Internal communications: Department for Work and Pensions

Connecting organisational values to the employee experience at the front line

The brief

DWP is one of the largest government departments, with over 125,000 staff (a quarter of the civil service) in over 2,000 locations and its work affects almost everyone, everyday. It's responsible for delivering the Welfare to Work strategy through a network of services to everyone of working age, employers, pensioners, families, children and the disabled.

DWP staff are committed to public service, but needed to be inducted in the new values and purpose of DWP.

We were asked to bring the values to life and make them real, for a large and diverse staff far removed from Whitehall and immersed in the tough local issues.

The solution

We were briefed to create a set of icons to represent the four core values. We questioned this - what would these icons mean to a personal adviser in a New Deal office? Our approach was a values framework, a blank canvas each representing a value to be used to display a changing set of images applied by local staff.

This has become the internal campaign encouraging teams and individuals to embrace and build on the department's values.

The campaign has been well received and we have subsequently created toolkits for managers to develop local ideas.