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The internal brand: successful cultural change and employee empowerment Jo Causona a Director of Business Strategy, Brandsmiths, London, UK

To cite this Article Causon, Jo(2004) 'The internal brand: successful cultural change and employee empowerment', Journal of Change Management, 4: 4, 297 — 307 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/1469701042000259631 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1469701042000259631

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Journal of Change Management,

Vol. 4, No. 4, 297 – 307, December 2004

The internal brand: successful cultural change and employee empowerment

JO CAUSON Director of Business Strategy, Brandsmiths, London, UK

ABSTRACT In common with many well-established organizations, City & Guilds has had its fair share of challenges but has continually evolved, remaining just as relevant today in training today’s workforce as it was 125 years ago. In this article, Jo Causon, former head of group marketing at City & Guilds, takes us through the process of managing the change programme within the organization as it rebrands and repositions itself in the marketplace. She is a firm believer in the brand as a business tool and in empowering all staff to support embedding the organization’s values and driving through culture change.

KEY WORDS: City & Guilds, brand, strategy, vision, values, change

Introduction

Every organization has to deal with change, responding to the ever-quickening pace of modern life as well as to the increasing demands of customers, consumers and employees.

The United Kingdom’s leading vocational examinations body, City & Guilds, too, has had its fair share of transformations over the years. Recently the organization has embarked on a comprehensive change programme. As part of this, it is embarking on rebranding and repositioning itself in the marketplace to keep ahead in an increasingly competitive arena.

Part of the challenge facing City & Guilds has been working out how to communicate to the outside world, the breadth and depth of its work-related qualifications and learning support, as well as ensuring that it is still perceived to be relevant to providing the UK workforce with the skills required.

1469-7017 Print/1479-1811 Online/04/040297 – 11 # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd. DOI: 10.1080/1469701042000259631

Correspondence address: Brandsmiths, 77 St Martin’s Lane, London WC2N 4NN, UK; Email:

[email protected]

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City & Guilds has always been at the vanguard of change, and has led the development of many educational initiatives. It has always had a pioneering zeal and today is no different. The organization is undergoing significant change with the appointment of a new Director General three years ago. There is a renewed focus on City & Guilds’ purpose, mission, direction and general strategy.

City & Guilds – preparing for change

City & Guilds is the UK’s leading vocational examinations body delivering work-related qualifications in over 500 subjects. These range from information technology (IT) and business to retail and construction. Each year, the organization issues over 1.2 million certificates worldwide while a further one million people work towards a City & Guilds qualification at any one time. City & Guilds international vocational qualifications are recognized by employers and educational institutions in 120 countries worldwide.

The organization – a charity – was founded in 1878 to address a serious skills shortage in the UK and 126 years later is still tackling skills shortages, although these are of a different nature fuelled largely by external change – the increasing speed of communication and globalization. Over this time City & Guilds has grown, changed and developed in a number of ways, responding to its environment, keeping pace with the massive changes and challenges in the world of work.

City & Guilds understands that today’s employers increasingly require multi-skilled individuals, capable of juggling numerous tasks and responsi- bilities. Employees meanwhile, increasingly favour varied and short-term careers over jobs for life, and require flexible working hours and conditions, and personal as well as professional development. City & Guilds regards its mission as providing the tools with which to create a flexible workforce with multiple skills that can be transferred between roles, jobs, companies, industry sectors and even countries.

Until recently the UK’s education arena has largely been protected from the harsh realities of commercialism and consumer branding. But as learners and employers are increasingly being offered a broader choice of qualifications and training, there is a need for organizations such as City & Guilds to rise to the challenge.

Lately, there has been a good deal of governmental, public and press focus on the UK’s education sector. Commercial bodies are increasingly becoming involved in the building and running of UK school. Moreover, the UK government is concerned to address the identified skills shortages facing UK PLC in 2010. A UK government quango, the National Skills Taskforce, highlighted in a report produced in June 2000 that, despite the creation of two million additional jobs by 2010, predominantly requiring qualifications at GCSE/high school level to undergraduate level respectively, there will only be half a million more young people than in 1985. Consequently, the bulk of these jobs will have to be filled from existing adults of working age, a third of whom – around nine million people – currently lack basic level qualifications.

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The organization has ambitious plans and its vision is of a world in which individuals and organizations can access the skills needed for their economic well-being. There is a strong feeling that the services City & Guilds provides are of incalculable value both to individuals and to society as a whole. It is necessary, however, for the institution to remind itself from time to time and rekindle this particular flame. All organizations need to focus in on what drives them and continually remind themselves of the positives arising from their work and City & Guilds is no exception. Perhaps it is even more important for an organization whose primary motivation is not for profit to be more focused on why the world is a better place because it exists.

