Our Clients
Natural England
One Voice, Nine Accents
Executive summary
Asked to help "create an organisation with 2,500 leaders" Couravel designed and delivered a process that built employees' confidence, knowledge and skills in talking about Natural England, creating advocates and "ambassadors" at all levels and in all functions.
The issues
Natural England's is the government's statutory advisor on the natural environment with a wide ranging remit to conserve and enhance the natural world and to reconnect people to it.
This puts Natural England's people in the front line across nine regions, balancing the concerns of communities and visitors, walkers and horse riders, conservationists and farmers; government and industry.
Teams face competing demands and vested interests. They must be seen to provide consistent advice, clear reasoning, sympathetic ears and challenging environmental leadership.
Determined to build an organisation that could deliver this, Natural England chose Couravel to design and deliver a programme that would help people:
- Confidently describe Natural England's purpose
- Understand the principles that guide policy making
- Talk about the organisation and policy messages in their own way, while respecting the policy positions
- Build their networks
- Improve stakeholder management
The approach
We put together two teams to meet these needs.
Our design team worked closely with Natural England executives. We wanted all employees to experience the same workshop as part of our One Voice message, but we needed to ensure different audiences each took valuable learning from the day.
Our delivery team was chosen to implement highly interactive sessions involving customer DVDs, competitions, and over 100 workshops in two months in order to build people's confidence in talking about Natural England to a wide range of different stakeholders.
At a strategic level our approach involved:
- Working with Organisational Development, Policy and External Affairs to create a workshop that was not only about building confidence in speaking to the external world but also about developing a cohesive organisation that is ready to challenge constructively in the outside world and internally.
- Ensuring the one-day workshops were followed up with relevant communication to reinforce the messages.
- Co-facilitating the workshops with regional leaders to send a credible message about the importance of the sessions and to help provide input on more complex policy areas and organisational issues
At a tactical level our solution involved:
- Getting a mixture of employees at every workshop across the hierarchy, job type and legacy organisation to help create networks and a sense of one organisation
- Creating a DVD that showed how the outside world views the organisation and showed high expectations of Natural England.
- Having both serious and fun content so that people enjoyed the day and also felt they had learned from the workshop.
- Working with Organisational Development to identify desired behaviours from leaders so that they way the workshops were run reflected the desired culture
The results
The results of the work were:
- Confidence in advocating Natural England's core purpose to stakeholders increased by 79% between the period immediately preceding progamme delivery and its conclusion
- 94% of Natural England employees agreed they had a core advocacy role following the programme
"A pleasure to work with and we have enjoyed the style and diversity of their team. They've invested in getting to know us and been flexible in developing their product. The scope we gave was incredibly broad and challenging and they've delivered."
Guy Thompson, Corporate Communication Director