Nottingham Building Society: Listening through strategic change

How a culture programme is supporting strategic change

Despite the turbulent time in the  financial services industry, Nottingham Building Society are undertaking a significant change and modernisation strategy to realise their vision of what it means to be a building society today. They have developed a unique advice and service proposition, completely centred around defined customer lifetime journeys.

Of course, change at scale means new structures, roles and services, which can be challenging for long-serving, loyal employees. To bring people with them through this change, the People and Culture agenda has been driven by Anne Mellors, Head of People and Development.

The Nottingham developed and launched their “Doing the Right Thing” culture framework and brought People Insight in to help assess how the employee experience matched their culture aspiration.

People Insight helped The Nottingham establish a baseline measure, understand how employees were experiencing change and identify tangible recommendations for the next phase of culture development. Through consultant-led stakeholder interviews, tailored survey design, online dashboards, results interpretation and action planning support, The Nottingham could move from culture ambition to clear evidence and focused action.

This made the survey more than a measurement exercise. It became a practical way to support strategic change, engage leaders and help employees see that their views were shaping the future of the organisation.

Related: Read our case study to see how Henderson Global worked to create an engaging company culture

About The Nottingham

The Nottingham Building Society is the eighth largest building society in the UK, with assets of £4bn, 67 branches and over 700 employees. They are one of the only building societies to combine building society and estate agency services “all under one roof”.

The Nottingham is a mutual, owned by its members, with a heritage built since 1849 of helping members own their own homes, providing a secure place for savings and supporting people to manage their finances.

Today, this ethos translates into a new advice and service proposition built around the customer, or member, lifecycle. The Nottingham offer not just their own products, but access to whole-of-market mortgage advice and financial planning from across a competitive range of suppliers.

The Nottingham announced its commitment to a multi-million-pound investment to develop its digital capability to complement its growing branch network. The ultimate goal is to create the perfect hybrid between digital and face-to-face, where members have the control and convenience of choosing how they interact with the society: digitally, by phone or face-to-face.

For employees, this meant significant change. Roles, services, systems and customer journeys were evolving. The Nottingham needed a clear way to understand how team members felt about that change, how well the culture framework was landing and what support people needed to deliver the new vision with confidence.

Working with People Insight gave The Nottingham the structure to do that. Our employee survey platform helped capture and report feedback clearly, while our consultancy support helped leaders interpret what the results meant and how to act.

Nottingham Building Society project team:

• Anne Mellors, Head of People and Development
• Tracy Gill, Senior People Business Partner
• Penny Burrows, People Business Partner
• Jo Navin, Internal Communications Manager

Change brings challenges

The strategy has required significant change for The Nottingham’s team members, including:

1. Job roles

Branch team members have gone from being specialists in one area of the service offering to being customers’ first point of contact for any of their services. This required significant training and the rewriting of job roles to fulfil the “all under one roof” service.

2. Upgrading IT and tech capability

As part of its investment in digital technology, team members are being trained in new software and processes.

As a recent example, team members are now equipped to provide customers with in-branch video calls, giving members on-demand access to specialist mortgage advisers at a time to suit them. Team members have also been trained to deliver the society’s new Lifetime ISA proposition in branch, and the Society has launched its new e-savings portal, Beehive, requiring customer services teams to learn new systems and skills.

3. Collaboration

To successfully deliver The Nottingham’s “all under one roof” offering, collaborative working across the different elements of the proposition, including estate agency, building society and mortgage services, is vital. Effective teamwork between branch, head office and field-based team members is also key.

The change in business model not only required role change, but significant culture change. Team members who were used to stable roles, confident in their capabilities and proud of their expert relationship with the local community needed to see the vision for change, feel the benefits personally and develop the appetite and energy for the task ahead.

People Insight helped The Nottingham listen through this complexity. A well-designed culture assessment could show how employees were responding to change, where confidence was strong and where more communication, support or leadership visibility was needed.

For a financial services organisation going through transformation, this kind of insight is essential. It helps leaders avoid assumptions and make decisions based on what employees are actually experiencing.

Related: Where employee engagement in financial services is falling short

How are The Nottingham making culture change happen?

1. Raising the profile of the people agenda

Looking at the bigger picture, over the last five years, the people agenda at The Nottingham has become more important. Under Anne’s leadership, the organisation has seen the value of improved management information, recruitment and better-quality business partnering.

Anne’s role on the Executive Committee gives the People and Culture agenda greater visibility, so the culture framework had strong foundations.

People Insight’s work helped reinforce that position by giving the People and Culture team credible evidence to take into senior discussions. Survey results, stakeholder insight and benchmarked engagement data gave leaders a clearer view of where culture was supporting the strategy and where further action was needed.

