Lynn Norbury

Said the following about Laura McLaughlin:

“I am nominating Laura as Rail Manager of the Year because of the remarkable way she has turned Service Quality (SQ) around. Since being appointed to SQ Manager less than a year ago, Laura has injected a positive ‘can do ‘attitude, passion, enthusiasm, strategy with proven results, and collaborative working into the role and purpose of SQ. Now, Northern are considered Industry Lead for Service Quality! Furthermore, she has successfully rooted herself as the anchor of the team creating a happy, trusting, dynamic group who are keen to maintain the momentum that Laura has generated and to ensure that Northern continues to improve, with the customer at the heart of all intentions.

In under a year of appointment into her first Management role Laura faced immediate challenges which included a team of four disheartened SQ Assessors, a stale SQ regime, a relatively immediate change to her direct Line Manager and a growing team of peers. Additionally, joining during the Covid Pandemic made it difficult to integrate with the new team. All four had differing concerns regarding the health and wellbeing of family members and for the effects that working in isolation can bring to mental health. Laura was the pinnacle of support to the team who worked out and about during the Pandemic when many remained at home. This caused some concerns for personal safety however, by keeping to the guidelines and remaining empathetic yet professional, the team hit every target, remained safe and additionally provided a monitor on customer mask wearing for the business to analyse.

Although working in isolation herself, Laura has always been a positive influence on the team never failing to meet each challenge as it presented itself and always going the extra mile to learn, dig deep to generate engagement, find new ways of working and solutions to problems.

Laura displays true determination and ability by tirelessly working long hours to ensure every task is delivered to an exceptional standard whilst successfully embedding as lead to a new team.

Within the early months during lockdown restrictions, Laura took the time to speak to each team member regularly, to learn their individual strengths and weaknesses and to understand their feelings, concerns, and ideas remotely. From these sessions she quickly identified that their knowledge was invaluable to the future of SQ as they were in the unique position of being the only four people to have evolved with SQ since implementation in January 2017. Laura empowered, guided, and grew with the team effectively restoring their faith in the role and reviving their vigour. Laura continues her aim to be the best she can by enrolling on the Leadership Development Horizon course which she is currently working through.

Whilst having a breadth of knowledge of the rail industry Laura has had to learn very quickly the intricacies of SQ. Never afraid to ask, Laura conducted in depth investigations into the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the current SQ regime, identifying holes, raising new items for consideration, building new relationships, and gathering robust information. Using the knowledge of the team and her own perceptiveness to quickly get to the heart of the issue and start the wheels of change for SQ.

Next Laura prepared and delivered well-informed, robust proposals to her internal hierarchy, DFT and RNP which she broke into achievable sections with realistic timescales.

Supported by her strong ability to negotiate and rationalise, the initiatives were agreed and cascaded internally to positively refresh the SQ mindset within the whole business. A deeper dive of the future of SQ continues as does Laura’s relentless motivation and determination to ensure the right choices are made by providing a high level yet detailed account of the initiatives that she is proposing.

During all this Laura works collaboratively with all relevant departments which teamed with her hands on approach enabled her to initiate and conduct site meetings at lower performing stations and took time to visit depots to openly learn their individual requirements/challenges and identify then implement processes that combine each area into an effective support network with positive output.

Additionally, Laura offered camaraderie to the broader team by helping to deliver and embed some of the new customers focussed initiatives that were in their infancy when she joined the team whilst selflessly finding the time to support her direct reports and coach her new team into understanding the path to take to achieve their personal goals for career development or considering retirement.

Laura has created a happy, focused, dedicated team which has already begun to make positive enhancements to the customer journey experience using SQ as the foundations. She founded, gained authority for, and implemented her own initiative of creating and cascading Northern branded backing posters to ensure there is always something bright for the customer to look at even if there is no specific poster on display. Collaboration with the Communications team has seen a monthly poster schedule make improvements to expired posters as everyone is aware of exactly what is appropriate for display.

She was instrumental in initiating and implementing a new set of collaborative meetings involving every appropriate department and chaired these until the new CXBP’s began their roles. These meetings are key to deliver a joined up thinking approach to enhancing the end - end customer journey experience. To support this, the clear effectiveness of her work has resulted in SQ being fully embedded within the business KPIs.

Currently she is working on a pictorial standards manual and a refined SQ question set which she is gathering data from the analysis team to understand the customers current requirements and make changes to the SQ questions to show the customer that we are listening, do care and have their safety, happiness, and comfort at the heart of everything that we do. I hope you agree that she is a worthy contender for this prestigious award.“