DNV GL: Employee engagement
Highlights of Hello Energy 2017-2020.
The challenge
Faced with unprecedented disruption and the greatest challenge imaginable – climate change – the energy industry was calling out for leadership. DNV GL Energy, an established international energy consultancy, should have been that leader – but in 2016, it wasn’t there yet. Multiple mergers had created a siloed culture and low employee engagement. They needed a message to wake people up to new ways of working; content to energize a global organisation; and a format that would reignite employees’ passion. Here’s how Stafford Long helped 2,400 people to say ‘Hello Tomorrow’.
Our solution?
An ambitious 4-year programme of cultural change, marked by tentpole annual ‘Hello Energy’ events and invigorated by creative communications, videos and interactive tools.
It all centred around a powerful, precisely-worded manifesto, created from surveys and 30 in-depth interviews, alongside a simple name for the programme that encouraged forward-thinking: ‘Hello Tomorrow’.
At events, employees gathered, connected and engaged with 140 up-and-coming internal influencers. Each high-tech annual get-together brought peer-to-peer interaction, external inspiration and out-of-the-box creativity. Every year, we meticulously plotted the message and topics in order to shift people’s mindsets; we premiered new videos for creative talking-points and introduced new speakers; we even created an entire fictional world, brought to life across the four years through a series of interactive iPad-led team exercises.
Even when the pandemic hit and cancelled our planned final event, it didn’t stop the engagement.
With an uncannily prescient theme of ‘Be Ready For Anything’, we took all our creative content and messages online, creating a bespoke event platform that housed a main ‘stage’ (live broadcast), branded in-browser team chat, and all manner of inspirational content distributed via three short live modules.
And the results?
Engagement soared. From a low-point in 2016 of just 25% engagement with comms prior to events, we saw overall employee engagement reached 7.4 our of 10 in 2020. It even rose to 8.4 in the pandemic, when most companies saw a drop.
Just as importantly, the business saw a phenomenal shift. The customer relationship score skyrocketed from 64 in 2016 to 79 at the end of 2020. And DNV GL Energy went from underperformer of the DNV GL group to its engine for growth – smashing all its targets, and recording the best year in its history. All of which the CEO attributes to the vast change in mindset driven by Hello Tomorrow.
