One Workplace - What's this all about?

' So what's this 'One Workplace' all about?' I heard a colleague ask me. Well, when we had our first pan-Workplace Team Session in the Radio Theatre last week, I talked about how it would be great if all 2000 of us were really working as one team.

Given the huge initial impact of the One Water project I thought it was sensible to label our game plan as One Workplace - see previous blog.

Now, I know that many of my readers are not interested in sport but, bear with me; a game plan is simply a list of things a team needs to do to win a game, a contest or a competition.

In Workplace, we're on a journey and I need to ensure that everyone understands where we're heading and the role each person will play in helping me get to our destination.

'So what are you trying to achieve?' you may ask. Workplace does two things, we operate the BBC estate on a day to day basis and we make changes ranging from the massive W1 and Media City projects to replacing windows and moving desks. We are expected by the BBC top table to successfully deliver our big tasks and put money back into programming by spending wisely. Our wider customer base needs us to help keep them on air as well as deliver a range of routine stuff.

We're following the direction given by Creative Future, or as Mark Thompson put it in Oct 2007, "Spend money wisely - saving it where we can give it back to our audiences - in great content"

But what does this mean for the readers of this blog? In a nutshell, we need to work out how Workplace is going to organise itself for the years ahead so we can deliver the right workplaces to support the BBC's Creative Future. Over the coming weeks I intend, with support from my senior team, to seek your input on how we go about helping the BBC become the most creative organisation in the world. I want everyone to have the opportunity to contribute to our plan. This aspiration brings to mind a quote: three people were at work on a construction site. All were doing the same job but when each was asked what they were doing, the answers varied. Breaking rocks, the first replied. Earning my living the second said. Helping to build a cathedral, said the third. It is this awareness of contributing to something bigger, beyond the task at hand, that I want to nurture.

'But shouldn't you management guys have this figured out already?' you ask. Well, we have in part and it's taken months! But we also need your help because we need to raise our game to help us succeed and to do this we all need to be on the same page. Now this brings me to the difficult part - we're a pretty big group (2000 approx), we're spread across the UK and most of us are not directly employed by the BBC. Yet for most of us the BBC is our life and we all want to see it succeed.

So how do you bring together this amazing group of people? There's no easy answer to this but, as with all big moments of inspiration, it came to me whilst shaving! We need some form of common cause that is worthwhile and easy to understand. We need to organise ourselves around focusing on doing the right thing as well as doing things right.

This gave rise to the One Workplace concept - which will in time give us a Workplace in which we are proud to work. We will be operating to six simple ways of working - we will be reliable, flexible, supportive, trusting, creative and fair. We are a good team now but I believe we can become a great team and with your help it has the potential to be amongst the best in the world. But we can only achieve this if we work as One Workplace.

I'm told that many people felt inspired following our first All Staff briefing and lots of you are keen to know more, in particular: what does 'doing the right job' mean?. At its most basic I need your support to help those less fortunate than us. We will be organised about how we do this and for starters we will think about lending our support at a global level, at a national level and at local level. There is still some detail to be worked out but One Water will feature as a global link whilst Children in Need will be our National focus. I will post a blog next week with further details including the team leader for this initiative. Plans for the local initiatives are also still in development but we are looking into linking up with BBC Outreach's Connect and Create scheme and working in a coordinated way.

In parallel, whilst doing the right thing, we need to think about how we can raise our game and do better. This is really all about doing things right and boils down to a drive for better performance in service quality and delivery. I want everyone to think about BBC Workplace as a high performance team, one which we can all be proud of, where service delivery is integrated and where we will truly be able to live up to the BBC value of great things happening because we are working together as One Workplace.