Wonder walls

How do you make employees feel part of a single successful division within Barclays when they’re spread out across 18 sites in two countries? The answer was the Team Advocacy Campaign, a reward and recognition scheme that we helped bring to life by producing 134 pieces of artwork championing the team’s efforts.

A previous campaign we’d helped Barclays produce for Mortgages staff had impressed Bob Cliff, Managing Director of Team Advocacy, who wanted us to create something similar for his team.

We began by running a series of workshops with team members to find out what they do and what makes them tick. We found that, as with most staff, it’s not necessarily money that makes them happy – what they’re looking for is recognition for all their hard work.

From that, we created a campaign that combined storytelling with striking portrait photography, to show how colleagues throughout the UK and India are realising their team's aim. This goal is to deliver the 'Right outcome, right way' for customers, whether it’s by taking ownership of a complaint or going the extra mile to resolve an issue with a bank account.

The campaign involved us shattering content to make the most of team members' experiences with customers. While the full stories live on Barclays' intranet, we took quotes and printed them, alongside photos of staff quoted, on wall vinyls and banners that were displayed across Team Advocacy sites on ‘Welcome Walls’. Barclays wanted team members to enter the sites, see their colleagues’ achievements on display and say: “Wow, this is what I’m part of”.

There was also the challenge of creating consistency across the portrait photography – no easy task when you’re commissioning a group of photographers using different light from each other, and photographing people at lots of different heights. We worked with a company called Photoshot that allowed us to photograph team members against a green screen, which we later replaced with a gradient background, creating a really good consistency across the board.

The overall result is a campaign that has proved a hit with Team Advocacy members. We’ve received great feedback from sites, with reports of staff standing next to Welcome Walls for half an hour, admiring the displays and reading their colleagues’ quotes.

And our efforts didn’t end there. We also produced Team Advocacy badges, a welcome ‘flicker booklet’ to inform and inspire colleagues, and a line managers’ pack explaining how the campaign works.

It all added up to a memorable campaign that is helping to make Team Advocacy members feel rightly proud of theirs and their colleagues’ achievements.