On track
How the internal communications team at Network Rail set about introducing cultural change to the organisation.
Since taking over from Railtrack in 2002, Network Rail, the organisation that owns the UK’s railway lines and stations, has gone through a major restructuring process, and this has entailed extensive communication with the 32,000- strong workforce.
With this initial phase now complete, however, the internal comms team has been working to take things a stage further, and bring about a major cultural change within the organisation.
Internal Communications Business Partner, Gordon Dowall-Potter, explains: “The aspiration is for Network Rail to be World Class in everything it does, and we are looking to achieve that by embedding and reinforcing four key values across the whole organisation.”
The World Class vision was first introduced at a senior leadership team event last October.
Each leader was then tasked with relaying the vision to their teams, and by January, the message had also been spread through the senior leadership team’s annual employee roadshow.
Next, the team held a series of 37 internal focus groups, plus in-depth interviews with senior leaders. These enabled them to firm up the detailed plans, including the four key values.
The focus groups made an extremely important contribution in helping to secure buy-in from people across the organisation, says Neil Kirkwood (pictured), another of Network Rail’s IC Business Partners.
Now the details of the values are in place, the team is using its range of established media to communicate and reinforce them.
“By the end of July, employees everywhere had heard about the new values, but really embedding them is a continuing process,” adds Neil, “and we are using every channel to help us tell and retell the story.”
Though it is early days for this change programme, Neil says there are encouraging signs that the new vision and values are becoming established in people’s minds. “You’ll hear people saying something like: ‘That’s not very World Class,’ which shows they’re taking the message on board,” he says.
• To read a longer version of this story, see October’s ic magazine.