The aim is to turn this vision into reality by becoming a world-leading provider of qualifications and learning support. In order to deliver this the organization is undertaking a number of cultural change initiatives to deliver the knowledge and skills that benefit individuals, communities, companies and national economies. This is being driven through a challenging new five-year corporate plan, which is currently in its third year.

Two important workstreams within the corporate plan entitled ‘vision’ and ‘empower’ relate to branding and the employees respectively. The plan is to improve the organization’s productivity and efficiency through the management, development and retention of highly motivated and skilled staff and by asserting the benefit of the brand to ensure the institution is positioned as the leading vocational education and training body.

The work undertaken in these workstreams is essentially driving through the culture change, moving the organization from a hierarchical structure to one where all staff are empowered to challenge and truly make a difference – without this climate of innovation it would not be possible to deliver this ambitious plan.

The City & Guilds brand is being used as the masthead for this activity.

What is the reason for doing this?

Without doubt, embarking on a rebranding programme is a long-term commitment. It is not something that will happen over a period of several months or even a year; it is never over and is an ongoing process that requires continual reinforcement and tenacity. As the surrounding world changes in reaction to an organization’s activities, so it must continue to press forward to the future it is building for itself and those involved with it.

Establishing the link between the business model and brand strategy is critical (see Appendix 1). Brand is one of the key ways that any organization actualizes its business aims and ambitions. It is a way of connecting people to the organization, and opening up a platform for dialogue and exchange.

True branding goes to the very core of any organization. It provides a powerful tool that can unite and galvanize the entire organization, and help reinforce and promulgate the key business goal of differentiation and customer satisfaction. Why? Because a cohesive internal branding programme does give power to the people, it is an enabler that releases the creativity fast performing and growing organizations need. It equips the organization to get things right more of the time, and also increases efficiency and therefore productivity.

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A word of caution – an important point needs to be fully understood. Any management team thinking of treading this path must think carefully. Once unleashed an internal branding programme cannot be stopped, so it should not be embarked on unless it is intended to see it through. Secondly, it is necessary to think about how this is going to be made part of the institution’s fabric, a natural part of how the organization thinks, feels and acts. So many initiatives of this nature fizzle out and therefore leave the staff feeling demotivated, even cynical.

Great organizations have a number of things in common. They share values with their customers and employees, make and keep promises, are distinctive and relevant, exert influence, depend on everyone being involved and continually reinvent themselves.

Many organizations undertaking a rebranding activity spend too much time on the external face of the organization, but failure to get it right internally will result in the external becoming nothing short of wallpaper, papering over the cracks.

Internal rebranding is a long-term, high-risk dependency strategy that takes guts, commitment and buy-in from all stakeholders; it is not just the province of the marketing department. Essentially internal branding represents the spirit and culture of an organization.

Everyone within the organization needs to be engaged in the business; yet it is a fine line between providing enough structure and allowing enough flexibility and scope in the fabric to give staff the freedom to live and grow in their roles.

Objectives of City & Guilds rebranding work

(1) Unite the organization behind one brand. (2) Align the culture so that everyone within the organization understands the

brand proposition and its relevance to their individual activities. (3) Re-establish and re-energize City & Guilds as the leader in its field. (4) Embed the new vision, mission and values into the organization. (5) Build the brand model on which to develop both business objectives and

brand objectives, so they become one. (6) Develop the staff to enable them to deliver the brand at every level in all

they do.

Work began in the boardroom, including members from the senior executive team. There was an initial brand strategy workshop, where the brand model was developed; and attention was paid in particular to the vision, mission and values as this model runs to the very core of the business and must be in harmony with the business objectives.

The importance of achieving buy-in at this level cannot be underestimated. Without it the work that is done throughout the organization can unravel quickly, once the going gets tough. This brought some initial challenges. Some changes were made to the initial work and there was much discussion around the need to balance the heritage of a successful organization of 126 years and the challenges of the twenty-first century. From this work the terminology of the ‘modern classic’ was born, in essence keeping the institution’s history but bringing modernity.

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The four values of ‘integrity’, ‘excellence’, ‘innovation’ and ‘engagement’ started to take shape.

Once there was high-level agreement it was quickly rolled out across the organization through a number of brand workshops at all levels to test first thoughts on values. At this stage some changes were again made to the values. Just as the management team needs to feel comfortable with any adopted value set, the staff must also. They, above anyone else, will be responsible for bringing the values to life, and often it is they that have the primary contact with the outside world. This is an important part of the process, if the management wants staff to really live these values it has to be ensured that they are comfortable with them, helping employees to know the value they bring to this process is essential.

It can also be useful to involve staff, as the process of socializing (getting people comfortable with the brand and what it means for them as an individual) the idea of using a brand in this way is often new to many. Most staff think of brand as the province of marketing, and need to be shown how they are just as influential in building the brand as any piece of marketing communications.

