Jon Grimes

Head of People and Leadership Development

Hello, I’m Jon Grimes. I’m British and live with my two children in the ancient town of Warwick, in the UK. Warwick dates back to 914 AD and was originally built on the banks of the River Avon to defend the country from the invading Danes, but these days more likely to welcome them as tourists! I’ve worked for DNV for the last 12 years, originally being recruited into the Loughborough office to help with the integration of Noble Denton and Garrad Hassan into the GL organisation, but quickly ended up working in Hamburg for the next five years, before working in Høvik for the last seven years. I think of myself as the eternal optimist, but with a pragmatic drive to get things moving

WHERE DID I COME FROM

My career started in Retail Line Management, having joined Sainsbury’s, a major food retailer in the UK, as a Management Trainee. I spent five years running successful teams and departments with significant P&L responsibility at an early age, working around the UK in numerous roles. In a career move worthy of the DNV career model, and taking my leadership experience from these roles, I seized upon an opportunity to join one of their Regional Training teams. I spent a number of years designing and running training programmes developing some of Sainsbury’s 10,000 leaders in their style and skills. This eventually led to me heading Behavioural and Process training for the Sainsbury’s Group, based in London for over 140,000 colleagues in retail, banking, supply chain and logistics.

From there I next moved to E.ON, a little known brand in the UK at the time, who had just acquired a number of power generation, energy distribution and retail businesses in the UK and had grand plans to rebrand them, and to make their mark in the UK. There I headed up their Learning and Development function, helping their Board Teams to define their Purpose, Vision and Values, and helping the organisation to better communicate with each other through dialogue skills and improving processes through the implementation of LEAN methodology.

MY ROLE AROUND HERE

In my view, I have one of the best roles in DNV. Being the Head of People and Leadership Development offers me the perfect mix of supporting the business in achieving its goals, by supporting its people to be brilliant. Who wouldn’t want a role like that? With our new strategy, I have the wonderful task of looking into our Employee Experience, defining what it is to work here, what makes it so unique, and looking for ways to keep enhancing this. Quite a legacy to help maintain and indeed improve, but also a great opportunity for us to look at who we are and what we should be, given our plans for the future. An employee experience encompasses so many pieces, it’s impossible to define this for each individual, but there are some traits that define DNV as an organisation, and these are the ones we are looking to recognise and develop.

For many years my team have delivered some of the now famous face to face Journey programmes for our leaders. Given our situation over the last 12 months, and taking the opportunity to change, we now run these virtually and still welcome around 400 learners onto these programmes every year from around the world.

Over the coming year we’re looking to extend our digital learning out to all colleagues, as part of the employee experience, and to offer more opportunities for people to develop in some of the key behavioural and business skills we need. In the past we have rolled out the Digital Transformation Programme, in conjunction with INSEAD Business School, and we are looking for opportunities to run similar programmes in the future, allowing everyone the opportunity to understand a little more about what our future might look like.

WHAT ARE THE IMPORTANT ISSUES COMING UP

As a business we have some ambitious plans in place in our strategy, many of which rely on things we already know well, but increasingly there is a list of new skills, business models and approaches that we need to explore and develop ourselves, in order to make the most of the opportunities we’ll need to keep growing and developing as a business. So, we still have much to learn, but our challenge is less about the content we need to learn, that’s relatively easy to source, our challenge now is how we learn.

The 70/20/10 model for learning is now increasingly well known and understood within DNV, but we still have work to do to align all of our development to it to ensure we live it. Learning preferences are changing driven by situation, need and opportunity. We are learning less from structured events these days, as we all move to search and access learning online, in the moment, from trusted sources. Development is done when it’s needed, it’s far less about booking yourself on a course and learning in a few months’ time, it’s about having something you don’t understand or want to know more about and exploring the learning in the moment. The hunger and want for learning is constantly growing, how we deliver it when it’s needed is our new challenge.

We have a great opportunity here, to align our learning into the work, into our daily routines, so it becomes less of an “event” and more of a continuous flow. We are already developing MyLearning, our learning management system, to align our material and make it accessible to all. We are using new software and bringing in new partners to refresh the look and feel of our crucial learning programmes, and we are creating learning paths to help everyone to understand what is available to help them develop and where to get it from. We also continue to explore other integrations where learning will sit within the production systems we use, for immediate access and comprehensive learning.

Bold plans, and not achieved overnight, but we are looking to build an Employee Experience here, not just place a few learning modules on a platform.

FINAL WORDS…

DNV has long led the way when it comes to having the best knowledge in our industries, and many new starters to DNV still cite that one of their main reasons for joining DNV are the development opportunities. So, we have a proud legacy to uphold, and bold new ways in which we can deliver it. How exciting is that! •

The hunger and want for learning is constantly growing, how we deliver it when it’s needed is our new challenge.