These audience characteristics and objectives identified in the research brief influenced how the communication team carried out the focus groups.

Transcription

1 Supporting Business Transformation at Rentokil Initial Malcolm Padley, Rentokil Initial Communications Team and Helen Coley-Smith Rentokil Initial PLC Gatwick, U.K. NEED/OPPORTUNITY / Rentokil Initial PLC (RI) is one of the largest business services companies in the world, with revenues of over 2.2 billion. Headquartered in the U.K. and listed on the London Stock Exchange, RI employs more than 78,000 staff (known as colleagues) in 52 countries, providing a range of support services to customers through six divisions, including pest control, courier services, interior landscaping, catering, cleaning and washroom solutions. Rentokil Initial is a truly multinational company, strongly focused on local service delivery through its local branch network. In 2008, the company faced a very difficult situation. While it had grown rapidly through a salesled approach, the poor integration of acquired companies and a general lack of investment had led to a weak financial base and lack of infrastructure to sustain its success. Service levels were below target and, in some cases, poor. In 2008, the company issued four profit warnings within seven months, its share price fell to a 10-year low and a new leadership team was brought in to turn its performance around. Alan Brown from Imperial Chemical Industries became chief executive and, working with leaders of the company s six divisions and the central communications team, he set out to put in place a new strategic plan, aimed at transforming the business over three to five years. The company felt strongly that the right values and behaviors could play a pivotal role in helping to transform RI s performance, and that they needed to be at the heart of the strategic plan. At the time, the six divisions had at least six different sets of values developed mainly by managers, some of which appeared to have traction, while others did not. The opportunity was to use values and behaviors to unify everyone behind the company s new strategic direction and focus on customer service. The need was first to identify, through colleague research, what those values and supporting behaviors should be, and second, to communicate and embed them throughout the business. INTENDED AUDIENCES / Work took place in two phases: a research phase in which colleagues developed a core set of values and behaviors for RI, and a second phase in which those new values and behaviors were communicated across the business, aligned to key business processes and people s understanding of them measured. Audience research was absolutely key to getting the values and behaviors right. The audience for the research phase was frontline colleagues and supervisors around the world: delivery drivers, cleaners, pest control technicians, catering staff, etc. This was because the leadership and communication teams felt that the values and behaviors should be defined by the people who are expected to live them. In the second (ongoing) phase of the work, the target audience is all 78,000 RI colleagues, as every colleague needs to understand what the values and behaviors are and how to live them. RI has 150 leaders, 3,000 managers and 75,000 frontline colleagues (over 50 percent of them on part-time contracts). 1

2 RI s employee base is extremely diverse. Many colleagues have a long service history with the company. However RI also employs a large number of colleagues on short-term, part-time contracts, and in some businesses (e.g., cleaning) turnover can be high. This complexity makes communicating across RI both interesting and challenging. The average RI colleague is years old, has moderate education levels and speaks the local language, possibly with English in addition. They are highly mobile, often drive their own or company vehicles, only touch base with their local branch or office once or twice a day, work shifts, and spend more time with their customers than their colleagues or manager. Frontline colleagues don t tend to be online at work, although this is changing as a result of a major agreement with Google. They work in many different cultures, and what works in one culture may not work in another. Colleagues are pragmatic and down to earth. These audience characteristics and objectives identified in the research brief influenced how the communication team carried out the focus groups. The main needs in running the groups were to: 1. Communicate with people in their local language, keeping things simple and jargon-free. 2. Involve people from each of the six divisions and key geographical areas (U.S., Europe, Africa, Asia and Australasia). 3. Schedule the groups at a time and in a place that fit in with people s frontline work. 4. Share existing value sets in an objective way, without bias. 5. Analyze qualitative findings in a systematic way. 6. Film the research so that a wider group of people could see what colleagues said later on. In the second phase, there were a number of important audience issues to address in addition to those above, which came out of the focus groups: 1. Colleagues wanted to be able to discuss the values; discussions could be backed up by other means of communication such as newsletters and posters. 2. Colleagues wanted to see leaders, managers, and supervisors modeling the values and behaviors, and to see local leaders driving communication through face-to-face interventions where possible. 3. Colleagues also said that if supervisors themselves didn t understand the values, they were unable to communicate them to their team. 4. Colleagues wanted the company to communicate the values on an ongoing basis, rather than launching them as a separate, expensive-looking initiative. Understanding these issues has influenced the communication team s approach to communicating the values and behaviors. GOALS AND OBJECTIVES / The overall business objective for RI is to ensure that all colleagues adopt and display the right attitudes and behaviors, particularly in regards to customer service and working together, in order to ensure successful implementation of the company s strategic plan. RI believes in the classic service proposition that engaged colleagues lead to satisfied customers, who in turn lead to satisfied shareholders. The strategic plan focuses on improvement in five key areas: customer service, capability, operational excellence, cost control and growth. Each of the values and behaviors relates to one or more of these focus areas. 2

