Communicating successful business change to 50,000 employees within Europe’s largest local authority

What our seven year transformation communications programme delivered for Birmingham City Council >

OUTCOMES

Ensured 10,000 employees moved successfully from 55 offices to eight and adopted new work styles – saving the Council £100m

Engaged all 50,000 internal stakeholders and all external stakeholders (including the 1.1m citizens of Birmingham) at all stages of communication – taking them from unawareness to action

Communicated achievement through hitting targets and producing winning submissions for prestigious national awards – including the coveted British Council of Offices Best Corporate Workplace 2013

BACKGROUND

Birmingham City Council (BCC) is the largest local authority in Europe, providing services for over a million people through its 50,000 employees. In 2007 they developed the Working for the Future (WFTF) programme to reduce property usage costs and improve service delivery.

BACKGROUND

The recent austerity measures from Government have seen their budget reduced by 28% – or £300m – between 2011-2015. What started as an efficiency and value-for-money programme became an imperative as the Council entered a period of constant change to protect frontline services.

Their target was to improve service delivery and save £100m

BCC asked Customer Plus to create a communications strategy to engage employees, take them through the change programme and implement the communications on-site for the duration of the programme

CHALLENGE

SOLUTION

Taking BCC’s stakeholders on a seven year journey to change where and how they work >

✚ Conducted quantitative and qualitative research through telephone surveys and focus groups to establish levels of awareness and engagement at the outset – and monitor them throughout the programme

Understanding stakeholders

✚ Used a stepped communications approach to drive the engagement strategy, ensuring all stakeholders moved from unawareness of the programme to taking actions to ensure its implementation and success

Communicating the journey

✚ Embedded a team of consultants on-site throughout all seven years of the programme – ensuring expertise was on-hand to drive the change and transfer knowledge and skills to Council employees

Driving change from the inside

✚ Developed and delivered tactical plans, communication channels and materials to match the needs of each stakeholder group – incl. press releases, training days, leadership communication skills development, branded collateral, film production, award entries, stakeholder events and launch activity

Tactical responses

Contact us:

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www.customerplus.co.uk

@CustomerPlus

Customer Plus is an award winning customer experience consultancy.

We believe the world doesn’t have to be difficult. Good customer experiences should be every day, not every so often (if you’re lucky).

Employee engagement – and by extension happy employees – is critical to delivering good customer experiences, with a great experience for customers starting with a great workplace for colleagues.

So we help our customers help their customers (both internal and external) to improve organisational performance.

We provide a full consultancy service to our clients to improve employee engagement, customer experience and organisational performance, comprising:

Clear strategy

Memorable learning

Insightful research

Creative communication

About Customer Plus

WINNER

Customer Service Training

AWARDS 2013