Communication to drive employee engagement

Agile communications a critical success factor for global change programme

Atkins a member of the SNC-Lavalin Group, is one of the world’s most respected design, engineering and project management consultancies. The company specialises in major infrastructure projects from aerospace and aviation through to transport, energy and buildings. Atkins is one of the UK government’s leading suppliers and was instrumental in creating the infrastructure for the 2012 Olympics.

Atkins has a programme of work that is focused on looking at ways that digital technologies can help further improve the service that it delivers its clients. As part of this, it is looking at embracing and developing new tools and new ways of working to create an even more collaborative and connected company.

As a global company, Atkins has over 19,000 people spread across 300 offices around the world. Many of these people come from companies that have been acquired over the years so one of the biggest challenges for Atkins is to ensure that employees can collaborate effectively across geographical and industry boundaries.

It was also important to ensure that employees bought into the vision of the company moving forward and felt that they could contribute to the ideas and innovations that are driving this change.

The 2020 Programme

As part of the 2020 Programme Atkins had a number of initiatives designed to get employees collaborating more effectively. These included the creation of Bid-In-A-Box – an online facility to help teams put together bids more efficiently through standard templates, shared content and key learnings. The company also decided to roll out a new collaboration tool that would make it easier for people to create and work through virtual teams.

Bright supported on the communications for the launch of the new services to make sure people were aware of what was available, how to access and use it and where to go for help. The communications also need to be clear and compelling to encourage people to get involved and use the available tools. The communications strategy needed to be agile and comms created, rolled out quickly and needed to align with the branding that had already been created around the 2020 vision.

Bid-in-a-Box: A success story

Bright were able to get a team up and running in just a few days. Working closely with the internal team, lead by Business Transformation Director, Kathie Gilley, the team was able to get a communications plan for Bid-In-A-Box built and approved in less than a week with the first elements of communications toolkits drafted and ready less than two weeks after the programme had been signed off. The team used Bright’s agile marketing methodology to create and test a number of concepts quickly to determine the best approach and worked closely with other suppliers to get the toolkits ready for launch in record time.

The toolkits included video case studies, user guides and FAQs for Bid-In-A-Box. Alongside toolkit and launch materials for the roll-out of the new colloboration tool internally including video and ‘how to’ guides.