d perform these roles in society. My industry, retail, contributes 17 billion pounds worth of tax every year, and it wouldn't be able to do that, it wouldn't be able to build all of those schools and hospitals and defend the country, and provide security for people, and pay for other people's furlough, and pay pensions and all of that, it wouldn't be able to do all of that, were it not for the fact that these businesses operated a profit, it wouldn't be able to sustain the 3 million jobs that retail sustain. Kevin talked about a social mobility escalator, I would argue a strong case for my industry, retail, as the most fundamental of those, is the largest private sector employer in the country. It's the best opportunity for entry level non-graduates to get on the career ladder and progress themselves and show what they can do, and given the chance at least to advance themselves into managerial careers if that's what they want to do.

It's a fantastic escalator of social mobility, but all of this only works if these are successful businesses, and I don't think we should skirt around that. We should be proud of the part the successful business plays in society, but more than that, even if we weren't fabulous corporate citizens, even if we weren't concerned citizens, even if Kevin and I weren't both proud fathers, and trying to be half decent husbands and do our bit for the planet and all the rest of it, if all we cared about was the sustainable commercial success of our organisations. Now in this environment, we would be in much the same place, because, after all, for us, public company, if you want to make public company worth more in corporate finance one o one, points you towards sustainable cash flows. Sustainable in the sense that investors have to believe those cash flows are going to keep coming, and who is going to believe that of a business now where the colleagues don’t want to work there, because they don’t think you are a responsible employer, where customers will no longer shop there, because they just don’t buy your environmental credentials, where government and regulators and investors are giving you poor marks on ESG and restricting your access to funding. If all you did was care about your commercial interest, you would still have a powerful incentive to behave as a good corporate citizen in this environment, and that's what people sometimes miss about business.

Kevin:

Yeah, you are right. If you're not a successful business, you can't make any investments, you can't pay the people, they can't pay their mortgages or their rentals, so two go hand in hand. Really good example that for me is social mobility. I can remember Ale, to your townhall example,being in a conversation with a group of partners, who said in a nice way, ‘why are we doing that? Why aren’t we just doing the recruitment from where we used to go and recruit? Why are we recruiting from a 100 different educational institutions, rather than just going to the reputed universities, which we probably did 20 years ago.’ I said, ‘well, it's actually hand in hand with the commerciality of the business, because the majority of the clients of this business, we have got 26,000 clients. The majority of those 26,000 clients are private businesses, quite often start-ups, quite often regional, and most definitely they only buy, not from the organisations with a brand, but from the individuals that have the same values or backgrounds as them.

If we only recruit and effectively develop talent from the small pool, we cannot sell in a big sea. The result really of the social mobility focus, which is the right thing to do societally, is absolutely critical commercially, for business like ours, and it's a bit like diversity and inclusion. It's not a nice to have, if you don't look and sound like the people that are going to buy from you, they won't trust you and therefore they won't buy from you, they buy from someone else, there are alternatives to go. Once you get your head around, in my townhalls, my people and my partner's head around, but this is an economic necessity as well as societal good they'll buy in and be proud and take part. You can't just tell them because it doesn't work anymore, you've got to engage with them, communicate, and effectively justify.

Teresa:

Just picking up on a theme that you've both, I'll use the phrase employee, maybe engagement employee activism and Alex, you mentioned the fact that you're accessible to all 35,000 of your people and anyone can ping either of you an email. When they ask you things around ESG, climate change, the commitments of Currys etc, how is what the direct line that you're getting through from your people, Alex, how was that then driving the conversation in the boardroom and how is it influencing some of the business decisions that you've made over the last couple of years and think you'll make over the next couple of years?

Alex:

In a couple of different ways, Teresa. First of all, you talked about employee engagement, just as a concept that's one of our big three KPIs, that's the start of it. Again, not just because we're nice guys, because in a business like ours, it's very hard for the experience of the customer to exceed that of the colleague. It might sound simplistic, but we believe that happy colleagues make for happy customers, make ultimately for happy shareholders. Unapologetically, we publish this externally as well as internally. Here are our colleague engagement scores, externally measured;, here are our customer satisfaction scores; as well as of course, the financial metrics. As the first point, is set out to have more engaged colleagues, set out publicly the scores that you're going to hold yourself to, get other people to measure them, so that the scores are trusted. Then, hold yourself to them and measure and manage the simple objective of having people who wants to turn up to work and who know what they're doing. We talked about capable and committed colleagues as being the first of our big three priorities that sit underneath our strategy, that's the first thing, but you'll get driving at something a bit more specific there.

