By Steve Arthur, Market Peformance Director, MOSL
The water retail market is fast approaching its third birthday, having opened on 1 April 2017. MOSL, it’s market operator, is not much older and has experienced the same learning curves as the market in many areas. Almost three years on, just like the market, we are still facing new challenges and often running processes for the first time, or seeing new situations arise. This can be hugely daunting, but also exciting. It represents an opportunity for us to be at the coalface of making changes and driving improvements in the market, but it also allows us to be a true ‘learning organisation’ in every sense of the word. MOSL is a small, start-up organisation in a water sector dominated by large and established water companies, at least until the smaller new entrant retailers started to join.
Having worked for several of these large water companies during my career, it wasn’t uncommon for me to be presenting 25 year, and even 40 year-long service awards to some of my team members. Having teams with this knowledge and expertise is hugely valuable in an organisation, but as we have found since the opening of the market, so is fresh thinking. It takes more than just knowledge to make a market work and work successfully, it takes fresh ideas and innovative ways of working. Here at MOSL we’re some way off the long-service stature of a number of our water company members, but for us this offers up some great opportunities.
Off the back of our recently approved 2020/21 Business Plan there’s a real drive from both us as an organisation, and from feedback from our members, to build and strengthen our capability and establish ourselves as market operator. Building Capability is one of the key themes of our business plan and it marks not only a commitment to the industry for us to be experts in operating the market, but also a commitment to our colleagues that we value their skills and knowledge and want to continue developing them at MOSL and in the water industry.
As a relatively new kid on the block, we’ve had to virtually re-build our team from scratch twice. The first time when we set the company up, in 2015, and again when we relocated from central London to Southampton at the end of 2018. This effectively meant ‘re-starting’ a start-up, whilst continuing to operate the market and deliver our services to members.
Rather than see this as a problem, we saw it as an opportunity and a springboard to ensuring we built a team of experts that are committed and excited to making this young market a success. Water may not be many companies’ largest bill, but we’re operating at the heart of a sector which has a huge impact on customers, society and the environment. It’s also a sector that has been subject to plenty of scrutiny and challenge recently - from calls for re-nationalisation and concerns over environmental stewardship to corporate governance and executive renumeration. What’s more, we’re operating against a backdrop of heightened customer expectation and awareness, with the likes of Amazon’s same-day deliveries and real-time access to data and services. Customers are also more informed about water and their own water usage. They expect the same level of service and innovation from their utilities as they do from their online retailers and we, as a sector, are still striving to meet that expectation.
So, what does that mean for MOSL and building our team? As a member of the leadership team, and as someone who has been with MOSL for nearly three years, it’s been hugely rewarding to see how our new MOSLer’s have taken on these challenges. It’s been great to see colleagues learning more about how the sector actually works, asking questions and challenging the ‘status quo’ - whether by visiting a sewage treatment works, spending time with a meter reading agent as they try to track down an elusive water meter or listening to one of our water company members deliver a ‘MOSL Masterclass’ in our Southampton office. We’re committed to ensuring our teams understand the realities of the market and use this to inform how we think and work.
In the last year, we’ve continued to develop our series of ‘MOSL masterclasses’ and have six stakeholders lined up to talk to our teams between now and the end of March. In parallel to this, we’re also getting our teams out to meet with industry bodies, and wholesalers and retailers, to understand how they work and how we can make it easier to do business in the market.
We’re committed to developing our people, whether through our internship programme with nearby Southampton University (see here for more details on our internship programme) or investing in colleagues with more experience in their field who are looking for a new challenge. We feel that as a young learning organisation, collaboration is one of the simplest and most effective ways to bring positive change to our customers, which has led to us publishing our Secondment General Principles, enabling us to work closely with individuals within the industry on projects that are sure to make a real difference.
Developing a team though, is more than just building knowledge. I’ve also seen first-hand the benefits of a supportive and flexible work environment, which includes supporting colleague’s wellbeing and work/life balance. We’ve now developed our organisation’s wellbeing agenda which includes training members of our team to be Mental Health First Aiders and encouraging an open and healthy workplace culture.
We have a great team at MOSL. To-date we’ve recruited economists, mathematicians, psychology graduates, data analysts, finance experts and business analysts from a wide range of backgrounds and sectors, and we’re going to continue building on this diverse skill set to help us deliver on the commitments set out in our 2020/21 Business Plan.
We may be a relatively young organisation but as I approach my third anniversary with MOSL (no long service award yet I’m afraid), I’m really excited and energised to see the team we’re building and the potential we’re starting to realise as individuals, as an organisation and as a market.