Dignity: Line manager communications training improves employee engagement

Dignity is one of the UK’s most trusted providers of funeral services and prepaid funeral plans. With around 4,300 employees, it serves more than 800 local communities in the UK.

As part of its business growth and development strategy, Dignity identified line managers as a vital employee engagement link when it comes to engaging dispersed and diverse audiences, especially at a time of change.

The goal was to help people managers understand and embody better internal communications, helping them see that communication is a crucial part of their role, the value of engagement, and to give them practical guidance, tools and resources for more effective two-way conversations with their teams.

Working closely with the Dignity HR and L&D teams, we created a workshop plan that made a clear case for effective internal comms and engagement. We developed practical and scalable sessions to reflect business objectives.  We ran a pre-session survey to add relevance and insight into the line manager training.

We:

• Ran 35 interactive focus groups and tailored training sessions of 90-minutes each
• Featured a range of formats and exercises to embrace different learning styles
• Produced an interactive PDF workbook, published on Dignity’s Learning Management System.

• Trained more than 200 line managers
• Delivered 35 sessions over two months
• Survey respondents gave the training an excellence score of 4.5 out of 5.

“The training was delivered really well, and it made me realise how much I need to think about how I’m communicating with my team, not just sending emails all the time.”

“The session gave a good insight into different methods and techniques we can use to engage with our people.”