Train operator, Greater Anglia, needed help with its internal communications strategy. The communications team felt they weren’t being brought into conversations with the senior team early enough and wanted to bring a fresh injection of innovation to their work.
Understand, diagnose and fix
With so many changes taking place in the industry, Greater Anglia wanted to explore the effectiveness of the internal communications function and investigate how to improve communication across the organisation. We conducted one-to-one stakeholder interviews, as well as group sessions with key stakeholders. We also reviewed the online and offline channel matrix, discovering a lack of long-term strategy, misaligned communication and a need to restructure the communications team.
We led a full-day workshop to share our feedback and channel review. The action plan included recommendations about developing more clarity around roles, addressing employee confusion, building a clear employee value proposition and increasing listening. With a strong focus on business strategy, in the workshop we reworked internal communication channels. We continue to work with the team on longer-term fixes to support both the organisational strategy and the communications strategy.
A leader’s experience of The Field Model™ (Karen McCann, Senior Internal Communications Manager)
“Our business was experiencing a mass of chaos from industry changes, the fallout of COVID and restructuring programmes. It was making communications complex, unfocused and unorganised. Through applying The Field Model™ with Jenni, we were able to pinpoint and understand areas we could make improvements. Jenni conducted one-to-one interviews, focus groups and channel research to diagnose our problems.
We discovered a lack of a business vision and strategy for customers and colleagues, as well as the need to re-envisage the communications team structure, channels and strategy. We are currently at the fix stage where we will be taking our plans to the board for its support before applying the new strategy and plans. For our small internal communications team, it’s been a really productive experience with all team members being involved and playing a part. We’ve all been on the journey together and it has been really motivating and inspiring. Working with Jenni has been a fantastic experience. Not only is she an expert, but she is also friendly and down to earth. We can’t thank her enough for her support.”
If you’d like to find out more about The Field Model, it’s described in detail in Jenni’s book, Influential Internal Communication. You can also listen to the podcast episode on The Field Model.