3 From a communication and engagement perspective, the overall goal of the research phase was to define a set of values that guide all RI colleagues in support of the strategic plan. The key research objectives were to: 1. Explore the values and behaviors that colleagues believe are appropriate for RI s businesses. 2. Assess current awareness and understanding of any existing values systems. 3. Look for significant bias in preference between businesses, geography or language. In phase two (communication, alignment and measurement of the values and behaviors), RI s 2009 goals were to: 1. Communicate the values and behaviors clearly and consistently across the business. 2. Segment internal audiences and produce tailored activities and materials for each key audience. 3. Encourage dialogue, support supervisors, increase leadership visibility and role modeling, and ensure ongoing communication (i.e., addressing the issues identified in the focus groups). 4. Ensure that 50 percent of colleagues have a good understanding of the values in year one, 75 percent in year two and 100 percent by year three. The team took a long-term approach when deciding on these figures; bearing in mind the complexity of communicating with 78,000 colleagues in 52 countries in the middle of a business turnaround, they felt that one in two colleagues understanding the values would be a good result after year one. 5. Make sure appropriate mechanisms were in place to measure the impact of communication activities relating to the values and behaviors. Achievement of these goals was reviewed three times during 2009 by the executive board and through a new group-wide colleague engagement survey (structured around the values), an interim progress report, feedback from local team meetings and road shows, and further focus groups. SOLUTION OVERVIEW / PHASE ONE: RESEARCH (JULY 2008 DECEMBER 2008) RI commissioned ColeySmith Consulting, an employee engagement consultancy, to run 21 twohour focus groups at locations around the world in the local language (including Dutch, Mandarin, French and Portuguese) with colleagues and supervisors in a wide variety of roles: sales, service, administration, complaints, drivers, etc. Materials were translated centrally and checked locally to ensure consistency of messages and local relevance. The focus groups ran at a time of day agreed upon with the local business, several running in the early morning or in the evening to fit in with work schedules. The communication team developed a set of standard templates for the groups and a facilitator s guide so that the results could be collated and analyzed consistently. They also ran a pilot group in London to ensure that the methodology worked. The materials allowed groups to explore current values, keep what they felt was relevant and develop a new set of values if needed. Although the materials were standardized, there was a great deal of flexibility in the potential outcome. Facilitators were all members of IABC to help ensure that they had the correct skills and experience. Several were found through IABC s search for members facility, and each was fully briefed and debriefed to ensure the highest 3

4 standard of delivery. Several of the groups were filmed, and each participant received a personal invitation and thanks, translated into the local language, from Alan Brown, CEO. In total, 215 colleagues attended, covering each division and key geography. Many useful insights emerged from the focus groups, some of which extended beyond the original brief. These included: 1. Colleagues felt that there could be one core set of values. Those consistently identified as being most relevant across the business were service, relationships and teamwork. 2. Current values weren t embedded; there was little awareness of or commitment to them. 3. There was very little difference between division, country or role. 4. People felt some words were missing from existing sets of values, and there were existing words they didn t like. These concerns were taken into account when defining the new values and articulating their supporting behaviors. 5. They also felt it is important that businesses have the opportunity make the values and behaviors meaningful locally to interpret them through their local communication processes and discuss what they mean for them in practice in their own teams. The findings of the groups were analyzed and presented to RI s senior management team with a summary video, and the new values service, relationships and teamwork were universally accepted. PHASE TWO: COMMUNICATION, ALIGNMENT AND MEASUREMENT (DECEMBER 2008 ONGOING) In phase two, roles and responsibilities needed to be clarified early on, as the central communication team is small (two people) and plays a strategy and coordination role. Communication professionals are embedded in each division (seven people in total) and play a planning and delivery role, supporting local delivery by managers. This clarification was achieved through a series of meetings and conference calls and has helped enormously as the program has progressed. The key elements of the approach were to: Develop an appropriate measurement framework from the outset. Avoid a major launch, communicate on an ongoing basis and align the values to key business processes. Focus on conversations and dialogue at the local level. The company committed to a major investment in local team meetings, which previously didn t exist. For example, in pest control over 90 percent of colleagues took part in a series of quarterly team meetings about the values (one each for values, service, relationships and teamwork). Across the group, a series of activities took place, targeted at leaders, managers and frontline colleagues, all under the umbrella of a group communication plan: In 2009, CEO Alan Brown talked about the values in 16 town hall meetings (including Chicago, Dusseldorf, Paris, Singapore and Sydney), 12 management conferences (covering each division and key geography), four editions of the group s Horizon internal magazine, teleconferences open to all managers, and a letter to all colleagues, translated into the local language. 4

