Recruitment
“I would like to nominate our fabulous internal communications team at Greater Anglia. This is a small team of fantastic people who do so much for our people and who it would be great to see be recognised, as they are normally the ones behind the scenes helping all of us!
The team work against the clock all year round keeping us all informed and engaged in daily news. On top of this, they organise fabulous events including a fun summer day out and an annual internal awards event to recognise our stars of the year. What’s more, each year these events continue to just improve and develop from the year before. 2018 included a great fun filled festival by the races in June and an award event this year that has allowed us all to nominate one of our own colleague awards, judged by the people themselves – engaging and utilising our social learning platform voting tool to its best!
Our January leadership conference leaped forward in innovation including a silent disco style learn event organised by them. Their follow up documentary (for all who couldn’t attend) was inclusive and professionally communicated out soon after the event.
The team have really collaborated with all of our departments to raise so many different internal profiles. They are always looking to engage our colleagues to bring their own ideas on-board on how to improve how we all communicate to each other. They do this via lots of listening visits and the first new internal comms audit. They do actually follow up on those great ideas too, keeping our internal comms innovative, positive and fast moving.
The team have been pivotal in raising the profile of our own L&D social learning platform, by launching the colleague forum strand of this tool and uploading lots of exciting news and bite-size videos about; stations, depot change, charity events, competitions and regular progress on our new trains, hot off the press from Switzerland and beyond! They also now proactively video and edit relevant meeting highlights, including our monthly leadership team who personally share their news in 90 seconds - which go down a storm! They fully support and lead on L&D’s drive to visually engage people in learning, achieving this by delivering videoed news and photo stories too. They always jump to promote our learning and development activities, which is a massive help to our team in helping others to develop and have easy access or sign-posts to our tools. Their help promoting our Fuse social colleague forum already has 31% of GA’s people actively using the site in a short span of time since its launch earlier this year. Our stats show that many even access the tool over weekends via their personal devices too, just to keep up to date with GA news!
I have been so impressed by this team's continuing support to my own L&D team that I can’t thank them enough for their commitment and passion to the role that they do, I would be lost without them!“
“The Internal Communications team at Greater Anglia are doing an amazing job. They have significantly raised their profile in the past year, as well as noticeably contributing to a recent rise in engagement from 69% to 75%.
The two-person team have recently completed the first audit within the company, doing it all in-house. This included an anonymous survey, voxpops, interviews and focus groups, saving the company £30,000 and improving engagement around internal communications. After the audit, they saw a marked increase in engagement amongst the colleagues involved.
The team manage the MD’s weekly newsletter, an internal 10 issue per year magazine, a specialised newsletter for teams going through significant change in Norwich, all colleague and all manager emails, the intranet, and act as trusted advisors to the leadership team.
Over the past year, the team have gone from strength-to-strength, acting as partners to every area of the business, delivering more than just static, one-way communication. The team have worked hard at removing the previous perceptions of “us and themâ€.
Introducing the organisation’s first ever social platform as well as video updates, including Director summaries every period, the team are truly embracing modern, innovative ways to keep colleagues aware of everything happening in the business. The social platform is achieving 1,000 views per day. Monthly video updates from Directors have proved especially popular, receiving 100 views within the first day alone.
Moving towards more campaign-based work, the team have recently completed a Focus on Five, five-week campaign where new content was created every day aligned to the five business focuses. The content included interviews, video, news articles, surveys, posters and engagement events. They created supporting intranet banners and posters in-house, and filmed videos, including interviews. 77% of colleagues read all or some of the articles or got involved with the events, and the campaign was rated 9 out of 10 by colleagues.
Other campaigns include an integrated campaign with the safety and external comms team for passengers taken ill which has been an unmitigated success. Between April 2016-March 2017 passengers being ill on trains caused us 10,359 delay minutes and 90 train cancellations. With the integrated campaign, which included creating tailored communications internally by the IC team, and externally by the media team we managed a year-on-year reduction of 50% for delays and cancellations attributed to passengers being ill on trains. The IC team supported awareness by creating posters, featuring content in the magazine, commissioning videos for specific audiences – including drivers, conductors and customers and creating a simple fold-out guide for colleagues on what to do in this situation.
Within the rail industry there are some Industrial Relations disputes. The team work strategically and both proactively and reactively to ensure sensitivity and confidentially are kept.
The Internal Comms team also organise three large events per year – a leadership conference, an awards ceremony and a summer festival. The 2018 conference was powerpoint-free and interactive with the theme of ‘A Journey to the Future’ to align with the organisations transformation introducing an entire new fleet of trains – the biggest project in rail franchising history. Along with the conference, the team created a documentary film which was deemed ‘the best piece of internal communication seen in recent years’ by a supplier.
The internal magazine, Our Journey, has a reach of 83% of colleagues reading every issue. The top descriptions from colleagues is that it is ‘easy to read’, ‘a conversation starter’ and ‘inspiring’. One area of significant improvement came from an October 2017 survey, where only 33% said the magazine was “relevant†and 14% “aimed at meâ€. To tackle this, the IC team went through a specialised project, including focus groups with professional Editors and Designers, to overhaul the content. A consistent flatplan was introduced, as well as articles that would affect all areas, such as “Day in the Life†pieces, “Going Social†pages, and a “Your Journey†section, which features a colleague’s story in their own words. These changes have proved so popular, these stories are booked out until March 2019, with progressively more colleagues submitting additional stories to the magazine. In October, the team roughly received two-three colleague stories a month, and now receive in excess of 30.
