DWP Welfare Reform 2013 CIPR Inside Award entry for best change communication

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1 DWP Welfare Reform 2013 CIPR Inside Award entry for best change communication Programme brief and strategy In 2010 the Government announced plans for the biggest reform of the welfare state for 60 years. Changes affecting millions of UK citizens would be delivered by the Government s biggest delivery department the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). In order to deliver this once in a generation welfare reform agenda we developed a groundbreaking integrated campaign approach, now used as a blueprint for internal communications across Whitehall. DWP has 100,000 colleagues located across Britain. Its remit includes working age support, disability benefit and pensions. All are undergoing major reforms. This diverse audience, with different levels of knowledge and experiences of change, needed to engage with DWP s organisational need to reform the welfare system as well as the work-related changes needed to achieve this. This would be difficult against a backdrop of: unprecedented pressure on resources significant reduction in communications headcount of over 45% a recent dip in staff engagement levels information on welfare reform continuously evolving ongoing press and stakeholder comment and speculation over welfare reform, including incorrect information and commentary the need to continue to deliver our core services. Our strategic approach given the scale and scope of the task was to treat our colleagues as stakeholders in change. We engaged them in the organisational and work-related changes we would all face through sharing, showing and storytelling our future as One DWP. Using the full mix of internal channels we built a genuinely informed conversation between everyone about our shared future The DWP Story. Collaborating with Strategy, HR and Operations we created a clear landscape of the entirety of welfare reform change and delivered a regular heartbeat of updates. This ensured everyone understood the changes and how they were affected. In order to maintain engagement with the need for change and keep everyone up-todate, a phased campaign was developed to: build a shared understanding of why DWP needed to change enable understanding of how this would affect our people and our customers enable the necessary changes in organisational behaviour to take root in all 100,000 staff. Colleagues in areas immediately affected by change received targeted, detailed communications. Contextual communications were developed to generate early interest and engagement in the longer term vision for colleagues affected by change in the future.

2 Objectives Phase 1 campaign objectives were to ensure all our people understood and could discuss with colleagues, managers and leaders: the full size and scope of welfare reform why DWP needed to reform the welfare system the culture and behaviours needed in One DWP. In addition colleagues immediately affected by change received targeted communications providing detailed information about the changes such as the introduction of Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments to ensure they: understood the reforms and how they affected their work understood how the changes affected their customers could confidently advocate these changes to customers. Reaching these objectives by the end of 2013 would put us in the best position to start our Phase 2 campaign to effectively change organisational behaviour to fully support welfare reform. Tactics Colleagues are stakeholders in change and reform, so we wanted them to have an informed employee voice feeling comfortable and knowledgeable in discussing, implementing and advocating reform. Phase 1 of our groundbreaking campaign was therefore designed to ensure a common understanding of welfare reform across all colleagues to help build this informed employee voice, with those directly affected receiving more tailored and specific information. Unique, engaging and innovative campaign materials were developed using audience insight reflecting communications preferences and delivered across multiple channels: two interactive user-centric intranet sites: o a welfare reform one-stop-shop allowing colleagues to easily access o key information Change&You to give colleagues specific information tailored to their job role national events with colleagues and senior leaders to talk about the DWP Story with open discussions around key changes, concerns, and sharing best practice in a peer-to-peer environment colleague storytelling via online video, allowing peer-to-peer sharing of the reality of delivering change showing change from the claimant and customer point of view by taking colleagues through the claimant journey, for example using interactive dummy claim forms to show what their experience would be like toolkits to support team discussions as teams prepared to implement change intranet articles and Senior Leader e-shots to show visible leadership on change and encourage discussion. All these were continuously tested using focus groups and our internal social media platform #eartotheground, encouraging colleagues to shape products at key development stages.

3 People who were immediately affected also received engaging and innovative material about the specific key welfare reform projects: For Universal Credit (UC): a dedicated UC intranet one stop shop for all communications and updates a central intranet-based library of useful information, quick guides, tools and links to help colleagues quickly find the right information to deliver change engaging content for internal channels: o video case studies from colleagues implementing UC o interactive quizzes to test and improve UC knowledge o Ask the Expert calls to help colleagues discuss implementation issues o a themed UC week prior to the start of the progressive roll-out of UC. For Personal Independent Payment (PIP): a dedicated PIP intranet area, with layered content to meet the needs of the wider department as well as those dealing directly with disabled customers a Quick Guide providing high-level information to build understanding and help staff understand the impact on their role and their customers tailored Are You Ready guides equipping staff to offer the best advice a monthly progress update to keep expert colleagues fully informed. All communications were sensitive to the cultural and organisational impact of reform including new job roles, grading and structures.

4 Our aim was to implement the campaign approach for colleagues with detailed evaluation by the end of 2013, and then use the audience insight and learning from Phase 1 to develop our Phase 2 approach. Budget We took a low cost/no cost approach in line with Government communications best practice: utilising our in-house design / development / intranet teams to create and develop content and hosting solutions delivered at no additional cost to the business where needed, using cross government capacity and shared services / video production, working collaboratively with other government departments to get the most VFM for our activities a small team of nine people with no external agency support managed the day-to-day delivery of the campaign. Outputs and outcomes As a result of this innovative and targeted campaign our measurable outcomes are that colleagues understand and can clearly articulate what change means for them, their teams and their customers. This is evidenced in our bi-annual quantitative tracking survey which evaluates DWP staff s perceptions of communications. Conducted mid-april 2013 the results were: 95% had an awareness of welfare reform 86% understood why DWP needs to reform the welfare system. For colleagues affected in the initial phase of welfare reform: 92% understood why DWP needs to reform 70% knew how to find out about how it affected their role. Our targeted Universal Credit communications led to significantly higher levels of awareness and positive engagement amongst colleagues implementing Universal Credit in the Greater Manchester and Cheshire area, where we first launched the service: 98% were aware of Universal Credit (saturation point) 81% felt confident they could explain Universal Credit to claimants 84% knew how Universal Credit will affect their work 75% believed Universal Credit would remove a key barrier to claimants taking a job. 94% were aware of Personal Independence Payment with 80% understanding of the case for change. Our intranet survey in May 2013 also showed that our Universal Credit products were seen as easy to understand and helpful to colleagues who were generally positive that Universal Credit would make a difference to claimants. Product specific evaluation showed that: welfare reform intranet news articles received over 1.1 million views Change&You received 30,000 visits in the first three days of launch PIP information products were downloaded more than 50,000 times.

5 The 2013 Civil Service People Survey showed colleague engagement had also increased by six percentage points in DWP since the launch of the campaign. We have laid strong foundations in Phase 1 of the campaign and we are developing our Phase 2 campaign planning and delivery from 2014 to 2017 driven by insight and evaluation from this earlier phase. Phase 2 involves moving from understanding and engagement in welfare reform to changing behaviours to embed and drive through reforms and improvements in customer service and delivery. We know cultural change is a long-term activity, and our phased approach recognises the hard work and consistent effort needed across all audiences to genuinely move the culture in a large delivery organisation.