Let me give a couple of examples of how we're thinking about that. We've got 35,000 colleagues, who are all citizens. They care about the environment just as everyone else does. If they didn't believe that we were serious about it, if they didn't believe that we were helping customers make greener choices, if they didn't believe that we weren't helping customers give longer life to the technology that they already have, as well as helping customers choose lots of shiny new technology, if they didn't believe that we were ourselves getting our own house in order and on the path towards net zero by 2040 and electric vehicles by 2030, all of the things that we're doing, then they would be less engaged or they would leave entirely. There's also, to give you finally just one other example of something that's not just been smiled on by colleagues, but has been generated by colleagues, and I mentioned this longer life thing, this isn't unique to us, plenty of people are asking themselves questions on do I really need all this new stuff, and what am I doing to the planet with my consumption, have we reached peak stuff in the consumer’s minds?

Obviously, that's particularly important for business like ours, whose commercial success is geared to selling laptops, and TVs and mobile phones and washing machines and fridge freezers and all rest. So, we've set our store at the demand of our colleagues to be every bit as famous for giving longer life to the technology customers already own as we are famous for selling them lots of shiny new kit. This is where a cynical eyebrow might be raised, that sounds all very nice, but that’s hardly in your commercial interest is it, how much should you be believed on that point? This is where we have to make it in our commercial interests, this is where I used the example of longer life to people's technology. We are number one, not just at selling stuff, but on trading in old laptops, selling protection products like warranty, and insurance, like number one on repair. We repair 2.5 million bits of kit a year. We account for more than half of all the UK’s electrical waste recycling. We have 11 million customers in our protection book and so on. These are very real lines of business for us. Once again, in trumpeting our credentials on giving tech longer life, we're not just making a boast off the side, it’s peripheral somehow from our commercial concerns. What we're doing is we're acting entirely in our commercial interests, and the more that we get famous, for giving tech longer life, the more customers are going to feel it's almost their moral responsibility to come in and shop at Currys rather than somewhere else, because we can help the planet while we're helping customers pockets. That's quite a compelling offer for customers and is also super engaging for colleagues.

Teresa:

Entirely makes sense, and Kevin, we have a very different business, so really same question to you as you're getting pinged by our people, which I know you do. How is that driving the conversation in terms of the average age of our people from memory is about 28, 29?

Kevin:

Yeah, one thing Alex says there, which I completely agree with is the point around non-financial metrics. We report on our engagement scores, we report our carbon footprint in a way, because definitely our people demand it off us, it goes beyond the town hall. Again, is also a business advantage for us as well, because the more they want non-financial metrics, the more they want people like us to report on them, to hold them accountable independent. It will be a business line for us in the long term, that’s your business as well as a societal point there as well. Again, the questions, I went up to COP 26, for a couple of days at Glasgow. We did a town hall from there, a virtual town hall, the Friday morning, and we had 9000 people online live at 9:30 on a Friday morning, which immediately tells you that the ESG agenda is very much our people's agenda, just like it is for Alex. If you're not on your people's agenda, they won't be your people for much longer. The other thing is that to achieve change people will need to make their commitments as what they're going to do, and we saw in the CEO Survey, 34% of the CEOs have now made commitments on their carbon footprint,. they'll be held accountable to them, that will be a source of income for us, it will be a journey they're on, but also that data itself will provide insights from which other people can make changes and adjust.

So, if we are going to make the difference to the planet as we need to do, the more data that's collected, the more insights as well as the more societal demand to live up to those standards, the better it will be for our children and the better it will be for the planet. Business again is at the heart of the change, the government can bring in the regulation, I'm sure they will, but the fact that the markets are moving ahead before you got regulation, you've already got 34% of the 4.5 thousand people in this survey moving ahead and making their commitments, tells you they're not going to wait for regulation, they're going to have to move, because like Alex and I, people that either buy from them or employed by them will demand it of them, which is a real positive.

Teresa:

I have got just one last question for you both, it's just listening to you both, I found it really inspiring actually, and especially just listening to the early part of the conversations, as we have talked about what the last couple of years been like, and the way in which path has this weaved through the decisions that you've both taken for your respective businesses. We're recording this just as everything is about to change again in terms of return to office, etc. When you both look forward over the next couple of years and using your crystal ball, what do you think might be the big challenges for you over the next two to three year period, and Alex can I come to you first?

