Employee Engagement Events – London Underground

Background

The London Underground Ltd (LUL), otherwise known as The Tube employs over 12,000 staff and provides passengers with over 1 billion journeys a year. 150,000 people enter London’s tube system every hour, thus making it a critical part of London’s transport network.

The Need

In November 2005, London Underground challenged their communications consultancy, to find a way for the leadership team to engage with all 12,000 employees.
London Underground had a number of objectives that they wanted to achieve:

• To enable the leadership team to share the vision of the organisation and the challenges that it was facing
• To collectively reflect on the events of 7th July, acknowledge the efforts put in on the day and thereafter and thank the staff
• To re-ignite the passion around the Olympics
• To kick start a new way of communicating within the organisation

The Solution

The result was a ground breaking programme where over 9000 employees voluntarily attended one of 23 events held in central London spread over three weeks. The events titled “Time to Talk” gave the top management a chance to engage with their employees on a scale never seen before.
A key part of each 2 hour event was the Q&A session. With approximately 500 people at each event it was paramount to London Underground that they gave each person a chance to be heard and also answered as many questions as they could in the available 30 minutes. It was for this session that Crystal Interactive worked with London Underground and LIVE to maximise the benefits for both the sponsors and the audience.

Each table had a Crystal tablet that allowed delegates to input their questions. Input was anonymous which allowed for honest and straightforward feedback. During the 10 minute input session the dynamic in the room changed. A buzz was created from the delegates discussing what they had just heard and the questions they wanted to ask, a definite change from the preceding attentive silence during the presentations. Meanwhile behind the scenes the questions were compiled into themes. The themes allowed similar questions to be answered together, allowing the leadership to cover a very broad range of topics in a short space of time.

The Results

In total, over 3,600 questions were captured; meaning that roughly 25% of all staff from LUL were able to ask a direct question to the leadership. Anonymous input meant people were frank and straight forward in their feedback, real questions meant real answers had to be given and this gave the session credibility.

Everyone had a say. All delegates were able to use the technology and this prevented the session from being dominated by individuals.

All the questions were captured instantly and put into a report afterwards, giving LUL a permanent record of the session.

Andrew Jones, Head of Communications, London Underground: “There was overwhelming positive feedback to the event” says Andrew, “by using Crystal we were able to include everyone and this was a key element of what we wanted to achieve. The technology made a major contribution to the success of the event, which in itself was a significant investment for the business”

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