Workforce lovers
Olympic Park champions 'employee engagement'
The London 2012 volunteers or Games Makers couldn’t have been more appropriately named. Publicly honoured at the Closing Ceremony, their attitude earned the London Olympics the nickname ‘the friendly games’. Over 240,000 people applied for interviews at Excel and Wembley with 70,000 going on to host London to the world.
This was a people engagement story of epic proportions. But another story came before the Games Makers – the building of the Olympic Park. By June 2011 the Olympic Deliver Authority (ODA) had recorded 64 million man-hours worked with an accident frequency rate of 0.17 per 100,000 hours worked. This is less than half the construction industry average of 0.4 accidents per 100,000 hours*. There was love and care amongst the workforce to achieve such fantastic results, but how?
Having visited the Olympic Park site regularly over the for 4 year build we were considerably impressed by the high levels of communication and organisation on such a mammoth scale. Every brand and communications project we worked on was clearly aimed at employee engagement.
My business is not as exciting as the Olympics...
Maybe not but we believe that there are some really important lessons business can learn:• Don't leave staff communications just to marketing
• Create a company wide team for brand environments
• Use data to inform communications and instinct
• Think upstream of problems, develop brand strategy there
For more encouraging stories on great staff engagement have a look here Engage for Success.
Back story: working with LOCOG and the ODA
For last 4 years we had the privilege of working with LOCOG and the ODA working for our partner company ABA. The high point was creating the brand communications and environments for all the Games Makers training venues across London. If you want to hear the full story then give us a buzz.Want to find out more >Taste
