BEST (short for Belief, Excellence, Success and Trust) was what Birmingham City Council's HR chiefs named this inventive employee engagement policy, and best it now certainly is, as it take this year's coveted gold award at the 2009 Excellence Awards.

Birmingham's BEST project was created to pull Europe's largest council out of the mire. In 2006, surveys revealed only a quarter of the council's 50,000 staff thought it was well managed and just 56% said they felt motivated in their jobs. Bosses thought this was an appalling statistic considering many of these same staff (such as those in social services) have to make potentially life-saving decisions every day.

Driven by HR, and with the full backing of new chief executive Stephen Hughes and its trade unions, the ailing council was successfully turned around by converting disenfranchised staff into quality of service advocates. A formal business case - stressing the need for a consistent set of values, improved relations between management and staff, best practice distributed across the organisation and better service - was drawn up. At the crux was developing a collaborative culture and giving staff the power to problem-solve for themselves, to both increase the customer experience and garner a new sense of employee engagement.

None of this could be done without help, and the programme was specifically focused around workshops led by specially-trained BEST leaders. Staff voted for the people they wanted to be BEST leaders, allowing those in non-management positions to demonstrate their ability to shine. To date Birmingham City Council has trained more than 1,800 BEST leaders, and these have now cascaded their work to more than 23,000 members of staff.

Regular events, including a Dragons' Den-style hustings, enabling staff to come up with business improvement ideas in return for a £1,000 prize; networking opportunities, social networking and constant branding of the project have all helped to keep BEST initiatives on the workforce's radar. Just one Open Space event brought together more than 1,000 BEST leaders, who could use the opportunity to discuss their views on the project and raise any concerns with it that they had. No channel was ignored. Details of BEST were on everything from employees' payslips to Twitter and Facebook sites, as well as YouTube and Myspace.

The success of these activities was evident in the results of the initiative - the part of the entry judges were most impressed with. More than 75% of staff who have taken part in a BEST workshop say they feel more engaged and motivated. A staff-wide weighted survey revealed the proportion of employees 'motivated' in their current role had improved from the 56% in 2006 to 83% in 2008.

A study by Kingston Business School has verified 76% of staff are 'strongly and frequently' motivated. The number of staff agreeing they feel proud to work for Birmingham City Council increased from a lowly 50% in 2006 to an impressive 90% in 2008.

With more than 6,000 service improvements suggested (including holding a Christmas event for Polish single-parent families), the ROI on the £1.2 million investment has been calculated as 133:1. It is estimated some 135,000 residents have been directly touched by improvements in service by staff. Unsurprisingly, residents' own tracker survey has revealed 62% of them believe the council is well run now. This is up from 53% last year.

Judges' comments

Judges were universal in their praise for this project, highlighting its "very clear vision and amazing ROI", its "business focus" and for "doing something that makes a real difference to employees and their quality of service delivery."

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