USA 
United KingdomNikki Humphrey,
Chief People Officer at Virgin Group
Everyone knows the brand Virgin – whether you’re the person who used to shop in Virgin records, you fly or cruise with Virgin, you use Virgin Media or bank with Virgin Money. As Chief People Officer for Virgin Group, Nikki Humphrey is part of a huge worldwide team working under core values of family, heartfelt service and being ‘delightfully surprising’. She shares her learnings and experience, and looks to the future of changing ideas, ideals and stereotypes in business and the workforce.
Interview by Jenny Holliday
Everyone knows the brand Virgin – whether you’re the person who used to shop in Virgin records, you fly or cruise with Virgin, you use Virgin Media or bank with Virgin Money. As Chief People Officer for Virgin Group, Nikki Humphrey is part of a huge worldwide team working under core values of family, heartfelt service and being ‘delightfully surprising’. She shares her learnings and experience, and looks to the future of changing ideas, ideals and sterotypes in business and the workforce.
I'm the Chief People Officer at Virgin Group, and I joined last summer, so I've been here over a year. And before that, for the last 11 or 12 years, I've held a number of either Chief People Officer roles or equivalent, starting at Lloyds Banking Group. Then I moved across to Virgin Atlantic where really I started my journey and love for Virgin about six or seven years ago, before a short stint in John Lewis for a couple of years and then I was enticed back to the Virgin family. I'm not the first, I think they call us Boomerangers - essentially there's quite a number of people that work across what we call our Virgin family that start in maybe one Virgin company, often go elsewhere and then come back either to same business or to a different Virgin company. So I'm definitely not the first to do it. And often because it's just the pull of how Virgin is. My current role is a new role. And it's a great opportunity to be part of Virgin Group where we work really closely with all the other Virgin companies. The priority of my role is to look after the people agenda for Virgin Group, and that means leading my people and communications team, as well as also working really closely and facilitating how we all work together as a network of Chief People Officers across the other Virgin companies as well. I help pull us together and share best practice, try and join up on particular initiatives, because the biggest thing we have in common is that we’re all Virgin businesses.
For me, the coolness is the disruptive nature of the brand. Richard set up his first business in the late 1960s, 1967 doing the student magazine, and it's fair to say with all of his different initiatives and businesses he's involved in, the core of it has been about being disruptive, being innovative, trying to do things differently, but always putting our customers first. And, so actually, that kind of alignment with often the experience with Virgin can be the customer experience, but it's very closely aligned with the people that we have in our business that go and create that really amazing experience for our customers. That's a real positive because we just have such close alignment and we have really clear brand values that all of our Virgin companies work to so things about, you know, heartfelt service, being delightfully surprising, living together as a family. And so we have really clear brand values that it doesn’t matter if you're Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Money, Virgin Media, you are trying to create and live up to those brand values. And then that makes it a lot easier to go and say ‘okay for our people, how do we need to show up to go and create that experience?’
Our purpose is changing business for good, that is our north star. And that’s what we aspire to do with our businesses and our people are a key part of trying to achieve that.
The work I've done over the last 10 plus years is always about anchoring back to those values both in good and bad. If you look at the experience that as a business we had to go through in the pandemic, we absolutely held on to those values in terms of some of the decisions we took and how we supported our people and looked after our customers. They’re critical. It's interesting, about a year ago we did a ‘big listen’ with our people, we went back to basics and asked questions like ‘What do you love about Virgin? Why do you work here? What do you really value what you want to change?’. We’re very open and honest, and the feedback reinforced how human we are, and how we go and encourage people to be brave. From our people's words, we refreshed our descriptions of our traits, and that’s so powerful because, it sounds so simple to do, but it's really effective. And that's helped us then reaffirm their expectations.
Completely! Actually, I see part of my role as helping our executive team or leaders to be okay to listen to that. Sometimes, and it depends where your background is and how you've developed - sometimes it's easier to not hear it. We got some really rich feedback through the Big Listen, and that got pulled back up to the leadership team. For example it’s a challenge for us that within Virgin Group, we're quite small, and so developing careers is really developing your career across the Virgin family and across other Virgin companies. So one of the things we’re now working on is helping the other Chief People Officers share opportunities. We’re using tech – we’ve got a platform called Virgin Family to help share roles – we’re doing a number of things. We listen to the tough stuff as well.
Absolutely. Our purpose is changing business for good, that is our north star. And that’s what we aspire to do with our businesses, and our people are a key part of trying to achieve that. We can cite lots of business examples where we're really either trying to disrupt an industry, or we're trying to do things differently, we're trying to put our customers first and trying to sort of buck the trend of maybe a particular sector of how they've worked before. We’ve developed four key pillars to go and help enable Changing Business For Good.
