Overview
One of the largest transport services organisations in Europe, Arriva deliver more than 2.2 billion passenger journeys every year. The organisation had been successfully growing over a number of years, through a combination of acquisition and expansion into a number of new European countries, resulting in an organisation spanning 14 countries, with some 55,000 employees. This scale of growth, combined with the acquisitions and different country cultures had resulted in a lack of alignment across the organisation.
Arriva wanted to create greater alignment across all their European operations, to remove siloed working and improve employee engagement and productivity by leveraging the power of the ‘Group’. They also wanted to improve the dynamics with their new parent company, Deutsche Bahn, in areas such as process flow and outlook. Against this backdrop, a number of changes to the senior leadership population were being planned over a 2 year period and the Executive Committee were passionate about ensuring that despite these changes Arriva’s success DNA could be bottled and leveraged for the future.
Our approach
Culture Consultancy were briefed to help Arriva:
Drive insights and understanding of the current culture as well as where and how it was enabling performance and inhibiting results, using the CC Organisational Culture Assessment™. During this stage we used existing insight and data complemented by stakeholder interviews across the organisation and once analysed, completed a series of validation exercises to ensure agreements were reached on the conclusions.
Using insights from the culture audit and working with the Executive team we developed the ‘Arriva Way’; a brand new set of company values which, together with input from the senior leadership population, we launched 3 months later through a company-wide leadership event in Mallorca.
We also created alignment between the new company Values and the expected behaviours of the Leadership population.
Leading an internal team in the design of the roll out of the exciting new ‘Arriva Way’ programme using the Culture Consultancy 4Es Human Change Principles, the internal team then took ownership for the implementation.
The development of the ‘Arriva Way’ enabled great things for the culture with it being embedded across 14 countries and tens of thousands of employees, engaging them all in a clear culture and allowing them to embrace the values of the business. The new culture being developed and launched into the business by internal teams meant that they had the tools they needed to own and evolve their future culture.
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