Ops Game Changers S02E03 Leading Operations Through Change: People, Data and the Future of Work

You're listening to 'Ops Game Changers', the ActiveOps podcast where we share real-life stories from remarkable leaders that are revolutionizing the world of service operations. In this series, we explore some of the key challenges faced by service operations as they strive to deliver more — more capacity, more productivity and more business impact. Host, Bhavesh Vaghela (linkedin.com/in/bvaghela), CMO at ActiveOps (https://activeops.com) quizzes his guests on how they unlock significant value, adopt best practices, and experience some game-changing results. In this episode, we are joined by Sarah Heighton, Head of Financial Shared Services at Absa, one of Africa's largest financial groups. Sarah leads a broad operation spanning reconciliations, finance operations, tax operations and change management, supporting both South Africa and Absa's wider African regions. She was recognized with the ActiveOps Executive of the Year Award for EMEIA at the ActiveOps Awards 2025. Drawing on a career that spans manufacturing, Barclays and now Absa, Sarah shares how she uses data not just to manage performance, but to have better conversations. Spotting where effort concentrates, where capacity is sitting, and where her team needs support before problems surface. She talks candidly about navigating the return to office, how she co-created change with her team rather than imposing it, and why preparing people for the technology revolution is now one of the most important jobs any leader has. Are you trying to lead your organization through significant change without losing the engagement and trust you have built? Or perhaps you are thinking about how to position your team and yourself for a future where the skill set looks very different? Then this episode is for you. Want to learn more about how to radically transform your company through the power of operations? Then don't miss the following episodes and hear more fascinating insights from other leaders in the field of Operations about how they have overcome challenges to drive productivity and boost performance at their enterprises. You can listen and subscribe to 'Ops Game Changers' on your preferred podcast platform and also on our YouTube channel, AOTv (   / @aotv7965  . Up your Ops game! ----------------------------------------- 🌍 Your automation platform records what the bots did. ActiveOps shows where human effort actually went. See how ops leaders in banks, insurers and BPOs are using Operational Context to make transformation decisions that hold. → https://www.activeops.com 📅 Most transformation programs look good on paper. The hard part is proving the gains are real. Book a demo to see how ops leaders do it. → https://www.activeops.com/book-a-demo/ 📊 The ActiveOps OpsTracker is our biannual data review for COOs and operations leaders across banks, insurers and BPOs. Real benchmarks. Real operational data. → https://www.activeops.com/opstracker 📈 Hear directly from the ops leaders doing it. Banks, insurers and BPOs on what changed when they could see exactly where effort was going, and what they did with that visibility. → https://www.activeops.com/more-stories