Embedding empowerment through behavioural experiments
Industry : Telecommunications
98000
A critical part of the cultural transformation of Openreach’s Fibre Network Delivery division was in enabling their frontline engineers to adopt the new culture that we’d helped them to define.
To do this, we spent time with engineers and cablers to deeply understand the challenges they were facing in shifting to an agile, innovative and autonomous way of working. With several key pain points identified, we partnered with several teams to design targeted experiments. One experiment focused on devolving autonomy to engineers, cutting through the red tape of the regular calls they had to make to their manager between jobs, and freeing them up to do the work they were experts at. This improved team productivity by 14%, but also helped the manager have “the best Monday I’ve ever had”. One engineer even said the changes improved their marriage!
To do this, we spent time with engineers and cablers to deeply understand the challenges they were facing in shifting to an agile, innovative and autonomous way of working. With several key pain points identified, we partnered with several teams to design targeted experiments. One experiment focused on devolving autonomy to engineers, cutting through the red tape of the regular calls they had to make to their manager between jobs, and freeing them up to do the work they were experts at. This improved team productivity by 14%, but also helped the manager have “the best Monday I’ve ever had”. One engineer even said the changes improved their marriage!
The Outcomes
Boosted empowerment to drive motivation, productivity and performance
Increased time frontline staff had to devote to creativity and innovation in their role
Built a scalable blueprint for fostering empowerment across Openreach
67%
Increase in managers’ available time to support their team
150%
Increase in creative freedom to deal with problems
The Strategic Difference
We enabled behaviour change by tackling problems that individual teams personally cared about (making them more likely to take part), whilst prioritising solutions that were scalable.
We demonstrated the measurable return on investment of the experiment, both at a team and organisational level, through regular assessment and pivoting.
Our work speaks volumes