Leadership Stories Unveiled: Angela Underwood
We sat down with Angela Underwood, HR Director at Bestway Wholesale, for the latest instalment of our Leadership Stories Unveiled series.
Angela, you’ve had an impressive HR career leading up to your current role at Bestway Wholesale. Can you share your journey in HR, what initially drew you to this field, and some of the key milestones that have shaped your approach to HR leadership?
I was drawn into HR as a student working in one of the ‘Big Four’ supermarkets during university holidays by the HR Manager who took the time to ask me what I wanted to do after graduating. Through those conversations she connected the things that were important to me with a career in HR.
I applied for the HR Graduate programme and embarked on a career that so far has given me amazing opportunities to learn, grow and deliver people step change. I’ve been lucky to work for businesses that embrace the People Team as core to the business and I’ve never been limited to my HR corner.
HR is in a unique position in a business, you have insight into all operating levels from front line customer facing roles to future strategy development. I’ve found you can add value all round whilst at the same time being in the privileged position to be able to think outside the box to develop a People agenda and plan that ensures we focus on what matters most to our colleagues and the business in the operating context you find yourself in.
Big milestones for me were moving from Supermarkets into Distribution learning that while the core skills of HR remain your operating context changes your approach on delivery. Working in a Corporate Head Office helped me to understand the importance of having a business vision that continuously takes you forward. Being clear on the value add to the bottom-line HR can directly make through an effective people strategy and getting on the front foot with clear foresight about where you can make a difference.
Having undertaken roles where I lived in another country with a very different culture, and one particular role where I was constantly travelling around the globe operating in numerous cultures were key milestones. This really shaped my leadership approach of listen and understand first from the personal, cultural, and business context of where you find yourself as a HR professional. Once you have that insight then guide, challenge, innovate and deliver in that context using your HR experience. If you listen first, you will always learn, and this creates knowledge and experience which you draw on from every interaction whether it be one to one or when building plans that drive business success.
I’ve seen experience under-rated in some organisations and teams I’ve worked in, but for me when this is drawn from and applied in the right way, it equals effective delivery for customers and results in business success. We have a responsibility as HR leaders to ensure we create ways our colleagues can gain meaningful broad experiences as they grow their own careers.
From my early days at Bestway I have seen how the founders of our business, and our leaders today very much seek out people with solid experience and completely value that and I’m sure that is a key part of why we have been and continue to be so successful and resilient when market conditions are tough.
The company has made significant strides in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. Could you discuss some specific initiatives that have been particularly impactful, and how you measure their success?
We have a long history as a business of diversity and providing an opportunity for people to progress to the highest level regardless of race and educational background. However, we have sort over the last couple of years to build on that further by creating a broader diversity and inclusion agenda.
Our Cash and Carry depots are where we started out and are at the core of our business, our talent development programme for that team identifies, trains, and develops our future leaders in both leadership and operating skills. We have increased all aspects of diversity on that programme, including the number of female leaders significantly. Our goal is to have at least equal numbers on gender on that programme in a Wholesale industry that has been traditionally male dominated, and I am pleased to say that after making significant improvements over the last couple of years, this year we will achieve that.
We have set up a Diversity and Inclusion Committee of volunteer colleagues at all levels of the business who together highlight our opportunities to improve and are creating a plan for further change and like many other businesses we celebrate diversity through various inclusion events which we run regularly across all our various teams, creating a spotlight to help improve understanding and celebrating the diversity of our teams.
Employee engagement is critical for business success. How does Bestway Wholesale ensure that its workforce remains motivated and connected, especially in such a large and diverse organisation?
Yes, absolutely colleague engagement is critical to success, a key part of our People Plan and focus for the year ahead is our Colleague Engagement Plan.
As well as running a colleague survey we also have a feedback route called ‘Ask Dawood’ where colleagues can directly contact our Managing Director to share feedback, ideas and connect.