Strategy

The strategy was to unite the organization in one direction under the essence of the brand – ‘skills for a brighter future’; this has an outward face and equally an internal meaning, so all employees could relate and understand the relevance.

A programme was developed with a core brand team established from the Marketing, Learning and Development, Human Resources and Business Excellence departments.

To ensure that there was representation from across the business, and so that every part of the business was involved and more importantly engaged in the process, 50 brand champions were recruited from all levels from across the organization. These were mostly volunteers, although in one or two instances people were picked who were known to be influential amongst their peers. The champions were also screened to ensure that there was a mix of experience and some fresh faces.

These brand champions were the evangelists, who understood the business and had a good working knowledge of their particular areas. Also a support mechanism to assist the champions was put in place through a buddy arrangement with the brand team. The brand champions not only helped the management push information and thinking out into the organization at large, but also helped them keep track of what was going on.

Tactics

The critical part of this work is developing manageable stages; it is essential to develop a process where the team can see the beginning and the end. So the brand team accepted that the work would take broadly 18 months, but this would be defined in three stages to enable the management to do a reality check at the end of each stage, and to establish whether each stage had been sufficiently embedded.

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Stage One: The Education Phase

This took the form of working with the brand champions throughout the business, through presentations and a toolkit. Giving tools to aid the process is important to ensure consistency and a series of step-by-step handy hints were produced. A basic presentation was given, explaining what the City & Guilds brand was and how the values should be used as a measure of defining what sort of organization it was becoming. This activity was encouraged at team meetings, or at any time the teams gathered as groups, both informally and formally.

The team gathered and publicized as many examples as it could as to where the organization and individuals within it were really upholding the brand values. As part of this process a dose of realism was also applied. Things do not change overnight, so a positive approach is important. The values are not there to set a standard for individuals, they are a yardstick to measure the organization by.

Stage Two: The Identification Phase

This again used the brand champions, to work with their specific areas of the business to identify what was ‘on’ and ‘off’ brand. This broadly fell into two areas; the culture (how the institution behaves and how the staff treat each other and people outside the organization); and the institution’s processes and services and products it supports. Each brand champion was given a proforma to work with their business areas to collect information; this was then relayed to the brand team.

Once the feedback had been received from across the organization, the outputs were categorized in order that the team should tackle those areas that needed greatest support first.

Clearly the board and senior executive were involved throughout this phase – notably as there were some resource issues arising from the changes identified as necessary by the champions.

Stage Three: The Implementation Phase

There were a number of areas that had been identified that needed attention. These were broadly in the following areas: communication, resourcing and planning. It was again important to apply a structured approach.

Firstly a process of quick wins was identified and then the brand champions were asked to tackle the first three areas to address the deep-rooted concerns of the organization, namely, communication and resourcing issues.

At this stage cross referencing was undertaken with other corporate plan projects to ensure no duplication was taking place and to enable the team to dovetail with other workstreams. This serves to extend the process deeper into the organization.

Examples include using the organization’s competency framework to ensure the values were being embedded in the appraisal and development model (see Appendix 2), ensuring that training and development programmes encapsulated not just task but behavioural skills.

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The induction process was altered to include an introduction to brand and the values and work on internal communications was undertaken to simplify language and reduce the dependency on meetings, email and phone messaging.

The organization’s reward and recognition programme is also under de- velopment to ensure that employees are given credit not only for doing their jobs well but also for being good ambassadors for City & Guilds.

The implementation phase is important; there is a need to focus on key issues to allow employees to see progressive movement and to deal with what is causing the most concern as a priority. The aspect that is critical is that staff are truly empowered to make the changes, locally within their own teams.

Other activities that were undertaken in conjunction with the brand champion work

The work of the champions and the role of the brand team was regularly reviewed. The brand team started to bring in other activities, for example, the alignment of visual materials and the modernization of logo. They also began to think about integrating the organization’s external communications to support the reposition- ing of the brand, appointing a new public relations (PR) agency, a new design agency and a new advertising agency. A large part of the selection of these agencies was to enable synergy with the values of the organization.

A Mixture of Mediums Used

Internal communications were developed such as: Intranet, internal magazine, weekly news and notices, email bulletins, ambient publication of values (noticeboards/values), a brand book and corporate plan folder. Also, a brand toolkit was established on the Intranet. Much of this work placed emphasis on what this meant for the individual employee and for teams within the business.

Communication is critical and every month there was some form of communication to the whole organization from either a brand champion, the brand team, a senior manager or a member of the board.

