The Independent Office for Police Conduct has an extremely important and difficult role in sustaining confidence in our Police force. Their work is not always appreciated either by the Police or the plaintiff. Having been set up in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence enquiry, their remit is to provide independent investigations into Police conduct and deliver recommendations for change. Perhaps the litigious nature of their work led to quite a toxic internal culture. Their cultural issues spanned a siloed, risk averse, target driven blame culture, almost a full house. They weren’t good at communicating across directorates, there was poor trust between employees and extremely low moral leading to high rates of attrition.

They needed a plan. They needed a “One Plan” programme that would help them work horizontally across the organisation in order to deliver on four strategic priorities and to stop the siloed working. To ensure the learning from investigations is embedded in the Police force it was essential to tackle this, and the incoming CEO wished to develop a Learning and Collaborative culture.

FEEDBACK

With input from the senior leadership we developed an initial draft of the “One Plan Big Picture” and helped the fractured team to align around a common narrative. We took a copy of the draft out into the business and held 10 employee engagement sessions to get the views of the staff in cross functional groups. The feedback was comprehensive and challenging, reflecting how extensive the issues were.

We fed this back to the leadership team and it informed all the other organisational development and design activities that were running.

It was clear that dialogue and communication was going to be the key to changing the culture of the organisation, so we iterated the picture to reflect the experiences of employees and trained 12 Story Sharers to use it to hold engagement sessions across the whole organisation. The aim was to get people to discuss the development of the values and behaviours that would most benefit the achievement of the Strategic Priorities.

OUTCOMe

These Story Sharers became the seed of a “Rebel Network” with the remit of sensitively disrupting the cultural issues and embed the values and behaviours the employees had identified. This programme was headed up by the amazing Rebecca Herbert whose passion drove the IOPC to extraordinary lengths.

Although the final output was the visual tool ‘One Plan picture’, the purpose of creating it was to open up the dialogue between staff and the business to ensure that employee voice was present in the revised strategic plan.  The picture was merely the tool to drive the engagement and the final output was a reflection of all the conversations that were had across the business.  The quality of those conversations helped to shape a common understanding and direct energy into becoming an organisation that is a great place to work and where people can reach their potential. 

The Security Industry Authority is an independent body responsible for regulating the private security industry and reports directly to the Home Secretary.  

The organisation wanted to develop its new Corporate plan through consultation with employees to hear from them what the key priorities should be in the following three years. 

The workforce felt their concerns and insights weren’t addressed and therefore disconnected from previous strategic planning.  They were also quite siloed in their working practices and struggled to transfer learning across the business.

We developed a visual tool (big picture), with input from the leadership team that we tested with cross functional groups of employees in facilitated dialogical sessions.  The feedback themes we gathered were fed back to the leadership team and once the way forward was agreed we redrafted the picture until it reflected the entire organisation’s perspective.

In tandem with this we developed a narrative to accompany the picture.  To ensure the organisation retained the capability to further the engagement, we trained a cohort of ambassadors to share their own version of the narrative, relating their own experiences. This team then held sessions throughout the organisation, with the finalised picture with cross functional groups.  They gathered also feedback and related it back to the leadership team.

The intention is for the tool to be used in an ongoing basis to have conversations around issues as they arise and ensure the interdependencies of the workforce remain strong.

Stonewater is a leading social housing provider, with a mission to deliver good quality, affordable homes to people who need them most.

Danielle Carnegie “Thank you so much to yourself and Paul for your guidance and expertise from day one of this project. I learnt so much from both of you along the way, the experience our colleagues had was incredible and the feedback I have had surrounding the business from TSO’s to Managers to Exec, has been amazing. Colleagues felt listened to by you, were able to share their experiences in a safe place and learn a new set of skills along the way. I can honestly say I have been singing the praise of you both to anyone who will listen to me and would recommend any company going through any change to do this! I cannot wait to now get started with continuing our story sharing culture we have now started creating…watch this space!”

Jenny Sawyer “I completely echo what Danielle has said.  We have loved working with you.  We knew from the original pitch that you would capture the essence of our organisation and our people in such an authentic way and that your passion for telling the story through their eyes would make this a successful project. The work only starts here, of course, and there is lots to do to further develop and deliver our Future Operating Model. However, I can’t imagine how we could have got off to a better start than with the big picture!”