2. Developing a culture framework resonant with The Nottingham’s heritage

The Nottingham’s mutual ethos is as relevant today as it was in 1849. CEO David Marlow said:

“We are all living longer and are likely to need to take more responsibility for financial planning. We think providing independent, face-to-face advice to our members to help them to navigate their way through the challenges is an important part of our role as a modern, mutual building society.”

The “Doing the Right Thing” cultural framework, with “ARROWS” values, supports the business vision. Importantly, it is grounded in the mutual heritage of helping customers “Do the Right Thing” to save for homes and the future.

This wording resonates with team members and the pride they have in the organisation. As one anonymous survey respondent told us:

“The best thing about working for The Nottingham is that the service & products we offer genuinely do help our members. We want to offer good service and adhere to the company values and ethos to support our members have a good experience.”

People Insight’s culture assessment helped test whether that framework was being experienced in practice. This is where employee surveys are most useful during culture change: they show whether the words, values and behaviours leaders aspire to are visible in the everyday employee experience.

3. Developing a consistent internal & external voice

Internal communications about the “Doing the Right Thing” culture framework are consistent with the external branding. The leaders’ event, where the framework was launched, was centred around “Doing the Right Thing”.

This consistency helped The Nottingham connect the member proposition with the employee experience. The culture programme was not positioned as an internal HR exercise, but as part of the organisation’s wider strategic direction.

People Insight supported this by helping The Nottingham align survey communications with the broader culture message. The “Your Voice Matters” campaign helped employees understand why their feedback mattered and how it connected to the future of the business.

4. Doing a full cultural assessment

To assess and help further develop the culture, People Insight designed a consultant-led programme to gauge views of key stakeholders, survey the whole organisation and provide recommendations that the Board, people business partners and line managers would know exactly how to action.

Anne said:

“From the start of the project, our objective was to listen to the views of our teams to gather clear insight and evidence to support us in planning what to focus on in our next phase of culture development.”

This was a key strength of the project. The Nottingham did not just want a set of survey scores. They wanted a full cultural assessment that would give leaders confidence, give employees a voice and produce practical recommendations for change.

People Insight brought together stakeholder interviews, survey design, internal communications, dashboard reporting, executive interpretation and action planning. That combination helped The Nottingham understand the culture from multiple angles and move quickly from insight to action.

The culture assessment programme developed with People Insight

Stakeholder interviews

At the beginning, we carried out consultant-led stakeholder interviews with two aims: to understand the views of leaders and frontline staff about the culture, and to engage them in supporting and improving the culture programme.

Anne said:

“The consultant was friendly, supportive as well as credible and analytical, which gave our leaders confidence in the process and in People Insight. It got senior leaders to think about ownership from the start, and helped reassure team members around confidentiality.”

The interviews helped build trust before the survey launched. They gave leaders and frontline colleagues a chance to shape the process, while helping People Insight understand the specific context behind The Nottingham’s change journey.

This made the survey more relevant, more credible and more likely to lead to action.

Survey design

Based on this input, we designed the survey to evaluate:

• how the organisation’s culture reflects its “ARROWS” values as a baseline measure, against which future performance can be tracked
• team members’ response to change and what could be done to support them
• employee engagement, as measured by the Pearl™ model and benchmarked to financial services
• how employee experience varies across the organisation

This tailored design gave The Nottingham a robust way to measure both engagement and culture. It also helped leaders understand the relationship between strategic change, values, employee sentiment and day-to-day experience.

People Insight’s survey expertise meant the questions were not generic. They were shaped around the culture framework, the financial services context and the practical decisions The Nottingham needed to make next.

Internal communications

The “Your Voice Matters” campaign, created to communicate with staff about the programme, was designed to be a consistent part of The Nottingham’s external and internal voice.

Taking part in the survey was incentivised with a prize draw for participants and a “Have a break” KitKat desk drop.

Jo Navin, Internal Communications Manager, said:

“The effort we put into pre-survey communications paid off. With the reassuring stakeholder interviews, followed up by a broad, bold campaign and incentives, we were delighted to achieve an 86% participation rate.”

This result showed that employees were willing to engage when the process felt clear, visible and trustworthy.

People Insight’s communications guidance helped The Nottingham build understanding and momentum before launch. Strong pre-survey communication meant employees knew why the survey mattered, how confidentiality would be protected and what the organisation planned to do with the feedback.

Understanding results quickly

Once the survey results were in, we released online dashboards to leaders and managers, so they could see their own results quickly.

People Insight’s consultants then led an interpretation session for the Executive Committee and the Board, sharing critical insights, engaging leaders in the results and focusing on priorities to have the greatest impact on culture and engagement.

