Driving change through leadership

28 December 2011

ORC International interviews Claire Bassett, Chief Executive of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), about the organisation’s major culture change

The CCRC is a public sector organisation that examines evidence when miscarriages of justice are suspected. Its 90 employees are highly skilled specialists in their fields.

ORC International conducts the CCRC’s employee engagement research and provides concise post-survey data reports and comments analysis. These have helped the team to fully understand the results, so they can take appropriate actions. Two years ago, Claire Bassett joined the Commission as Chief Executive after a long period with no-one in that role.

The CCRC was the overall winner of this year’s prestigious ORC International Employee Engagement Award.

Before you joined as Chief Executive, what was the employee engagement story at the CCRC?

In short, we had done very little around employee engagement. We didn’t have a strong management team, and there was no clear leadership in place. There had been a number of quite tricky people-related issues and there wasn’t a leadership structure in place that was able to respond appropriately. They were dealing with difficult issues like redundancies; a unionised dispute was developing; and talks of strikes were rife. It was a very difficult time, the leadership was very disparate and there was no sense of ownership over staff.

How difficult was it for you to come in and re-evaluate things?

It was a very good time for me to come in. People still cared enough about having a really poor survey result. If things had continued the way they were, people would have stopped caring altogether. Luckily, we got in before that happened. I walked into a kind of void. There had been no Chief Executive for a good few years before I got there.

We sat down and set about putting in place the right structures and the right accountabilities to manage change going forward. We developed quite a detailed action plan.

What were the specific issues that you could see when you came on board?

I came in right when we got the results from the first staff survey that ORC International was involved with.

The main issues it highlighted were around communication and trust.. People took things personally and felt they weren’t being talked to about things. That had created a very difficult working environment. There was a real lack of mandate among managers and a number of issues with the personal management styles.

What immediate actions did you take on the survey results?

We had a disastrous start to the process. There were some really upset people. We planned a staff away day and brought in someone from outside that I’d seen expertly engage people elsewhere. In front of our staff, they fell flat on their face. As a group, our people were fed up, and did not want to respond to a quick fix. That very negative experience forced us to take stock and gave us the opportunity to visibly start addressing the very serious problems that we had.

How did you set about making big changes?

Half of the management team had been given the title of manager and instructed to manage, without being trained and armed with the skills to do it. We did a lot of one-to-one training and mentoring to bring these managers’ skills up to scratch. This vastly improved the communication which in turn improved the trust. We now have a monthly all-staff meeting which I – without fail – address. We have a weekly update that goes out 50 weeks of the year on a Monday morning. That features a section from me, and the Chairman also contributes. It acts as a kind of a blog. This has been a very popular scheme.

I also operate a very open policy. Everyone can see my diary and where I am and I now sit in the open plan office.

What challenges did you face?

Within the workforce there was a noisy minority who were very vocal about the problems they felt existed, and a silent majority who largely left this unchallenged. I spent most of the first year telling people that it wasn’t broken. It was also important to manage expectation, particularly of those who had worked for the Commission for a long time or not experienced other working environments.

What have you learnt from the staff surveys?

We are now as honest as possible. We recently ran a redundancy round, which strangely seems to have improved morale! We were open and honest about the cuts from the outset. Staff all knew the same day as the board did. In the past bad news sometimes leaked before staff were told. The board is now committed to avoiding this and there is never a period of time for it to leak. This time people were also engaged about how we made the decisions.

And what are the areas that you still want to improve on?

I think we are really good at the big things now, but the small things need to be addressed. These small things can be silly stuff, like a lack or abundance of milk in the kitchens. People are unhappy about it, but don’t speak up. What we need to do is explain that we want to solve it. We need to communicate the little things. And we are still working on getting the silent majority to speak up a bit more. The other big challenge which we did not crack in the last survey was progression. We are a very flat structured organisation. This means that it is very difficult, without a lot of investment, for people to progress through the organisation. We are being honest that that is the problem now and we know that it’s not going to be an easy fix.

What kind of advice would you give to other organisations looking to improve their levels of engagement?

We have focused on changing our culture in the long term and how we do things. We don’t want something that’s going to improve the results of our next survey and then peter out. We want to be able to sit down and see that we have an organisation that inherently has the right values. It’s very easy to think you can buy an off-the-shelf solution, but with our workforce, that just doesn’t work.

They feel patronised. It’s also about understanding your workforce. With the nature of CCRC’s work, we strategically hire people that question everything and look for evidence. So we can’t expect these highly skilled, intelligent individuals to switch all of those skills off when they are dealing with people or organisational management. We have learnt to value that for what it is and we now share everything, with a strong emphasis on evidence based decision making.