Why HR put employees in the driving seat in its quest to reinvigorate the company’s culture
Joining an organisation at a time of disruption can offer a unique view of its weaknesses, and for HR director Laura Lewis, who began work at Napp Pharmaceuticals in October 2015 as it went through a significant structural reorganisation, issues with low morale were glaring. Many long-serving staff left during the restructure, a process that led to a lot of ill-feeling and placed time-sensitive pressure on the leadership team to invest in the future vision of the company – or risk losing more staff.
“We had to emphasise that we do have a future, a pipeline and a means of keeping Napp alive,” says Lewis. “From a professional perspective, it was a great time to enter the organisation – because when a company strategy is fundamentally changed there is a real need to take stock of where you are, and confront existing issues.”
Galvanising a disenchanted employee base and creating a sense of company unity demanded an engagement programme that would energise Napp’s 180 employees, less than half of whom are based in the firm’s Cambridge head office. A culture change was essential, but it had to be delivered in an authentic way that brought the leadership team on board and spoke to staff on the ground.
“Employee morale can be a huge issue when launching a big project,” Lewis says. “You can sell a dream or vision to an employee, and in an abstract sense they will believe it is going to happen in the future, but creating an immediate sense of engagement and having staff personally buy into the journey can be much harder, especially when their colleagues and friends have left.”
To make that buy-in a reality, Lewis ensured that staff were involved in developing the vision from the start, with every employee taking part in workshops that gathered thoughts on how to turn Napp into a more inspiring workplace. These generated 33 ideas that Lewis and a 20-strong cross-functional team of ‘firestarters’ worked to make a reality, including an internal magazine, an office chill-out garden room and a more agile appraisals system.
“We deliberately didn’t call it an engagement project,” says Lewis. Instead, the project was captured in one of the five company priorities for 2016, entitled ‘fostering an inspiring workplace’. “Engagement is an entirely personal process. I can’t say what’s going to engage a person, and likewise they can’t make assumptions about what will engage me,” she says. “We didn’t want an HR-led or leadership-driven initiative; we wanted to help staff discover this on their own.”
Fostering a ‘best self’ mindset became a key commitment for the firm, with managers leading workshops with their teams on how to weave personal improvement into their working lives. For some, this meant exercising before work, while others took 30 minutes before every meeting to clear emails.
Annual and mid-term appraisals were scrapped, and replaced with a programme for sharing ongoing feedback. Managers were given accountability for delivering rolling, flexible feedback to their teams, and the firestarter team began developing a performance assessment app for Napp employees working remotely around the UK. “We wanted to empower our managers by saying: ‘You know your people, and we trust you to be responsible for them,’” says Lewis.
Managers were initially resistant to Lewis’s ideas for engaging with employees – “that negativity surprised me; I didn’t expect such a pushback” – but a year on, she is convinced of the positive impact on Napp’s company culture, despite evidence of its success being largely anecdotal.
“I know it’s working, but engagement is a difficult thing to quantify,” she says. “From a metrics perspective, it’s hard to pinpoint; survey results have been positive, but the real success was that people began talking to each other across functions. Informal conversations were taking place between colleagues who would never usually interact, people were using the garden spaces we had created, and there was a palpable difference in the office environment – a real buzz.”
Informal feedback will continue to play the most significant role in measuring success, says Lewis. “We don’t want to rely on metrics to tell us how our organisation is feeling,” she says. “Our value lies in talking to people. Communication has underpinned everything about the process, and without it we wouldn’t have succeeded; that conversation about how individuals work to continually improve themselves is just engagement under a different name.”