We met Martin Fitzpatrick, Internal Comms and Engagement Business Partner at B&Q, at an ‘engagement through change’ event last year. If you don’t already follow Martin, we highly recommend that you do!
It’s clear that Martin and his team are doing some great work at B&Q. Recently, B&Q celebrated its 50thbirthday, so we spoke to Martin to hear how their big birthday provided an opportunity to bring people together, to both celebrate, and inspire.
Hi Martin, thank you so much for talking to us today – we love seeing your LinkedIn feed and all of the great things you’re doing at B&Q, and we’re excited to share some of it with our readers.
So, before we get started, can you tell us about yourself?
I’ve been working in communications and engagement roles for almost ten years, initially at Vodafone UK and now here at B&Q. Prior to that, I had quite a variety of roles whilst I searched for a job that I could fall in love with – including sales and a few years as a train driver!
I was fortunate enough to almost accidentally fall into a role at Vodafone, creating comms and engagement campaigns around information security and protecting customers. I was hooked from the very first week in the job.
Seeing the immediate and far-reaching impacts of connecting people, inspiring them and empowering them to create change was amazing. I knew straight away that I wanted to spend my career helping to make work a more rewarding, inspiring and, frankly, more interesting place to be.
Fantastic – we can relate to that.
So, you recently caught our eye with lots of photos and videos from the B&Q 50th birthday celebrations – so let me start by saying a huge congratulations and a collective happy birthday!
The events looked great, can you tell us about the day?
Thanks! Given the challenging retail environment over the last few years, it’s a real pleasure to be able to celebrate being part of a business that’s been helping to make home improvement accessible to everyone for 50 years.
This moment in time gives us an opportunity to further engage colleagues in our purpose and to strengthen their connection with our iconic brand.
But it also represents real challenges for the team. The expectations and shopping habits of customers are changing rapidly and we’re working hard to ensure that we’re continually disrupting the home improvement market, to provide better customer experiences. The challenge then, is how do we celebrate the heritage of the brand and the successes of the last 50 years, whilst still looking to the future and the transformation that’s underway?
We decided that the best way to do this was to make the 50th birthday celebrations part of our annual planning cycle and to put managers and leaders at the heart of our plans.
We focused our efforts on giving leaders everything they needed to celebrate the birthday, provide reward and recognition to our colleagues and share our plan for the next three years.
All three elements are important drivers of engagement and we wanted our teams to have time set aside to share in our past successes, both business and personal, at the same time as sharing our plans for the future.
The events looked great and it looked as though hundreds of colleagues were involved. How did you make sure everyone was included?
We always knew that we wanted every colleague to have the chance to feel part of our 50th year. That meant finding a way to create a memorable moment in every store across the country and in our store support office – with 23,000 colleagues and 300 stores, that’s quite a challenge.
We kicked off our 50th Birthday celebrations at our leadership conference in Liverpool, with theming and messaging strongly tied to our 50th birthday (you can check out the pictures on our LinkedIn page). We also unveiled our new adverts and social media campaign – 50 years, a great time for change.
My favourite element was an 8-foot-high, 60-metre-long wall that mapped the changes in society, customer needs and in the home improvement market over the last 50 years, as well as the key B&Q milestones. It was a great engagement mechanism, there’s plenty of pictures on social media of colleagues in front of the year they were born, or the year they joined B&Q. It seems a small thing, but the opportunity to interact with the company’s story on a personal level is quite powerful and a great way to get people sharing.
I also have to mention Firehouse, our partners who helped us to create the events.
I love that, and a great way to bring that personal touch too.
And I understand it didn’t stop at the event? Can you tell us about the other activities that took place?
As soon as the 600 leaders who attended left the event, we launched a new set of intranet pages containing all of the information and materials they needed to run a session with their own teams.
We also delivered hundreds of ‘party boxes’ containing props, sweets, snacks and a ton of other stuff to help recreate the celebratory atmosphere back in stores and in the office.
Every single one of our 23,000 colleagues were given time away from the day-job to attend one of the events and to celebrate together.
For store colleagues, that meant snacks, cakes and food together after the stores closed.
In our store support office, we brought everyone together for a shared briefing of our three-year plan and had very special moment where Chrissie Quayle*, the wife of one of our founders, David Quayle, cut our birthday cake. We then gave everyone time to celebrate with their teams and do some reward and recognition.
*Pub quiz fact – B&Q stands for Block and Quayle, the names of our founders. David Block would later go on to found Blockbuster
It’s clear these events were also used to create a strong, united team to focus on the future – can you tell us more about that?
We want our colleagues to own our plan and to feel that they can make a difference, particularly line managers. After all, they’re the people who really decide what gets done day to day and they’re key to our success. To help build this sense of ownership we dedicated an entire hour of our leadership conference to Q&A with the B&Q board. We received over 150 questions – and we answered every single one, either on the day or on our conference intranet page.
Building a sense of connection and shared purpose is absolutely essential if you want to build engagement and create momentum. To create that feeling of connectivity we asked all of our stores to hold their party over the same weekend and ran a series of competitions across Yammer to encourage sharing – best cake, best picture, etc. we saw hundreds and hundreds of posts, pictures, videos, GIFs – you name it, one of our teams was doing it and they were feeding off each other’s ideas, creativity and pride in working for B&Q. Its one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever been part of.
Creating that kind of emotional marker is a key factor in helping people readily access and recall information. By combining the unveiling of our three-year plan and the 50thbirthday events, we’re seeing significantly more colleagues using the language of the plan and reciting the key elements regularly in Yammer posts, presentations, videos and other activities.
What an inspiring story.
Ok, so last question – what would be your one piece of advice for organisations wanting toengage their employees?
Listen often, listen with humility and go beyond the transactional language of business when you speak to people – whether that’s as a business or as a leader.
Engagement is more than a number on an annual survey. It’s the very essence of how people feel about coming to work. In our personal lives, we build meaningful connections when we’re laughing at shared jokes or supporting each other through tough times. When we’re sharing memories or making plans for the future. Yet when we come to work, we seem to want to turn those very personal and emotional connections off. We resort to PowerPoint and email and we speak in a language that we’d never use with our friends and family. Everything is reduced to its most practical and functional parts.
If you want to see a real change in how your people feel about coming to work, take the time to find out what really matters to them. Figure out what makes the people and the culture in your business unique.
Then, when it’s time to speak or act, be brave, be emotional and be human.
Thank you so much for your time today, it’s been great speaking with you
