Saffery is an international accounting and consulting business with a strong heritage dating back to the 1850’s. Strong growth was the catalyst for HR to transform and elevate from a traditional, transactional support function into a consultative, ‘people experience’ partner – restructured and realigned to deliver a new people strategy and reshape how Saffery attracted, retained and developed its people.
Saffery is an international accounting and consulting business with a strong heritage dating back to the 1850’s. Strong growth was the catalyst for HR to transform and elevate from a traditional, transactional support function into a consultative, ‘people experience’ partner – restructured and realigned to deliver a new people strategy and reshape how Saffery attracted, retained and developed its people.
Create a consistent brand and tone of voice for the People Experience team, that engages stakeholders around the business, encourages a change in the way that the business interacts with HR and delivers consistent and engaging communications at every level. The rebrand needed to be inclusive, personal and reflect new ways of working. In addition, the new brand had to be light touch and have the flexibility to enable future integration and alignment with a new value proposition that was due to be developed within 6 months.
We had to introduce and launch the brand to key stakeholders in a way that helped overcome resistance to change, built understanding and drove behavioural change over time.
Create a Storybook to support and inspire the HR and Internal Comms teams to deliver engaging People Experience communications across every touchpoint in the talent lifecycle.
Our insight led approach began with understanding the transformation journey. Where is HR at Saffery now? How is it perceived? Where do they want to be? What’s the journey and what barriers do we have to overcome? How do we engage the Partners? We audited all existing employee communications and evaluated engagement with channels and how best to land our transformation message. We talked to Partners, key stakeholders and employees across the business to understand the Saffery brand and what the HR transformation meant to them.
From this base of insight, we developed a core manifesto that captured the spirit and reason for the transformation. From this, through a series of creative sprints, we brought the story to life in a fresh, vibrant and inclusive way. We developed a bespoke illustrative style, that ‘humanised’ the brand and enabled the individual areas of People Experience (TA, Employee Engagement, Reward, L&D, Onboarding) to be reflected through colour and visual representation.
We then wrapped the brand in a comprehensive user guide and Storybook that enabled all users to understand the People Experience brand and deploy it in a way that built personal engagement across the business.
The brand was ‘soft’ launched through the People Experience team. It was a case of ‘let’s show’ rather than ‘tell’. It was the successful catalyst for change in an 18-month transformation program that launched, embedded and reinforced the Saffery people strategy.