Creating a communications and engagement action plan, the team have helped the Train Presentation team move from Silver towards Gold for their Investors in People award. This included working collaboratively by conducting interviews, writing articles that included colleagues at every level and taking part in “day in the life†articles at various depots. On top of this, the IC team organised a cleaning week where managers volunteered their time in the morning and evening peaks to help clean trains and stations to raise the profile of the team and increase awareness of what the team do.
With the annual survey scoring ‘leadership’ as the area of the business needing most improvement, the team tackled the challenge head on. They assisted in the launch of a Golden Ticket scheme where senior leaders recognise colleagues who are delivering great customer experience. This both increases the visibility of the leadership team and celebrates the successes of customer facing colleagues.
The awards ceremony, the Everyday Legend Awards, has seen a significant increase in nominations and perception, following a campaign by the team to promote that any colleague could nominate – not just managers. The volume of nominations saw an increase of 108% from 2017 to 2018.
The team always embrace and encourage change, that is why they sit on the committee for the internal UP women in rail group. This includes hosting networking, speed coaching and inspirational speaker events. The group has been featured in a Passenger Transport magazine, interviewed by BBC Radio Essex and a gatefold spread in Our Journey magazine that was asked to be used in promoting female drivers by our Drivers union ASLEF. The IC team are in charge of branding and advertising the group, and have designed posters and commissioned specialist pins, posters, balloons and notepads to support the group at events.
The team are also working on a suicide prevention campaign alongside the Samaritans and Land Sheriffs, and a Health and Wellbeing yearly communications plan.“
“Well I'd like to shout from the rooftops just how good the Internal Comms Ladies are at Greater Anglia
There publications especially the Journey Magazine of which they create is just brilliant,
You develop a thirst that someone could take a picture of as you await the next edition of the Journey magazine too!
They have created and overhauled the Journey Magazine to such a high standard you have to see to believe it is one of the most Diverse and Informative publications that encompasses everyone on the Greater Anglia network
Uniting everyone all in one place ,
I feel very proud of all the Internal Comms Team they really do an Outstanding job and would like to show my appreciation through this nomination
Good Luck Internal Comms“
“I want to nominate the Internal Comms team at GA. When I worked at GA, it felt very much "us and them", the magazine was relatively stale and not really connecting with the staff. I left just after a restructure and at the time it seemed things were starting to improve. A year later, it's clear everything has fallen into place and there is a marketed improvement. Having recently visited a GA station for a meeting, I read some recent copies of the "Our Journey" internal magazine, and was impressed with how fresh it felt. It feels more engaging than it used to be with some genuinely interesting articles. When seeing how the team acted with station staff it was clear that the team were far more approachable, friendly and genuine - no "us and them" barriers anymore. They’re a young team with fresh ideas but shouldn’t be underestimated. I’m really impressed with how the team has changed in the year I’ve been gone.“
“I have nominated the Internal Communications team at Greater Anglia largely because of their successful relaunch of their internal magazine, and the engagement efforts accompanying this. As an editor, who previously worked managing the communications of a Network Rail infrastructure project, I was invited to attend a focus group to give feedback on the existing magazine and suggest ways to improve it. I found this a great opportunity to really get to the heart of what an internal publication should focus on and was really pleased with the ideas the team came up with in response to our comments. I also think it is great how the team used the advice of both industry experts and on-the-ground staff and coordinated these responses to create a new design that is both professional and accessible. Having seen the progress made on the magazine, and the new design, I believe it will make a huge difference to engaging staff with the internal comms team and wider company initiatives.“
“I am nominating the utterly deserving Internal Comms Team at Greater Anglia (GA) because they represent a new era of communications for the rail industry. With a small and mighty team of two, they are catapulting GA's staff engagement into the 21st century with a variety of new mediums that have never been tried or even thought about before about at GA. The team are not afraid to try new things and have utilised our new social learning platform to bring the faces of our Directors and exec to our smartphones for their updates, meaning everyone across the business is able to experience bitesize and accessible briefs, unlike the previous methods that would reach very few. For those that like the more traditional paper Comms, they have completely re-vamped the company magazine ‘Our Journey’, bringing to life the day-to-day activities of our colleagues across the whole patch and variety of departments.
On top of the great work the GA Comms team do day in day out, they also organise and execute brilliantly two management conferences and a summer festival each year, both of which are not only engaging and informative, but fun too!
Karen & Sophia are also on the committee of GA’s women’s group UP, using their influence and variety of Comms channels to give exposure to the initiative which is invaluable and the group would not have had such success in its formative year without them.
I am personally amazed at the amount of great work that comes out of a team of only two people and this clearly illustrates how driven and passionate the team are about great internal communications to improve our experience as colleagues every day.“
“Karen & Sophia look after our internal comms both on our intranet and also produce a monthly magazine called “Our Journeyâ€
We have three main events each year, our Family Fun Day, Leadership Conference & our Legends Awards which recognises talent internally. These events are delivered in a creative and fun environment which have solely been pre planned by both Karen and Sophia and are always a resounding success.
Creating structure and framework they actively engage with all colleagues involving them early on in the design and the content of our internal comms.
Karen & Sophia always listen to our colleague’s ideas and any concerns and ensure that we are always kept up to date and informed.
Karen & Sophia clearly demonstrate our organisation’s vision and live & breathe our values and behaviours interacting with others and offering support where required, this ensures that our colleagues find it easier to communicate effectively via all channels.“
“The team are going places, having revamped the internal Our Journey magazine and come up with innovative new ideas to keep staff informed, such as by creating a new bulletin dedicated solely to the Norwich area.“
“Saturday night was a great evening and we enjoyed it more than last year. The comedian was truly funny without any smut, and we all seemed to gel at the table. Our thanks to you for the hospitality and looking after us so well.”
Latest Twitter Updates
Follow us @RailStaffAwards