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View from the Top: RWE Npower, the HR's prospective
Since taking on the role of HR director of RWE Npower in 2003, Saudagar Singh has embarked on a campaign to woo some of the top HR minds in the business. Peter Crush reports.
There is a management chart hanging in the HR general office at RWE Npower that, like a royal ancestral tree, portrays Saudagar Singh, the power company's HR director, as monarch of all he surveys. Six managers are lined up beneath him (a remarkably small number, considering the company's 12,000 employees), plus a further five who work in a strategic partnering role.
While this particular king may not display the sort of over-mighty zeal that has been the downfall of real monarchs, the analogy is an apt one, in that this HR leader is what historians might today call a consummate court-maker - one who considers it his role to surround himself with the best people for the job.
"I want the best people in the organisation, at every level, so why wouldn't I want them in HR?" says Singh. Since first becoming HR director of the power company's retail business in 2000, Singh's reign has been characterised by a campaign to woo the top HR minds around for specific tasks.
In 2001, shortly after Npower bought Independent Energy, Yorkshire Electricity and Northern Electric, which was responsible for its growth from 1,600 people to 10,000 in less than a year, he brought on board Richard Frost, head of communications at Cadbury. Triplication of roles as a result of the mergers was behind the appointment of Irene Stark - ex-Calortex - as head of HR for its business division.
Then, in 2005, Npower parent company RWE divested itself of its water businesses, leading to an entire management restructure and a new approach to graduate recruitment. The move prompted the recruitment of Bob Athwal, formerly of Enterprise Cars, as graduate schemes manager - who had an already established set of links with UK universities. The last of the big hires occurred only last summer, when Gareth Evans - Royal Mail's then head of industrial relations - joined as head of HR operations.
Symbolically, this potted history rather sums up Singh's lot at Npower, the UK's second-largest energy provider, which last year reported profits of �495 million, but which is now under the media spotlight over the issue of price rises. At least twice, Singh has built up an entire HR team from scratch, has had to let them go, and then has had to start from the beginning again. But while lesser HRDs may have wilted, Singh remains incredibly upbeat.
"The world doesn't stay still, business transforms all the time, so I've just got on with it. Every time, however, I feel it's been an opportunity to raise the position of HR in the business - from having to ask our marketing director about our brand and how we galvanise our people around it, to looking at our HR set-up, which we decided would be a shared-services model three years ago."
Npower is hurtling towards its '2020 Vision', its stated aim to be responsible for 20% of energy production in the UK - 20% of which from sustainable sources - by 2020.
If there is one thing all this change has taught him, it is that management is his number one priority. Npower is hurtling towards its '2020 Vision', its stated aim to be responsible for 20% of energy production in the UK - 20% of which from sustainable sources - by 2020. For the company that supplies the power to Marks & Spencer, Lloyds TSB, Sainsbury's and the new Wembley Stadium, it means upping output by 10,000 more megawatts, and growing its 6.7 million household customer base. To achieve this, Singh believes it takes tough management. "If you've got 1,500 managers in a business they have a real impact on how the majority of the people feel," he says. "A lot of my focus is on this population. These are the levers that control the rest of the business."