5 Stories have been written across the business, about people living the values, and have been shared in divisional newsletters, on group and divisional Intranets, on group and divisional web sites, and in group and divisional conferences. The values and behaviors have been incorporated into core documents and HR processes: RI s Code of Conduct, core management guide, PDR (performance management) process, grading and talent schemes. Online videos that communicate what the values and behaviors are, and that show them in action, have been created. These have been used at group, divisional and local conferences as well as in local team meetings. An Intranet site for supervisors and managers was under development at the time of this work plan. The site will give them tools and techniques for holding team meetings and creating dialogue about the values and behaviors. An interactive PDF progress update was shared with RI s top 150 leaders and cascaded to share best practices. In September 2009, the company conducted its first ever group-wide colleague engagement survey, called Your Voice Counts. This was a critical part of the communication and measurement of the values and behaviors from the outset. Tailormade for RI by the Hay Group, the survey s 30 questions were all aligned to the organization s values and behaviors. Colleagues were also asked about their understanding of the values. This direct link to the values and behaviors makes it different from many other opinion or engagement surveys. Each division also communicated the values and behaviors at the local level, and aligned them to their key processes, based on local communication and engagement plans. Examples of activities included: Team meetings led by local managing directors and line managers focused specifically on the values and behaviors. Examples include the pest control, hygiene and Ambius divisions. Current estimates are that 80 percent of full-time employees across the business have taken part in these meetings. Meetings include action planning focusing specifically on how to improve performance on each of the values. Recognition programs: The hygiene and pest control businesses launched STAR (Service, Relationships and Teamwork) Awards globally, with categories directly based on the values. The launch of monthly divisional leadership team teleconferences with local operations, again with a focus on the values. In pest control, for example, these are called Radio Rentokil and are open to all colleagues. An and text message is sent to everyone, and they can dial in at any time to hear the broadcast. The introduction of video messaging from divisional managing directors using alerts. In Ambius, for example, videos from the managing director (created on his own webcam at his desk) have been watched by over a third of Ambius colleagues. HR communications: In several divisions, values were incorporated into new joiners packs, induction programs, staff handbooks, recruitment advertisements, and interview and reference checking guidelines. Rentokil Pest Control launched debugged, its first blog to support relationship building (one of the core values). Newsletter articles, posters, stickers, pocket cards, water bottles and coffee cups. 5

6 The divisions are currently developing action plans to address the Your Voice Counts results as part of the ongoing focus on measurement of the values and behaviors. IMPLEMENTATION AND CHALLENGES Cultural sensitivities: A program of this nature is highly sensitive as local attitudes and interpretation of words/language vary widely. Great care was taken to make sure that the values and behaviors themselves and any related materials reflected the diverse cultures, e.g., the team in South Africa was actively involved in all stages of the development process to make sure that the values and communications worked locally. The wide range of people Rentokil employs: Such a variety of colleagues means it was extremely important to ensure that centrally developed materials worked locally and that they could be tailored and translated in most cases. Time scales: The program started in July 2008, the new employee engagement survey was rolled out in September 2009, and the online videos were due to be launched in February. This was an intensive design and delivery task that used a small core team (two communication specialists, one design agency and one video production company). Languages: As it is important that many activities take place locally, this necessitates translation of a large amount of material. Centrally, the team translated all key materials into RI s core languages: French, Spanish, Dutch, German and Mandarin. Locally, materials were produced in languages such as Malay and Zulu. Budget: The overall budget for this program was 280,000/US$445,000, i.e., 3.50/US$5.70 per colleague. MEASUREMENT AND OUTCOMES / The response rate to Your Voice Counts was 63 percent, and in some businesses, such as Asia Pacific and Pest Control, over 90 percent responded. This was encouraging, as the team had hoped for 60 percent across the group, and in some divisions, the response was far higher than expected. Seventy-nine percent of colleagues said they had a good understanding of the values, exceeding the 50 percent year-one target. In the global pest control division, 85 percent of colleagues said they had a good understanding of the values. Linked to the introduction of the values, a commitment was made by each leadership team to improve customer service in every business. A wide range of operational initiatives, such as the introduction of divisional customer extranets and new PDA technology, were undertaken to improve service. From June 2008 through June 2009, customer service rates rose in every division, taking them to over 95 percent and, in some businesses, over 99 percent reliability rates. There has been a major shift in employee attitudes and behaviors. The graph below shows the improvement in customer service rates within the company s main turnaround units. This improvement has continued across all businesses, and today service levels are all above the company s target service rates, making their performance among the best in the industry. 6

7 The company is two years into its journey to deliver its long-term strategic plan. Service levels are very strong, financial performance has improved significantly, and understanding of and engagement with the values is high. There is an ongoing dialogue about the values and behaviors with colleagues, and leaders are more visible and accessible. The Your Voice Counts survey was followed up by eight focus groups in the U.K., U.S., Asia and Australia, which took place in December Feedback from colleagues was that having experienced a positive and open dialogue, they wanted more of the same. These groups were again filmed and used to highlight the importance of the values at management conferences and in local team meetings around the globe. The focus for the values work moving forward is to: Continue building awareness and understanding of the values and behaviors in areas of the business in which they appear not to be understood. Continue to embed them in central and local business processes. Address the results of the Your Voice Counts survey that indicate there is an opportunity to change perceptions, behaviors and ways of working in areas such as the quality of products and services, and teamwork. 7