A cultural change campaign to cut through the noise
How a new tone of voice grabbed employees’ attention
The client
Network Rail
The challenge
How do you support cultural change with copywriting and tone of voice? How do you drive adoption of new practices, ensure engagement, and communicate your future vision? Network Rail’s staff were bombarded with communications and, frankly, ignored most of them. We needed them to pro-actively report potential maintenance issues before the item failed.
The solution
We decided to adopt the attitude and tone of the track-side worker in employee communications. We made the employee the hero by articulating their achievements. Down to earth, no nonsense, bit cheeky, puns. It’s a non-corporate tone.
The writing
'Collect this. Fill out that. Forms. Templates. Procedures.
Blah blah blah...'
'But, you know what? We turned around over ten S14 incidents in under two hours last month.
How? Because the AM rerouted two mainlines as soon as it happened. He knew the risk of S14 on that line segment because of info collected from other teams.'
The results
The client particularly liked the attitude of the copy and the way it articulated the
feelings of track staff.
The credits
Copywriting agency: Barnaby Benson Copywriting London
Copywriter: Barnaby Benson
Agency: OPX
Client: Network Rail
