At the end of 2009 Couravel won the prestigious PR Week Award for outstanding Internal Communication for its work for Natural England. The PRWeek Awards are widely accepted by the PR and communications sector to be the equivalent of the film industry’s ‘Oscars’. The PRWeek Awards reward absolute excellence with their superior credibility in the business and political worlds. This is the second award scooped by this work, following on from the International Association of Business Communication’s 2009 Gold Quill Award. The work helps Natural England’s people become better Ambassadors for the organisation and the Natural Environment.
“Natural England and Couravel demonstrated excellent creativity and organizational skills” Malcom Padley, Director of Corporate Communications at Rentokil Initial.

The full case study can be found here.

Couravel’s fifth engagement seminar at the RSA was jointly hosted with Hilary Scarlett. It focused on the SMART working and how companies were managing engagement with remote and part time working. Clare Prochaska for Logica and Sue Pearce from the London Borough of Hackney spoke. Click here to see the slides. Key topics discussed “roundtable” were:

  • The importance of strong and visible leadership support to champion new ways of working
  • The need for leadership to understand their role, and the examples they set, as essential to achieving a return (perhaps using specialists and visiting other companies/sites to show the way)
  • The fear of the unknown acting as a block – many enjoy new ways of working once they try it (we had the example of people complaining that hot desking may be suspended)
  • The dilemma of balancing the need to comply (with rules about how we need to work) with the need to innovate and to encourage risk taking – the need to establish clear boundaries about what we can and cannot do in the new operating environment
  • The need to apply basic principles of good management communication in order to facilitate change – i.e. be clear about outcomes desired, how performance will be measured, what you expect from people, behaviour that is unacceptable
  • The importance of trust underpinning effective change (and the lack of it getting in the way) – so the need to be clear about key messages, consistency between words and actions, leadership visibility and candour, etc

 

 

In the last month Couravel has won a major role in the COI’s Internal Communication, Engagement and Change Framework. Couravel is recommended for a wide range of internal communications, engagement and change consultancy services.

The Central Office of Information (COI) is the Government’s centre of excellence for marketing and communications. Every four years it assesses suppliers to ensure high quality services are available to Government departments and agencies. Following a rigorous assessment process a shortlist of suppliers is published.

Following the latest assessment Couravel has been appointed to the Internal Communication, Engagement and Change Framework. We feature under twice as many categories as any other company. Couravel features on the framework for: Strategy and planning

  • Workforce and employee engagement
  • Leadership communication
  • Manager skills development and coaching
  • Vision and values development
  • Employee and workforce engagement
  • Measurement
  • Action planning

 

IABC’s annual Gold Quill Awards program honours excellence in business communication, offering professional communicators an opportunity to have their work evaluated by expert judges and showcased among peers. The winners represent the best in organizational communication and their work plans serve as best practices for professional communicators.

Couravel’s work for Natural England competed with nearly 1,000 entries from 26 countries. Click here to see the in depth case study that helped win the Award of Merit.

 

The engagement process developed by Couravel and BAE Systems has won the Gold Prize in the Chairmans Award for Innovation, the international award that is granted to only a handful of projects globally.

The project involved developing a picture of the companys strategy which was used as the basis for hundreds of workplace discussions about the business, where it was going, what it meant for individuals and teams.

As the process unrolled, understanding of the companys business strategy increased by more than 30%, and buy in to the idea that the company had an exciting future grew by a similar amount. Similar increases in understanding customer expectations and recognising how people need to change to meet those expectations were tracked.

But the impact was not limited to these soft measures of engagement. The business has grown by 40 per cent in the past two to three years. In the view of the board, a lot of this success is down to the engagement process, says Andrea Adams, the HR Director.

The project has been widely reported in the UK media featuring on the BBCs Working Lunch and in The Times.