Anne explained:

“The survey results had a clear mix of positives and areas where we could do better. After the interpretation session we all came out really clear about what we needed to do. Our CEO, David Marlow, called it the most actionable survey we’ve ever done, which is really satisfying as ‘actionability’ was our key project goal.”

The results were shared at a company-wide event. Tracy Gill, Senior People Business Partner, said:

“David was able to share the high-level survey results, and highlight the key themes, which tied in to the narrative about the culture we were launching. It certainly whet the appetite and was a call to arms for the next stage – action planning.”

We held workshops to prepare the People and Development team for action planning. When people are busy in times of change, this session helps them become familiar with the survey results dashboard quickly, navigate the information with ease and prepare practical activities to support effective action planning.

This is where People Insight’s platform and service model came together. Dashboards gave leaders and managers fast access to their results. Consultant interpretation helped the Executive Committee and Board understand the bigger picture. Action-planning workshops helped the People and Development team translate results into practical next steps.

Creative action planning

Following the workshops, the People and Development team were enthused and confident. Already, 80% of areas have a functional plan.

One action-planning activity led by marketing involved senior team members “pitching” ideas for support to solve issues around communication or innovation in a Dragon’s Den style.

Jo described:

“This was really fun, we came out with some really simple ideas – such as the Brown Bag Lunch to help improve inter-team communication. This informal event is now held frequently to help colleagues find out more about what different functions within the team are working on.”

This kind of creative action planning helped make survey follow-up feel practical and engaging. Rather than leaving managers with data alone, The Nottingham created space for teams to discuss ideas, test solutions and take ownership.

People Insight’s action-planning support helped give that process structure. The result was not just insight, but movement.

Making action actually happen

To keep teams accountable to the “Your Voice Matters” actions they made, they are included in functional people plans and progress is given Board airtime at quarterly intervals.

Tracy said:

“We’ve also renamed our staff council the ‘Your Voice Matters Forum’ which keeps the profile high. Your Voice Matters is certainly here to stay!”

The results from the project provide a cultural assessment framework that the Board review regularly to support them in their responsibilities for overseeing the culture of the organisation and as part of their commitment to demonstrating culture change.

This accountability is what turns employee listening into visible progress. The Nottingham made action part of functional planning, Board review and employee representation. That helped keep feedback alive beyond the survey launch window.

People Insight’s approach supported this by giving the organisation a framework it could return to over time. The baseline culture assessment created a reference point for future measurement, while the action-planning process helped managers and leaders keep progress moving.

Results from the project to date

“We’re early on in establishing the ‘Doing the Right Thing’ culture, and the assessment has been really valuable,”

said Tracy.

“Most people feel that The Nottingham strives to ‘do the right thing’ – the central value to our culture, which is fabulous. However, some of the work we need to do includes ensuring team members feel listened to, that leaders are more communicative and demonstrably ‘live the values’ more. At this early stage in establishing our culture, its great to have the stake in the ground and the direction we need to head in.”

said Jo.

“Another key area is helping team members feel confident that we’ll act on the results. In all the change we’ve had recently, this is so important. We’ve set up support and accountability for action, coupled with a solid internal communications plan. So we’re looking forward to improving that view!”

The Nottingham’s project shows how employee listening can support strategic change when it is designed around action from the start.

People Insight helped the organisation:

• assess how the employee experience matched its culture aspiration
• establish a clear baseline for future measurement
• understand employee response to change
• give leaders and managers fast access to results
• focus Board and Executive attention on the right priorities
• prepare teams for action planning
• create a framework for ongoing culture oversight

The outcome was a survey process that leaders described as highly actionable, supported by 86% participation and clear next steps for culture development.

How was it working with People Insight?

“People Insight have been extremely easy to work with. They have challenged our thinking in a really constructive way; bringing fresh ideas which have helped us deliver a positive survey process with highly actionable results. Thank you!”

Start your employee listening journey

Nottingham Building Society’s story shows how employee listening can support culture change, strategic transformation and leadership accountability.

People Insight helps organisations capture employee feedback, understand what it means and turn it into clear action. Our employee survey platform gives leaders and managers accessible dashboards and benchmarks. Our consultants support stakeholder interviews, survey design, interpretation and action planning. Our communications guidance helps employees understand why their voice matters and how feedback will be used.

We can support you with:

• Employee surveys
• Employee engagement surveys
• Culture assessments
• Change-focused listening programmes
• Stakeholder interviews
• Survey dashboards and reporting
• Pearl™ engagement framework
• Financial services benchmarking
• Consultancy and interpretation sessions
• Action-planning workshops
• Survey communications
• Employee listening strategy

With the right platform and expert support, employee feedback can become the evidence base for culture change and strategic progress.

Ready to get more from your employee listening?

To learn more about employee engagement surveys supported by Pearl™, speak to our team

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