We have run some pilots on our new ‘Let’s talk’ sessions which are jointly led by the HR team and the team managers which are open forums for feedback where people have opportunity to share detailed thoughts and feelings about what it feels like to work at Bestway, what’s good and what we can do better at a practical everyday level. The feedback from the pilots was so overwhelmingly positive we are rolling ‘Let’s talk ‘ out across the business with real focus on improving our colleague experience.
By focusing on engagement at a local team level and listening and acting directly with teams about what really matters to them you can drive improvement regardless of the size and scale of the business, the big themes we spot we take through to our business wide people plan to drive a better colleague experience everywhere.
Bestway Wholesale has received various accolades over the years. Which awards or recognitions are you most proud of, and what do they signify about the company’s direction and values?
We have a strong connection and history with Grocery Aid and we are always proud to be the recipient of the Gold Award. Grocery Aid is really valuable for our colleagues in the support it provides to them. This year at the GG2 Leadership and Diversity Awards we won Diverse Employer of the Year Award.
Over the last few years, we have won a number of FWD depot manager awards reflecting the talent, dedication and incredible hard work of our senior team who lead these regional hubs for us.
I am super proud our business was recognised for our history of growing our own talent from people of all backgrounds and the work we are doing to take our Diversity and Inclusion agenda to the next level embracing a future where we actively seek out ways to drive equality and embrace what diversity really means today.
As we look to the future, what do you believe will be the most significant changes or challenges in the HR landscape, and how do you see Bestway staying ahead of these trends?
We’ve seen in recent years the challenges that have impacted the HR landscape that weren’t predictable in the way they actually landed. The Covid19 pandemic that we all lived through with challenges remaining, global instability driven through conflicts which resulted in the cost-of-living crisis for our people and considerable impact of increased cost on business necessitating cost reduction elsewhere.
I’ve learned over many years in HR that whilst you can’t predict what is coming and often predicted impacts don’t always materialise, what you can predict is that there will be changes that you need to be prepared to react to and have built resilience in your HR team and the business in order to face into it effectively.
So, staying ahead is about planning to have the right resources to be flexible and the right business foundations to be resilient, that will give you competitive edge. I think in HR we have to be aware of getting carried away with trends and the trendy and properly analyse the near-term horizon scanning for what is coming and thinking through that in a planned way.
Business continuity planning is important, you may not know what the exact challenge will be, but you can plan for how your people and the business will respond.
We learned as a business through the pandemic to stick to our core approach and keep focus on what was important to customers and how our people needed to align to that. This meant that whilst other businesses in our sector very heavily followed the move for everyone to work from home for an extended period, we kept true to our operating model. So, whilst we did move to some working at home we did this is a balanced way and carefully monitored the situation so that as soon as it was right for our office based teams to return to in person collaborative working we did this and this gave us competitive edge.
Near term on the horizon, I believe the biggest challenge is the concept of a working week and full time working. Some of this will change via legalisation and aspects of this challenge started a considerable time ago with flexible working. However, the whole construct of work, when people work and how long they work from an age perspective, what new entrants into the world of working want continues to change.
The ageing population world-wide and perceptions about where people are in their career and what they want for their career will change further too. So those things combined and the fact that resource resilience and consistency of experienced resource will mean that traditional evaluations of the type of person you need, how they approach their work, what type of contract they have with you and how customer facing businesses effectively resource plan will need to change again. This presents a key challenge for us as a business and as a HR team we are thinking ahead now about how we can properly prepare our colleagues and managers in order to lead the way in wholesale and ensure our business remains fit for the future.
Angela is a Senior HR leader with Global corporate experience (FTSE top 30) within retail and professional services. Strategic, commercial, autonomous and highly effective at leading HR teams to deliver an effective and pragmatic business wide people agenda. Angela has been the Human Resources Director at Bestway Wholesale since August 2021 leading HR for the Bestway Wholesale and Bestway Retail businesses including Costcutter. Reporting to the Managing Director and Chief Operations Officer, Angela has full accountability for the People Strategy and culture for its 6500 colleagues across the UK.
