Elite 8 2012: Susan Gueli’s High-Energy Approach to Building IT Muscle
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It's not just "muscle" that has driven these successful initiatives, but also the energy and commitment of the Nationwide Financial team, Gueli notes. However, she confides that early in her tenure as CIO, employee engagement wasn't where she wanted it to be. Gueli had earlier undergone what she supposes others would see as a personal transformation as the result of her interest in human performance and energy management. "What got me started was seeing a speaker from the Human Performance Institute (HPI, Orlando, Fla.), after which I began to study their materials," Gueli recounts. "Later I had the opportunity to participate in their Corporate Athlete program, which had grown out of HPI helping athletes to manage their energy and performance."
Gueli says she worked with HPI to apply its practices and tools to drive cultural change at Nationwide Financial's IT organization. The effort began with Gueli's leadership team learning the principles and tools of energy management with an eye toward leading by example later. "They have been amazing, driving a change in themselves first and then through the organization," Gueli relates. "What we wanted to be able to do was drive change in the organization in a way that was noticed and felt before it was talked about."
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Gueli takes great satisfaction in associates reporting how the energy management initiative made changes in their overall personal health or performance. But it also has had a significant impact on the organization. "IT has driven amazing changes in our organization that are exciting and fun to be a part of," Gueli says.
The metrics bear that impression out -- according to analysis by Gallup, the Nationwide Financial IT organization's ratio of engaged to disengaged associates improved from 3 to 1 to 16 to 1 over two years. During the same period, the percentage of teams with top quartile engagement scores jumped from 41 percent to 72 percent.
But Gueli emphasizes that the purpose of energy management is by no means directed solely at organizational gains, but rather at a kind of win-win situation in which associates have energy not only for work, but outside of work, in such a way that improves work/life balance -- and thus morale generally. "As human beings, we can't generate more time for ourselves, but we can generate more energy," Gueli observes. "Most people say that they see the benefits at home first, because they typically apply so much energy at work and are neglecting other things. They love the fact that we are focused on the whole person."
Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio
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