Objective – To embed a unified service culture in the organisation, focusing on front line staff and minimising cost by utilising existing communication methods.
My role – To plan a fully immersive event day to bring to life the unified service culture and ensure content is credible, relevant, memorable and engaging. Influence senior leadership team to fund, promote and support this event (leading by example) and pilot the event using the annual retail conference (adding one day to the itinerary).
Solution – Using the service culture development as a starting point, the principle I worked was that this could not be a corporate event, it needed to resonate with front line staff, it needed credibility and a drive to succeed, so again using the principle of ‘to the people, from the people’ it seemed the best approach was to get a cross functional team of front line staff helped by steering group to (a) create the content and (b) present this, whilst this was risky in the sense that this team had no experience of presenting the passion, drive to succeed and engagement from across the front line staff was intense, so coaching them and supporting them with presentations and film content.
Outcome –This was by far the most engaging conference event Thomson has run. The events were subsequently rolled out to other areas of the business in the same format but updating content as appropriate. The four pillars are a focus for improving service moving forwards and the service culture has encouraged significantly more opportunities to work cross functionally, ask for help to resolve issues or to share success stories.