When employees said that a lack of management visibility, accessibility and appraisal inconsistency was hindering effective internal communications and employee engagement, Powys County Council decided to tackle the issue head on, winning a CIPR award for best public sector campaign in the process. Emma Savage, internal communications officer at Powys County Council, explains how they did it. This case study forms part of our internal communications toolkit.
The context
We carried out an extensive programme of consultation to find out what our employees felt about working for the council. From these events one message was clear: our senior leaders weren’t visible or accessible enough. We knew we needed to do something promptly, but we also knew that people had different definitions of ‘managers’ so we had to come up with an approach that we could deliver from right across our first line managers, all the way up to the chief executive.
Our leadership team enlisted the help of the communications team and organisational development team to devise an integrated programme of activity to raise levels of employee engagement. We built our work on the Four Enables of Engagement based on David MacLeod and Nita Clarke’s extensive research.
The plan
Before we started thinking tactically we knew we had to create a clear corporate narrative and vision for Powys’ future that staff and managers could use as the building blocks for better engagement and internal communications. We created two documents to cover these issues and then worked together with our organisational development team to look at how we could use our managers to develop this work further.
A key part of this was an initiative called ‘Trading Places’ which would see our chief executive and management team spend the day working with our frontline staff. We wanted to do something that went deeper than a simple site visit and gave our leaders the chance to join staff on the frontline for a day to get a deeper understanding of their roles. We also wanted to arrange something that would help to show colleagues from across the council that our leaders weren’t hidden away in the county hall and were part of the team just like they were.
We also worked with organisational development (OD) to look at way of empowering managers at all levels to be better internal communicators. The OD team adapted the council’s leadership development programme so it was more closely aligned to the vision and values and offered further coaching support. Together we developed a programme called Networked Manager, which was a series of informal events and networking opportunities, offering managers at all levels the chance to have open and informal conversations with their peers and the senior leadership team on a variety of management issues. We rely on our frontline managers a huge amount to cascade information so we felt that it was vital to create a forum where they could support and interact with one another.
The execution
We launched Trading Places across a number of different frontline services, focusing our attention on the more remote parts of the council where people had the least regular contact with senior leaders. While on site the chief executive and management team members completed full shifts in everything from school canteens to bin collections, working on exactly the same tasks as the rest of the frontline teams.
We shared pictures of the day on our Yammer platform and filmed the sessions for our intranet and YouTube channels so people could keep up-to-date with what they were doing.
We’d rarely used film as a communications channel before so it required a bit of upskilling in our communications team, not to mention a lot of trust between our communications officers and our leadership teams. It was an enormously worthwhile investment though as it captured the mood far more effectively than we would have been able to replicate in writing and it meant that all employees to share in the experience as it was happening rather than waiting for us to publish and internal release.
The impact
The response to Trading Places was overwhelming positive. One member of staff told me that she had been a bit nervous about working with the chief executive before the day started but by the end she had realised that he really was just another colleague from the council. She even arranged an opportunity to come and spend the day with him to find out more about his work.
The leaders who took part also got a huge amount out of it. It got them out of their offices and into parts of the council they may not have had a great deal of direct access to before as we purposely took them into services outside of their directorates. The first-hand experience they picked up also enabled them to go back to the management team and discuss how to overcome practical problems effecting the frontline or discuss ways to share any best practice across the organisation. All our senior leaders have now undertaken at least two to three trading places days.
Why it worked
The success of Trading Places lay in the fact that gave people the chance to actually work with senior leaders, not just see them in our staff magazine or at events. It helped to break down a lot of barriers and preconceptions. By working in frontline services it also helped to reinforce the message that the aim of any council is to deliver outstanding services that directly impact residents.
Video was also crucial to is success. Councils are awash with written content so it offered something more interactive and visual which really helped the initiative to stand out in a sea of information. The fact that the communications team was able to develop a new skill also offered up a whole new communications channels which we have regularly used to communicate other messages, including a regular video blog from the chief executive.
Lessons learnt
This work undoubtedly reinforced the importance of being creative when communicating and engaging with staff. People are bombarded with information every day so you have to keep evolving your channels and developing your messages. We also learnt that despite all our managers juggling extensive workloads, they are truly passionate about communicating with their teams. Our networked manager group has even developed a staff engagement group off its own back to keep the topic of employee engagement high on the agenda.
Want to know more?
For more information on Trading Places, or details on Powys’ experiences of engaging managers please contact Emma Savage at Powys County Council.