1) Flourishing people: How do we enable our people to be at their best so that they can really make that difference and try and change business for good?
2) How do we have an impact in the communities that we go and serve as well - So we talk about creating thriving communities. And I think that's recognition that it's not just about the business we do and our customers, we've got to think about our impact with the local communities we serve both geographically as well as also the impact on those depending on our businesses.
3) Really be thoughtful about the impact on our planet. So this is pulling in all of our environmental sustainability agenda, because we can’t be having a negative impact . Because we can't, we can't be having a negative impact or be ignoring such a big sort of set of stakeholders and it's such an important, you know, world that we live in.
4) And then our final bit is about how do we really radically collaborate? so we genuinely believe if you look at the sort of history of Virgin and where we've got to where we've got to, it's because we're prepared to go and work rapidly and radically with different partners across our family, with each other. And we believe those four elements are really thoughtful pillars to help us drive our purpose of changing business for good.
We're constantly challenging ourselves whether we're doing enough and, about 18 months ago, we created a purpose decision filter. So it doesn't matter where you are in the business. So whether it's me picking a new people system, it could be our investment team looking at a proposition to go and invest in. It could be our brand team thinking about a brand guideline or a toolkit they might be sharing with other parts and searching it, this decision set filter helps you think about your impact, about are you being brave enough, are you being human enough, are you being visionary? It's a really powerful tool to stop you in your tracks and think about whether your decision is going the extra mile.
I'd highlight the work Virgin Atlantic did with their gender-neutral, uniform policy - they listened to their people. and absolutely led the way in terms of their diversity and inclusion agenda.
The pro is definitely the breadth of talent that we have that talent, opinion input. We have some amazing people across many different teams. I would say the challenge we have goes back to Richard’s core value. Each of our Virgin businesses operate typically in their own sectors – what he hasn't done is go and create a massive group structure to say: "right we run Virgin as one Virgin". And this comes back to his entrepreneurial spirit you don't go dampen and go overlay or these heavy sort of governance and procedures and policies, etc. You let businesses thrive. And so what's good is, every single Virgin business has its own board, it has its own independence, depending on its shareholder status plus many other factors but in general they're not controlled by Group. They are given the freedom and space to go and operate and be successful, because they know their sector the best.
The challenge we have is because of all the different sectors we work in and because of the freedoms that Virgin family, different companies have, sometimes you can miss on the coordination. Sometimes you want to see more collaboration than there is; we have very motivated teams within the individual Virgin companies that want to be incredibly successful. That's more of the challenge rather than too many voices and us being overwhelmed with that. If anything, it's more had, you know how do you kind of keep that collaboration and coordination going?
Being innovative and forward-looking and trying to lead the market is tough to do, it's tough to do when there are just so many other great other businesses thinking in a similar way. I'd highlight the work Virgin Atlantic did with their gender neutral, uniform policy - they listened to their people and absolutely led the way in terms of their diversity and inclusion agenda. What's also been amazing is the impact of the customers and how the customers feel about it, they really feel that Virgin is embracing the individuality and celebrating diversity of our team.
I'd also highlight the Dyslexic Thinking campaign. So this is about, how do you really embrace neurodiversity? Richard Branson himself is dyslexic, and we've done a lot of work with Made By Dyslexia, and also done work with LinkedIn and dictionary.com. Last year, we got Dyslexic Thinking recognised officially as a drop-down skill on LinkedIn. So people could go put that as a skill on their LinkedIn business profile. What does that skill give you? It's saying you're creative, you can think differently. You can bring a different perspective to your work. That's been incredibly powerful.
Similarly, Virgin Voyages, our amazing cruise business, has really disrupted the cruise industry. Again, recognising that human element, we know there are some quite serious mental health and wellbeing issues because when you're cruising you can be away for six months. If you're cruising and you're away from home, that period of time can be pretty challenging. We have introduced free Wi Fi so, actually, where other cruise lines charge employees, Virgin Voyages doesn't charge employees to access wifi so that they can always be in contact with their friends and family and don't need to worry about Wi Fi costs. We offer free cleaning and dry cleaning services to our employees and also their cabins to get cleaned. We say it’s okay for partners to share cabins together because we recognise they're in a relationship. These things feel small, but what they’re doing is reinforcing the real human element that we want our people to be at their best and when you treat them as humans you recognise they have needs. It's amazing what they then go and take back and out to our customers. That's the kind of Virgin experience we want to create.
