How do we pursure our mission by living our values?
The Royal Parks (TRP)
The Royal Parks (TRP) is a charity that officially launched in July 2017. It looks after eight of London’s largest open spaces; Hyde Park, Green Park, Richmond Park, Greenwich Park, St James’s Park, Bushy Park and The Regent’s Park, and Kensington Gardens. It also manages other important open spaces in the capital including Brompton Cemetery, Victoria Tower Gardens, Canning Green and Poet’s Corner.
In 2017, it took over the role of managing the parks from The Royal Parks Agency – a former executive agency of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), as well as fundraising and some education work from the Royal Parks Foundation. The two organisations joined forces to create a new charity and bring together the best of fundraising, education and park management.
The senior team faced a challenge of how to embed the values of a new charity into day-to-day ways of working to support its new mission. Firetail was commissioned to support the senior team shape the new organisation’s culture.
The ambition
The overall aim of the work was to help create a vision of what the charity could look like if everyone lived the values.
We designed a phased approach that focused on building ownership, as well as momentum, across the organisation. This included a bespoke process of staff consultation to ensure that the new organisational behaviours were defined and described in their own words. This included one-to-one interviews with the senior management team, away days and a series of workshops held across different sites within the charity. Staff were directly engaged in designing and developing new internal initiatives to bring their organisational values to life. These included new and practical steps around internal communications activities, policy and process development, performance management and development approaches.
Our approach
Values and behaviours play a critical role in shaping and changing organisational culture. Whilst organisational vision articulates purpose, values offer a set of guidelines on the behaviours and mindsets needed to achieve that vision. To make values live and stick, behaviours need to be practiced and visible in everything you say and do – from how you behave with colleagues and volunteers to how you make decisions and communicate with external partners and customers.
The work has provided a common standard that supports the implementation of the charity’s new strategic plan, but is also contributing to the development of a positive collaborative working culture across all the parks. The new Values and Behaviours statement is helping everyone to understand what is expected of them and is being used to guide new recruitment and selection processes, as well as approaches to staff management and development.
The final output from the review is available here:
https://www.royalparks.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/113139/Our-Values,-Our-Behaviours.pdf