London Overground HR director Carol Poole on maintaining high levels of staff engagement

Want to know how to maintain high levels of engagement in a traditionally tough industry? You could do
a lot worse than take a leafout of London Overground Rail Operations Limited (LOROL)’s book. LOROL
has consistently high levels of engagement, scoring animpressive 90.3% this year.

If your engagement scores remain consistently high it could be easy to get lax – but Poole says it’s
critical to never assume thingswill remain the same. “We have fantastic scores but we have to make
sure we continue to focus,” she says. “It’s about taking surveyresults and focusing on what we need to
do on the frontline. Some organisations would kill for a 90% score but it’s all about makingit real for the
frontline.”

At LOROL, where the nature of the organisation means employees are scattered across multiple sites,
this means embracingdeceptively simple communication methods like marker boards in stations. “It’s
trying to engage people at the coalface,” says Poole.

As a more high-tech way of engaging people LOROL has also introduced a mobile app for frontline staff,
which keeps them up todate with issues on the lines. In future Poole hopes the app will also make HR
information more readily available to staff who don’tsit in front of a computer.

Make HR visible Increasing HR presence “out in the business ” is another engagement must-have.
“Everyone in the HR team, not just HR businesspartners but HR administrators and people in payroll, has
to go out into the business once a month,” Poole explains. “We need tomake sure HR is adding value.”

A recent company-wide event had stands featuring information about HR and engagement. “That’s an
opportunity for HR to showwhat it does positively. There’s still a bit of a view that HR is about pay,
rations and disciplinaries. [Events like this] are really goodopportunities to show what HR does.”

To spread the message about what HR offers further, LOROL partners with its unions to promote areas
like L&D opportunities, byworking with union reps to identify suitable topics.

If you want more engaged employees why not ask them what would make them so? LOROL asked teams
to come up with ideas tofurther drive engagement. Employees asked for things like smaller events to
bring together senior managers and frontline staff on amore regular basis.

LOROL is also running a competition around its vision and values, asking teams to create videos or
photos that demonstrate howthey relate to the organisational values. Communications champions
ensure messages are spread around the business, and athriving recognition scheme is also vital –
LOROL’s ‘Shining Stars’ awards include an ‘Unsung Hero’ category.

“The more you do [around engagement], the more people’s expectations rise, so you constantly have to
be creative,” says Poole. “Butit is quite simple: ask how you’re doing, analyse feedback, see what needs
changing and act on it.”