With revenues of £1.8bn, Rentokil Initial is one of the largest business services companies in the world. It employs 79,000 ‘colleagues’, providing a range of support services and has three brands: Rentokil, Initial and Ambius.

A new executive team set a key priority to focus colleagues on delivering an inspirational customer experience, largely defined by customers’ interaction with service delivery people – pest control technicians, cleaners, parcel delivery drivers etc. These frontline colleagues typically do not have direct supervision at customers’ sites, so it is essential they understand Rentokil’s values and what behaviours the company expects of them.

The new senior team, including Director of Communications, Malcolm Padley, asked Helen to discover whether their values were embedded well, and whether one set of core values could be developed for the entire company covering all brands. They also asked her to unearth people’s views on how the corporate values (whether a single set, or more than one set) should be communicated.

Once Helen had helped them define new values and behaviours, Rentokil asked her to bring them to life for internal and external audiences using communication channels and mediums including video and photography.

To research the values and how to embed them, Helen and her team conducted 21 focus groups around the world in local language, covering all company divisions. The purpose of the groups was to gain frontline and supervisor feedback on the existing values – whether they knew of them, what they thought of them and how well they thought they had been communicated. They wanted to discover which values were most meaningful to people, how they could be improved and what needed to be done to properly embed them and associated behaviours in people’s daily lives. Implicit in Helen’s approach was the need to understand if one set of values could be implemented across the group, or if the individual brands needed their own values.

The groups were concise, standardised (with some flexibility to explore different issues in different markets) and highly interactive. Many of the groups were filmed, at the request of colleagues themselves, and the results used to bring the proposed values to life for the senior management team.

Once the values had been clearly defined, Helen set about creating a communications programme that would embed them.

Rather than taking a traditional approach to video – leaders and managers speaking to camera about how important the values and behaviours are and how employees must change – Helen and Malcolm agreed to celebrate those people around the world who were already demonstrating them in action.

Budgets were tight – it was important to not to be seen to be spending too much on video production during a period of business turnaround and cost cutting. This was achieved by sourcing and working with a video production company that had a new, low-cost business model compared to traditional video suppliers.

In addition to making a suite of videos, a young photographer was also engaged to take still photographs of colleagues at work, living the values. The photographs were published in a hard copy book, which sits in all their offices and is sent to stakeholders. For the creative, non-traditional approach to the video and photography, and for the book, this project won two industry awards.

Colleagues wanted one set of unifying values across the group to encourage closer co-operation across Rentokil Initial and to keep things simple. They identified three core values from eleven they debated – service, relationships and teamwork. These three scored very highly, no matter where people worked in the business. Helen and her team were also able to identify behaviours to underpin each of the three core values. Colleagues also gave valuable feedback on how to (and how not to) communicate each of the three values effectively.

A global communication programme was then put in place to engage leaders, managers and colleagues in the new values and behaviours, based on a core set of messages and materials.  Helen’s team developed a toolkit which gave divisions and functions the flexibility to interpret what the different elements meant for each of them.

This programme won an International Association of Business Communicators Gold Quill Award for employee communication, and an Institute of Internal Communication Excellence in Communication award.

A judge from the Institute of Internal Communication made clear how highly they rated this programme: “The approach to communicating values and behaviours is extremely comprehensive. The team knows its audience profile and has a clear understanding of goals. Helen and Malcolm started with the research to make sure they knew the challenges they were facing. The multi-channel, multi-tactic approach and the results speak for themselves. Targets are exceeded, the scores are in the 90s (staggering!) and the challenge is now to help drive forward the behaviour change that sits behind the new values. As a campaign to bring values to life I see little here to fault.”