Alex:

Well there's different ways to answer that, Teresa. You mentioned the return to work, let me start with that for those of our colleagues for whom that's an option. By the way, it's always important that a business like ours, like Currys, we can talk about hybrid working, the overwhelming majority of our 35,000 people don't have that option, because these are colleagues, who work in stores, who work in our repair labs, who work in our distribution centres or our fulfilment centres, and their jobs will look very much post-pandemic like they did pre-pandemic. Now, that said, we've got a bunch of white collar workers, perhaps more akin to those who find in your business, Kevin, whose working habits will fundamentally change. We talked about hybrid working as others do. It's simply that we want to hang on to the benefits that we've discovered during the pandemic, we want to hang on to the silver lining of this grim couple of years, but also get back to the best that we had previously. That means rediscovering the serendipity, and the coaching, and the collaboration, and the relationship building that is always best done face to face for as long as we remain human. But also hanging on to the reach, and the convenience, and the flexibility, and the balance that come with remote working. Doing it in a way that isn’t flexible and tests and learns are way to the right balance, doesn't seek to impose one size fits all solution, we're not saying work in the office on Tuesdays and go home on Fridays, but we are being a bit more flexible than that.

That's one challenge, to get that right, to hang on to the benefits of the pandemic, while also rediscovering what makes us human, which is the face-to-face that's in how we work in some parts of our business. But much more importantly than that is going back to what we exist for, which is to helping millions of people. The challenge for us is, can we complete this transformation of Currys that we set out on, that was initially given a bit of a bump by COVID, and then ultimately a bit of an accelerant by COVID, and can we transform this into a world class business that we've set out to build, can we help everyone enjoy amazing technology, can we help people not just choose, but afford and get started with, and give longer life to, and get the most out of the technology that has never been more central to their lives. That we've got a clear mission to do that, we've got a clear plan to do that, we're underway with it, we're pretty pleased with our progress, but we intend to see through and stay the course for that. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning, that's what gets my team out of bed in the morning knowing that, of course, we can build something to be proud of, and that's commercially successful, and that protects and extends livelihoods, but also something that can have a broader impact on millions of people, so we can feel good about what we do, because after all, we're a long time at work. That's our priority, and that's our purpose if you'd like, that's our mission and I am champing at the bit to get back to it.

Teresa:

Awesome, Kevin.

Kevin:

Yeah, I agree with Alex on the hybrid working. Yeah, I just think human contact is critical, it is hybrid, it's not working remotely, and our city centres need it. We are very keen on people bouncing back into the office on the number of days that suits them, but certainly for me it's a minimum of two or three. Otherwise, I think people will save their train fares and damage their careers. As a leader, we've got a responsibility to warn them of that, rather than finding out in three years’ time, that their careers have been blighted by not having the networks or the observation learning that is so critical, and then wondering why their careers stalled. I do think that’s a fairness point really, that is for a workforce like mine. The other thing is that we are at a really important turning point to the country. Probably the generation that lost out the most is probably the teenagers, under 25s, whose social lives were damaged, whose schooling was damaged, education was damaged, and human contact was damaged by the pandemic for good reason, but for them, they'll take a while to get back, but at the same time, they're going to be the generation that they're going to be drinking from a firehose in terms of work opportunities, because every CEO I speak to, and a bit like we are talking about in this conversation, we are going to need people, who achieve our growth ambition, and those very people are in that age group. Actually being positive about the opportunities, particularly for that generation that has lost out, and effectively being confident about the future for the country, which I think the CEO Survey does show through. I think it is really important, because we've got to have a positive story, because to get people leaping out of bed in the morning with postitives of their business and their opportunities, it is with the country, we are a little bit too obsessed on bad news at the moment. And for me, I think we're at a turning point on the back of a really tough few years that we've come through successfully as a country. We would focus on the positives and the opportunities particularly for the youth that lost out and I think we as business leaders have got a really bigger role to play in creating and driving for that narrative.

Teresa:

What a great way from both of you to end the conversations, that draws us to the close of another in conversation with episode in our Business in Focus podcast. Thank you so much, Alex and Kevin. That was really both insightful and inspiring. For our listeners, you can explore the CEO Survey findings in more detail, and of course, thank you to everyone for listening. Please don't forget to subscribe to keep up to date with future episodes. Thanks again and please do tune in again soon.

Kevin:

Thanks, Alex.

Alex:

Thanks, Kevin and Teresa, thank you very much, my pleasure.

Participants

• Teresa Owusu-Adjei
  
• Alex Baldock
  
• Kevin Ellis