NTA Regional Award Winner, Partnership and Collaboration; Birmingham City Council and Stanton Marris
Birmingham Aims to be BEST

In 2006 Birmingham City Council (BCC) under the direction of Councillor Alan Rudge, Cabinet Member for Equalities and Human Resources and Stephen Hughes the Chief Executive, engaged Stanton Marris a strategic consultancy, to help develop a programme which would improve employee engagement and motivation leading to improved performance and delivery of improved services to the Council's customers and service users.

The vision was ambitious, at the time the Council employed almost 60,000 employees, whilst the tide had started to turn positively following a change of political administration in 2004 and a commitment from Councillor Rudge in his role as the new Cabinet Member for Equalities and Human Resources to ensure people felt supported, valued and heard, there was still much to be achieved. In the summer of 2006 Stephen Hughes took post as Chief Executive, and his vision was to create a world class council. Both Cllr Rudge and Stephen Hughes were committed to the changes but realised there were challenges ahead - not least the challenging transformation programme that the Council was about to embark on; which would result in a shift change in how the council delivers many of its services, making them more efficient and more tailored to the needs of its service users. Key to the success of achieving this was the support of well trained and enthusiastic staff.

Both Cllr Rudge and Hughes wanted council workers who took on responsibility, worked for their customers, used their initiative and worked collaboratively. So BCC teamed up with Stanton Marris a small based consultancy in London with a staff of 23 to help scope and develop a programme and they had a daunting task ahead of them - to create a learning scheme that would create a culture of innovation in all 35,000 of the council's employees (the programme was not initially designed to cover the 25,000 school based staff).

Developing a programme of this complexity required considerable planning, and the partnership of BCC and Stanton Marris spent a year researching, design testing, piloting their ideas and training facilitators, as well as ensuring that the programme would meet the ambitions of Cllr Rudge and the Chief Executive. Finally, at the end of 2006, the Birmingham BEST programme was ready to go.

BEST, standing for Belief, Excellence, Success and Trust works on a cascade principle, Employees were formed into natural teams, who could effect real change. Each group voted a leader, who was then trained to run a workshop for his or her group. From January 2007 onwards, the BEST Leaders began working with their teams (32,000 employees) encouraging innovations and development and putting the initiatives they came up with into action.

BCC organised a series of award events hosted by Councillor Rudge to celebrate the best initiatives put forward by BEST teams and replicated a "Dragon's Den" approach - whereby employees who pitched what the dragons felt would be successful initiatives, could be awarded up to £1,000 in council funding in order that that the initiative can be implemented, this approach has resulted in a number of initiatives being implemented which have had significant impact on teams as well as service users.

Communication about events and successes were supported by newsletters, e mails an intranet page and social networking tools like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. The whole programme cost BCC about £1 million.

Evidence supports the approach taken by the Council - a 2008 survey found that 70% of staff thought BEST was a well managed programme. Two years earlier in 2006, only 24% thought the council was well run. The 2008 survey also showed that 83% felt motivated in their jobs, compared with 56% in 2006, the 2008 survey also showed that 84% of were proud to work for Birmingham City Council.

More than 6,000 ideas coming out of the BEST workshops have been implemented by the council - positively affecting Birmingham residents who have benefited from these initiatives. Examples include a Christmas event for 200 Polish families and a sensory garden open to 60 disabled children.

The programme has since become part of business as usual at BCC. The role of Stanton Marris was to work with Birmingham City Council to develop the programme, the programme was then handed to the Council so that the delivery and on-going development of the programme could be led by the in-house 'Best Programme Team' under the Direction of Councillor Rudge - an approach which has resulted in excellent results for the council

2009 has been a significant year for the BEST programme, the Council has won prestigious awards this year from the 'Municipal Journal', 'PPMA' and the 'HR Excellence Magazine' where 2 awards were won and the 'Gold Award' - awarded to the overall winner of the 16 category winners. In winning the 'Gold Award' the council beat off competition from other public sector organisation and many top private sector companies including Macdonalds, ASDA, TGI Fridays and BP. In addition, two of the programmes BEST Leaders were finalists for the Local Government Worker of the Year Awards 2009.

The programme has become so popular that the BEST team had to run an event ('Engagement 2.0') just to cope with all the councils who are keen to learn how they can fire up their own employees.

Summing up the impact that the programme has had Councillor Alan Rudge said "This programme was always going to be ambitious, but I believe that the results show that the council was right in their brave decision to invest in this programme, and the people of Birmingham that we service are now receiving a substantially better service as a result".

"Although not every employee has changed their behaviour, we have seen a substantial shift in engagement from so many thousands of employees that I believe it is fair to say that we have created a culture of innovation where there was low morale and disengagement before."