A new scheme called ‘living the values award’ was developed for rewarding people within the organization who, through their behaviour and work, had demonstrated themselves to be exemplars of living the brand values. During the latter half of 2002 over 50 people within the organization were rewarded with a £30 gift voucher. They were nominated by work colleagues.

Another scheme that was introduced (called Brainwaves) provided a mechanism for anyone within the organization to put forward any innovative ideas that they had for improving the business – whether it be saving costs, improving systems or making the workplace a better environment in which to work. Suggestions are screened by members of the organization and ideas are then implemented. Everyone who puts forward an idea that is of merit is rewarded.

In September 2002, there was a brand launch to all staff within the organization. This involved over 500 staff at the Café Royal in London from across the UK and also

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from City & Guilds’ international offices. The event was to celebrate the launch of the new visual identity and the positioning of the values and the brand work. People from across the organization were encouraged to discuss how they had found the programme and what they were doing in their own areas to embed the new culture.

Contingencies and advice

It is important for chief executive officers (CEOs) to keep checking and reiterating, to offer a lot of encouragement, to find out the difficult areas and to send the experts in. They should always be prepared to do the job themselves. Time is the biggest opponent, as it takes much longer than they think. However, they should not be put off by this, as it is better to take longer than rush the job and become superficial.

CEOs should be prepared to reiterate and also to be tough! They should demonstrate good role models and celebrate the success in every way they can from simple praise and thanks to financial rewards so that they are always reinforcing high performance and behaviour.

CEOs should be comfortable with living with chaos. If they are truly encouraging people to take control and make change happen, then they might not always be comfortable with some of the plans. They should encourage innovation but manage it.

Senior managers should be used tactically. The benefit of having the Director General of City & Guilds stand up at key moments and encourage people to continue in their efforts cannot be overestimated.

Results

At City & Guilds, the results have been tracked through feedback from champions and also employee survey. As part of this process the organization is constantly reviewing and reporting to board and Director General.

It is gratifying to see that in the latest employee survey 72% of all staff state that they understand the values.

75% of employees surveyed claimed they understood the objectives of the corporate plan while 74% stated they understood how their work contributed to achieving the corporate plan.

Since March 2004 a further 22 employees have been awarded a ‘Living the values’ award, again nominated by work colleagues for exemplary behaviour. The types of examples range from taking on additional roles to support and maintain the integrity of the team and its outputs to external praise when resolving complex problems outside of their day-to-day remit.

To date, 135 ‘brainwaves’ have been submitted to an internal team/project board, made up of staff at all levels within the organization. Of these, 55 are being implemented or under review. Examples of activities that have been implemented range from the working environment to supporting customer improvements.

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In essence, cultural change takes time and there is a need to constantly encourage and maintain enthusiasm – this takes a good deal of commitment at all levels within the organization.

Summary

In summary, CEOs need to be prepared and to have their plans well laid. The key to any initiative is to know where it will lead, to have thought carefully about the journey and not to be easily deflected when adversity strikes which it surely will.

Most people will resist change. Doing things in the old way is more comfortable – sometimes easier. CEOs need to help and encourage their staff through change, and to assist them when they run into difficulties for whatever reason. It is necessary to make them believe in themselves, to understand that change is not only necessary but also beneficial, and that employees have the power in their hands to build a future for themselves. In the case of City & Guilds, that future is tied up with the future well-being of millions of people around the world who depend on the organization to help them progress towards a better future, and maybe along the way, become personally fulfilled.

Finding ways of inspiring employees therefore to raise their game and find their way around the difficulties that beset them as the organization strives to change is as important as the infrastructure one puts in place to support the change as it happens.

Appendix 1:

The key elements of our brand model

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Appendix 2: Key elements of the competency framework

Acting with

integrity

Engaging

with others

Being

innovative

Striving for

excellence

Core competencies

(þmin 2 others)

Generic managers

(þmin 2 others)

People managers

(þ2 others)

Adaptability 3 3

and change

Business focus 3 3

Communication 3

and impact

Continuous learning, 3 3

sharing knowledge

and expertise

Customer focus 3 3 3 3

Delivering results 3 3

Influencing others 3

Innovation 3 3

Leading others 3 3 3

Managing and 3 3

developing others

Planning and 3 3 3

reviewing

Solving problems and 3 3 3

making decisions

Vision and strategy 3

Working with others 3 3 3

J .

C a u so

n 3 0 6

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Notes on contributor

Jo Causon is now Director of Business Strategy at Brandsmiths. During the merger of CGU and Norwich Union, she managed a team which supported the brand development, identity and positioning. Until recently, she was head of Group Marketing for the educational brand, City & Guilds. Reporting to the board she was responsible for strategic marketing development, including group brand strategy, corporate plan and marketing intelligence. This has included a far- reaching rebranding programme with its focus on the internal and external positioning of the brand.

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