How West Sussex County Council uses a ‘super’ internal communication channel to engage their hard-to-reach workforce

Summary of accomplishments

• Launched within exacting time scale to meet published commitment;
• 1000 active users within the first month and almost 2000 users by the end of the first quarter;
• Company news reaches all users at the same time;
• Two-way communication process begins with simple Interactions (increasing 300% month-on-month)
• 700% increase in employee ideas generated.

Challenge

In December 2018, West Sussex County Council’s (WSCC) Chief Executive Nathan Elvery committed to introducing an app to tackle the challenge of staff engagement. To make it more interesting, the programme had real urgency behind it - it needed to be fast-tracked into operation and launched by the first of April 2019, a memorable but potentially ironic choice.

In reality, the momentum behind the programme had grown throughout 2018. The senior leadership team had already identified that they needed to address the three challenges culture etc... It was one of their three main challenges, and the team realised that to have any chance of transforming services and the communities they served, staff engagement would be critical to their success.

Although, this was not just a top-down driven solution! The 2018 staff conference and several pulse and full staff surveys, identified that council employees were equally hungry for change wanted more information. Workforce feedback consistently asked to hear more about the organisational challenges and changes, but specifically they wanted senior leadership to be far more visible and possibly more importantly, the opportunity to contribute to the decision-making process.

Employees are the council’s most important asset - their contribution is critical to deliver transformation in services that our communities need.
Nathan Elvery, Chief Executive

Client Profile

WSCC is a two-tier english shire county responsible for public services such as education, transport, strategic planning, fire and rescue services, social services, public safety, the fire service and waste disposal. It is responsible for services to a community of almost 860,000 people in an area almost 2000km2 in South East England. 

The transformation team responsible for fast-tracking the app into commission needed to wrestle with three known staff engagement problems:

Problem 1 - a difficult workforce to reach

• Approximately 6,000 Council staff (excluding teachers and education staff based in schools); 
• Spread across a wide geographic area in relatively densely populated region and a large number of locations - such as children and family centres, libraries and fire stations - who may never visit a main hub;
• Providing a broad range of services including highways, social care, waste, fire and rescue and libraries, as well as core corporate services;
• With varying and flexible work schedules, patterns and shifts;
• Who identify with the ‘location organisation’ rather than the county council (e.g. fire fighters identify with the fire service and crossing patrols with their local school) working in some services

Problem 2 - the digitally overlooked workforce

• The very hard-to-reach - around 25% of our staff - who have sporadic access to shared computers (e.g. librarians) or,
• Who may not have any corporate IT equipment to access the organisation’s network or email services or,
• Who may have an extremely limited known digital footprint (e.g. no WSCC or known personal email address)

Problem 3 - outmoded internal communication channels

• Weekly email newsletters only available to those with a WSCC email address;
• Intranet news features open to those with access to our corporate network;
• Printed leaflet system that can be issued with the monthly payslip;
• Team meetings, where information is cascaded but runs the  risk of consistency, filtering and bias problems; 
• Some service specific newsletters, issued by some directorates with different objectives, frequencies and levels of support.

The Big Exchange

WSCC’s wanted to address these issues by focusing their attention on the workforce that current channels couldn’t reach. They called their solution the Big Exchange.

The Big Exchange (BE) is a rebranded version of the Talkfreely app that’s distributed to the council’s workforce via the app stores using the council’s own brand and logo. It offered WSCC a number of immediate advantages over their existing communication channels:

• Communication is real-time allowing the council to distribute alerts - including business resilience messages, such as weather warnings - immediately;
• The channel is available 24x7x365 allowing staff to engage across different work patterns;
• It is available on different digital platforms. Both corporate and personal users can access BE via a browser on their desktop or laptop, or via the app on their smartphone or tablet. It’s their choice;
• It also helps the council to segment their staff into different audiences or groups which allows:
  • the council to target specific messages and content at different groups,
  • the council to create open and closed groups for sensitive information
  • individuals to personalise their experience and filter out ‘noise’;
• It’s also a flexible app that’s easy to configure and control, which helps the council grow or reduce the channel’s focus in line with their evolving communication objectives, strategy and tactics.

Why Us

The Talkfreely team has been supportive, proactive and reactive. They helped us to navigate our way through the launch and onboarding processes, Their expertise in this field and their flexibility to work within the parameters of what can be a challenging sector has been invaluable. Whereas other suppliers may have provided the product and left, their team continues to collaborate with us to make the app as successful as it can be.

Julie Robinson, Project Manager

Talkfreely was chosen because:

• their core product offered significant savings when compared to other off-the-shelf products or developing their own product (in-house or with a third party developer);
• their software consisted of flexible modules that could be:
  • configured to accomodate for cross service involvement and the challenging change culture;
  • enabled and disabled to phase in functionality in line with both their launch plan and future plans;
  • streamlined to help users familiarise themselves with the apps functionality in an organic way;
• the app could be rebranded to seamlessly align with their existing - and familiar - communication programmes;
• their app was one of the few products that treated the hard-to-reach and corporate users equally with responsive mobile and desktop environments and push notifications;
• their support team were based locally and able to support our exacting project timeline.

The results and next phase

On 1 April 2019, the app was launched with first-phase functionality – a news page with corporate information that staff can react with uisng familiar interactions such as ‘likes’ and ‘comments’.  Two weeks later, they launched the ‘Big Conversation’, a free-for-all page that allowed staff to post questions, debates or comment - but importantly also allowed a dialogue to develop as other staff were able to interact. Finally - in the first month -  a small number of polls were included to generate feedback about future functionality on the app and to gather feedback on their existing staff benefits platform. The second and third months, incrementally added a little more functionality - a staff survey and an ideas section for example - but emphasised the need to create a dialogue.

Results at the end of the first quarter were highly encouraging:

1. A third of the employee base (33.5%) are actively using the app
2. And 8% of those active users were recognised as their ‘hard-to-reach’ brigade 
3. The ideas section - although in its infancy - generated a 700% increase (albeit from a very low base) in ideas over their previous system - but more encouragingly accounted for 17.5% of all employee interactions in the month of June.

Although, this is an early peek at the project’s performance, it’s interesting to note - and contrary to preconceived conceptions - that there is a real council workforce appetite to get involved. For example - there were 25200 page views in the first month which means on average, each active user visited over 25 pages of content per month. Pretty good for - in that first month - ‘just’ a corporate news site!

Of course more work is needed to reach more staff (both corporate and non-corporate users), engage those staff in ways that encourage participation and dialogue, and align their engagement behind the council’s need to change and transform services in response to other - evolving - stakeholder expectations. The second phase promises to introduce more functionality based on new modules - but more importantly - the input and ideas of their workforce.

The Big Exchange is helping us to create a modern employee communication plan that reaches, engages and aligns. It’s starting to help us think empirically about what we do - and how we engage our workforce.

Ravi Dhindsa, Head of transformation