About BEST
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BEST...What is it all about?
BEST was the beginning of a journey to more effective employee engagement across Birmingham City Council. There is a wealth of information for others across the pages, a lot of it is out of date now in August 2012 - but still useful for understanding the exciting and challenging journey of the past 6 years.
BEST is based on Birmingham City Council’s core values: Belief, Excellence, Success and Trust. Its aim is to motivate staff and enable them to think differently.
BEST is a workshop programme which creates a ‘can-do’ culture amongst our employees and develops a sense of pride and commitment in working for our organisation.
BEST was designed to:
- Support the delivery of the 5 Council Plan Objectives
- Give individuals and teams a 'voice'
- Devolve decision making as close to the end user as possible
- Work better as a team
- Improve the service we deliver to the citizens of Birmingham
- Engage the employees of Birmingham City Council and seek to strengthen the psychological contract
- Support the wider transformation agenda, by engaging our people in the changes that are happening
BEST aims to identify and drive forward thousands of small changes in behaviour at all levels of the organisation. The theory behind BEST lies in employee engagement, driving performance improvement and moving towards a transformational culture.
How does BEST work?
The BEST Programme is designed to give Birmingham City Council employees a voice and provide an opportunity for teams to come together to discuss ways they can work together more effectively, and provide better service to our customers, the citizens of Birmingham.
Since the design and implementation of the BEST Programme in 2007, over 20, 000 members of staff have been through a BEST Workshop, led by 1800 trained BEST Leaders. This has resulted in over 6000 actions across the Council focusing on improving customer service, partnership and team working. All contributing to helping teams work together more effectively and improving our service delivery.
The BEST process involves a series of facilitated workshops led by a trained BEST Leader.
It is important that that the BEST Leader is not the manager of the team as BEST is employee not manager led.
At the heart of a BEST workshop is a honest and open discussion which involves the team scoring themselves against the four core Council values of Belief, Excellence, Success and Trust.
The team then works together to come up with three or four actions based on their value scores to help them improve their team working, customer service and partnership working.
Following the initial BEST workshop the team then comes together 3 or 4 more times over the year to discuss and reflect on their actions progress, however teams are encouraged to raise BEST at each team meeting to help drive the process forward.
