Transport for London explain their engagement strategy

This is an excerpt from an interview with Transport for London, who won the Public Sector Award at the 2014 Employee Engagement Awards. In this interview we delve into the company’s approach to engagement across their broad network.

We’ll also be sharing tips & insights at the Employee Engagement Conference in London on 18th September, with talks from inspiring leaders & industry experts, and a chance to network with some remarkable peers, all with the aim to help people realise the power of engaged employees, wherever they are in your journey.

If you had to pick why you think you won the award, what do you think it was?

For me, it’s around engaging with the team and aligning engagement with the business objectives of what not only my teams needs to achieve but also corporately what Transport for London (TfL) needs to achieve.

My team acts as the conduit: the single point of contact for the outside market to engage with the business. We deal with property professionals in regard to building on or next to the railway. It’s about leveraging the outside market to improve not only the commercial aspects for TfL, but the operational benefits as well.

You often get change done to you. That never feels very engaging because you just have to get on with it. I didn’t want that. I wanted the team to be engaged and to find it personal to them and for the team to be able improve what they do. People find it easier to solve problems if you give them the space and the ownership to solve it. It then becomes embedded.

You make the point that your engagement programme has been done without technology. What was the thinking behind this?

What I didn’t want is for us to use the latest technology just for the sake of it. Delivering something with the teams which was relatively quick and easy to do was by far the easiest way to engage them as otherwise we end up polishing things just for the sake of it.

For me, the engagement underneath was the most valuable — that’s a people thing. I hold regular team meetings, which are about 80 strong, and it was about sowing the seeds regarding the journey we needed to take.

You mention that engagement must be rigorously tied to commercial objectives. Why do you think this is so key?

Even though TfL is a not-for-profit organisation we are still a business. I have an operational budget and I have to ensure I get turnover. I have to ensure I am delivering value for money, not only the internal clients I have, but also for the external clients.

We need to make sure everything we do, and every benefit that we can leverage out of the team, not only improves the service we provide but also makes it better value. That value can go back into either an operational benefit or is returned into the business for the customers.

Aside from energy consumption, our biggest bill is staff costs. So improving our value metric against what we do as individuals is vitally important.

From the wider perspective, what reaction has there been from TfL to the success of your engagement programme?

TfL is a huge company and often you can develop a change initiative and develop something which improves your job but no one else other than 15 people out of a workforce of 18,000 will benefit from. After we won the award a number of the questions from the TfL programme board were regarding what we did. I gave them some highlights of things which had benefited our programme.

Yes, there were elements which were very specific to us, but there were other measures which, with a bit of tweaking, could be applied to other departments. This programme isn’t just for me; if it works for others I’m more than happy to share it, which I have done.

Read the full interview on HRZone, or find out more about the North American Employee Engagement Awards and Conference.

You can read more about employee engagement in our #GetEngaged slide deck.