Engaging leaders at a time of major change

Alasdair was asked to join Serco as Group Head of Internal Communications in 2013, joining just as the company started to go through a very challenging period. In January 2015, Alasdair went to the Exec. team to propose an approach for communication for the following 12 months. Serco had just completed a strategy review, announced a write-down of £1.3bn and subsequent £555m rights issue as the market value had fallen by 80%.

They planned to make divestments while continuing to ensure the essence of the ‘corporate renewal’ programme would be sustained, and operational and cultural changes embedded across the vast organisation.

The proposal was to create an ‘inflexion point’ in time at which materials, and more importantly, tangible evidence would be in place to enable the narrative to change – from an internal orientation to one aimed at customers and markets, and from the past to the future. Also, to talk about ‘how’ people behave and deliver service, not just ‘what’ is done.

The focus was placed on the wider leadership group (c. 700 people) across the business, initially via leadership events in each division in early 2016. The aim was to increase the confidence of this group. Through the crisis, communication had been geared to keeping the leaders – as the key storytellers in the organisation – informed of issues, aware of how they were being addressed and what the plans were to turn the business around. This was now the time to simplify the messaging and change the tone.

Key elements of the work included:

• Refining the organisation’s values to create a clear set of fresh values with underlying behaviours.
• Further evolving strategy / purpose messaging, including a Group-wide corporate ambition, four objectives and key activities to deliver on these. Pleasingly, this framework and content was also used in results updates and presentations to investors.
• Commissioning and creating a feature-length documentary-style film by BAFTA-winning director, Molly Dineen. ‘Inside Serco’ was designed to reconnect the business to the frontline, observing what people do and how they do it, across all key sectors and geographies.

With materials available after the events, Alasdair helped develop a plan to socialise and share these over the following 6 months.

The key measure of leadership engagement rose by 17% prior to the events (driven by increased clarity of direction) and a further 17% (to 72%) in 2016.