When Essex County Council decided it needed to change the way the organisation worked,it went straight to its people. Holly Baker, People and change communications manager at Essex County Council explains all. This case study forms part of our internal communications toolkit.
The context
Like all councils Essex is facing huge budget challenges, cuts to our services and increasing demands on our resources. It’s a difficult time, but we realised that by making a few changes to the way we worked we could meet these challenges head on and keep delivering the best possible services to our residents.
The plan
We decided that the best way to help people behave differently was to introduce some new operating styles or ways of working across the council. We decided on five approaches which would help us meet our future ambitions; ‘collaborative’, ‘innovative’, ‘lean and agile’ ‘outcomes-led and ‘self-starting and accountable’; practices we all knew were in abundance across the council, but which we’d never articulated as those we specifically wanted employees to model before.
Because we knew we already had lots of employees working in these ways we decided to go out into the organisation to find the best examples. Our communications team used their extensive contacts to track down the unsung heroes who were already championing the approaches with the plan to highlight their work as best practice.
We worked directly with frontline and senior managers to find the best stories from across the business and ended up finding a swathe of fantastic examples from all aspects of the council – something we simply couldn’t have done without working directly with teams from across the organisation or without the storytelling savvy of our internal communications team.
The execution
After whittling down hundreds of examples we headed out to meet the people who best exemplified the operating styles. We travelled the length and breadth of the county, interviewing people about their stories, photographing them in their roles and creating video content about their work.
It was really important to us that we integrated our communications channels as much as possible to cement the message in the minds of our colleagues and illustrate just how committed the council was to this new way of working. We wanted this campaign to be about a behavioural and a cultural change so we took the bold decision to run it for five months – longer that the majority of our other campaigns but absolutely the right decision to getting people to take notice and change their approach.
We created a complete communications suite for each person to publicise both the employee and the working style they represented. We created posters for our sites which featured photos of the employee, introduced their stories in the council’s weekly E-newsletter and shared video content showing who they were and what they stood for. We also published a first person blog for each employee on our intranet, which allowed them to tell their story in their own voice. Each story ran for a week before moving on to the next example.
The impact
Almost as soon as the campaign launched people started talking about it. The highly visual approach we took was sparking corridor conversations and people really enjoyed getting to know different colleagues from all over the business. In a county as big as Essex it can be difficult to feel connected to people outside of your team, let alone your building, so this was a great way to make it feel like we were all part of one organisation.
Our survey results also saw a marked improvement. We run a monthly communications survey and by the end of the five month campaign we recorded a 24% increase in the number of people answering ‘yes’ to the question of whether they were aware of the campaign and the new ways of working.
Why it worked
The success of this campaign lay in the fact it was focused on people. Working practices or behaviours can often feel like abstract concepts but when their embodied by people they have a much deeper impact. We set out to make people aware of new behaviours, but it was also a powerful employee recognition piece and gave us the opportunity to celebrate the people who make everything we do possible. In time of challenge it’s vital that we don’t forget how valuable our people are.
Lessons learnt
Although we delivered this campaign quickly and with a limited budget we definitely could have achieved a wider reach of stories if we had had more time. Earlier planning also would have reduced the logistical challenges of trying to get across a county as big as Essex in just a few weeks.
Want to know more?
For more information on this campaign contact Holly Baker at Essex County Council