Like many businesses that care for their people, we worked hard to make sure everyone was well set up to work from home during the pandemic. After a brief but worrying increase in productivity, we’ve now dipped well below our pre-pandemic levels. So we need people to return to the office to some degree – and we want them to want to do so.
Help us define our ‘next normal’ with employee well-being at its heart so we maintain our stellar employee engagement scores. Help us believe we can push our productivity and creativity to new heights, so we can deliver Sky’s vision to make every moment magical, everywhere.
Sky Labs is the place where Sky innovation happens. Scientists and engineers think outside the box to generate phenomenal ideas and then invent the software and hardware to turn them into reality. These products — the award-winning Sky Glass for example — are portals to a world of entertainment which supports Sky’s ultimate ambition to offer customers complete control of all their domestic systems via one central device – their TV.
We created six workstreams, focused on the following:
Develop a new way of working plan
Engage Sky Labs people in the plan and the wider business goals
Identify any support needed for the Leadership Team to deliver the plan
Develop and agree a robust new purpose and strategy for Sky Labs
Define and embed a culture which places the customer at the heart of every decision
Identify systemic and structural opportunities to make Sky Labs more efficient
We organised and facilitated the leaders of each work stream to develop solutions against each objective. Gradually we brought their work streams together to take advantage of their co-dependencies and log some quick wins in order to create confidence and momentum.
We shared the purpose and strategy in a truly simple way so that everyone now understands the journey Sky Labs is on and the role they have to play.
We defined ways of embedding customer-centricity and are watching these ideas take hold as we measure their affect on output. Linking all these ideas to Sky’s OKR appraisal model is was a no-brainer in theory, harder in practice. OKRs remain a work in progress and we are supporting leaders in embedding them as standard ways of working.
We used our Strategic Narrative tool to engage and unite everyone with Sky Labs’ purpose, strategy and ambition and to create a place for all these new ideas and outcomes to live.
We launched the narrative at a hybrid event which we conceived with the Leadership Team, scripted, rehearsed and delivered with a live Q&A on our interactive virtual platform.
This was a big moment for Sky. We defined its next chapter whilst recognising the contribution everyone had made to its past. There was a tangible sense of appreciation for the empathy and ambition which the leadership team conveyed.
Sky’s design engineers now embrace flexible working and productivity is on the rise.
In times of change, how you look after your people matters. If you place well-being and people at the heart of what you do, you will develop a competitive advantage. A sense of direction and a clear route toward the next normal are essential tools.
You need a clear strategy to engage people; we have built loyalty and momentum, a real buzz to be back at work, to embrace the new normal (whatever that might be).
Uniting people with purpose underpins everything we do.
