CASE STUDY

King’s College London

THE CHALLENGE

Faced with far-reaching upheaval in the education sector, King’s College London set out its Vision 2029 strategy to lead the institution into the future.

The principles behind the vision were well designed, articulated and supported. But as with any strategic initiative, embedding the right behaviours would be vital to its success.

Knowing this, the executive sponsor asked YS Research & Consulting to help King’s establish a set of core behaviours that would:

• bring the principles to life for employees
• inform a range of HR practices to underpin the vision

OUR SOLUTION

We ran a series of focus groups with a diverse set of stakeholders from across the college to understand:

• how the principles would work day-to-day
• the behaviours that would deliver them
• the behaviours that risked undermining them

We distilled these outputs to create a set of ‘Principles in Action’: aspirational behaviours (knowns as ‘Practices’) that described what the Principles looked like in everyday interactions.

We benchmarked these against behaviours used by similar organisations, and by others going through comparable culture change.

Then using an iterative process, we refined the Practices, and repeatedly tested the concepts described and language used with stakeholders, user groups, the HR community and executive sponsor.

Following this, we identified ten core Practices – built on hundreds of examples from around the college – and gave them a final stress test in the form of a campus-wide survey.

This brought in hundreds of responses from staff and students, the overwhelming majority of which were positive. The findings highlighted how closely the language used reflected the culture and feel of King’s College, and how easy the Practices would be to instil.

THE RESULTS

The ‘Principles in Action’ have now been incorporated into the college’s HR procedures to help realise Vision 2029. These include its systems for:

• 360 feedback
• performance management
• development programmes
• promotion decisions
• recruitment

As a result, the principles are helping staff to understand how they can support the vision, and how their behaviours align with the college’s aspirations for the future.