Background and challenge
Berry Bros. & Rudd (BBR) faces a strategic challenge. As a leading global wine merchant, the company enjoys a reputation for selling the very best wine but growing competition from wine wholesalers and supermarket chains means that better customer service and greater all-round competitiveness are fundamental to future success. To engage staff with this challenge and the company's response to it, BBR invited Ibis to help.
Approach
The first priority was to measure levels of staff understanding and
connection with existing company goals and strategy. To do this we used
our State of Engagement™ methodology to conduct a full staff survey and
followed it with a series of interviews and focus groups with directors,
managers and staff. The output provided the platform we needed to
develop the strategy in conjunction with a newly-assembled steering group.
The strategy focused on two main areas: clarifying and articulating the
message we needed to communicate and the changes we wanted to bring
about and developing a balanced range of media through which we could
communicate and sustain the message.
Implementation started with a series of all staff presentations followed by
local team meetings, both now firmly established in the communication
calendar. An Intranet and regular email performance update followed and
the company has recently embarked upon an extensive training programme
for all managers to improve the effectiveness of their communication
and dialogue.
Results
Eighteen months after the first survey, we repeated the
State of Engagement™ to measure progress. We found that the number
of champions had increased and levels of indifference amongst the
less engaged had fallen. The survey also helped to set out the engagement
priorities for the year ahead.
