The Challenge
“Getting it right, first time.”

This was Thames Water’s aim when they invited us in to help them with their HR Service Centre’s (HRSC) challenges. The management team had taken on board criticisms from customers and decided to act quickly. Thames Water invited Norton to define and facilitate the programme: simplifying and harmonising their processes, identifying problem areas and changing the culture so that everyone wanted to ‘get it right, first time’ for the customer.

What we did
Norton’s first step was to find out what stakeholders thought, inside and outside the HRSC. We set up a series of interviews to uncover the real problems so that we could come up with genuine solutions. What we found was that KPIs were designed to measure volume handling, without any meaningful quality measures in place. So we worked with the HRSC’s people to:

• Create new opportunities for the business to engage with its customers
• Devise better, balanced KPIs – adding quality measures
• Redesign processes to take the new quality principles into account
• Set up effective internal communications channels and embed the new culture

The Outcome
The quality initiative was launched to all HRSC’s employees and spread to the wider business. Thames Water’s new culture concentrated on making it a great place to work and re-establishing everyone’s sense of pride. As a result, Thames Water built a more disciplined but happier workforce which, when challenged by the summer weather, stood up to the test.

The Client
"The Norton Group has been invaluable in helping me design conferences, workshops and training that will achieve our objectives. They have helped me to convince senior managers that having fun and talking about feelings have a key role to play in getting people to really listen and perform...the Managing Director and Trades Union reps alike appreciate their authoritative, good humoured style as facilitators."
Catherine Cook, Thames Water