Case study

Smiths Group – engagement

The challenge

Smiths’ Global IT team had been transforming its service to reduce costs, achieve economies of scale and improve its service levels. Through the many restructuring and outsourcing phases there was an absence of a defined communications, engagement and change management approach. Smiths needed a breakthrough to really engage their employees and also the business divisions with what they were aiming to achieve and gain support for the remainder of the journey. Negative feelings were manifesting amongst employees and business divisions due to a lack of visibility, communication and engagement around the vision of its Global IT team.

The result

With the help of Ignite, Smiths established a framework for engaging different stakeholder groups, both internally and externally, for existing and future projects. Building the internal capability amongst the leadership team and the business partnering team for engaging stakeholders has resulted in the Global IT team being able to exploit that framework for future projects.

What made it successful

  • Stakeholder engagement – We developed and implemented stakeholder engagement across the global IT team and business divisions. We used outputs from the employee survey to shape messages for leadership and engaged staff in the design of the new global IT organisation, in order to build ownership and commitment to it.
  • Understanding and application of best practice – we brought our experience and understanding of what best practice internal communications and engagement looked like and used this as a basis for building their internal capability
  • Bold and imaginative solutions – we used the Ignite innovation and change approach to explore and deliver breakthroughs for clients. This involved the following:
  • Frame – we created a stretching vision for what best practice communications and engagement needed to look like, and the impact and benefits this would achieve.
  • Illuminate – we developed a real understanding of the current issues through the employee opinion survey, audit of divisional businesses and what vehicles we could exploit to really engage the Global IT team and divisional businesses on the journey to lasting transformational change of the IT service.
  • Create – here we worked really closely and creatively with the leadership team to design different interventions and involved a wide number of people from the Global IT team.
  • Stretch and build – we created a totally new communications strategy and plan to use as a vehicle to deliver the agreed interventions and messages
  • Embed – this is where we made the communications and engagement plan a reality. Establishing a blueprint for content, rhythm, style and tone and embedding the capability within the team to adopt the framework.