Video Transcript (Met Office)
Workplace Innovation in the Met Office
John Hirst CBE 0:03
I’ve seen innovation be attempted in lots of organizations. And what classically happens is that people create an innovation team. And they become experts on the theory of innovation. And they isolate themselves because they start talking in completely different language from most of the organization. There are lots of conferences and speaking engagements and make no impact on the organization at all.
Gary Holpin 0:36
I think the traditional culture of the Met Office is lots of people in their offices beavering away at their science and for innovation to work best you need people collaborating and talking to one another and engaging with people outside of their sphere.
John Hirst CBE 0:55
And so when we started here, and so when my colleagues came and said, Look, we think innovation is important, don’t you? Yes, I do. Do we think we have the skills and experience do you think the same? I do. I said, Look, you’re not getting a budget and you’re not getting a title, and you don’t getting a team. Right. What I what I think we need here is a terrorist organization of people who really care and are prepared to invest a bit of themselves. I’ll give you some space, and I’ll give you some cover. But what I want you to do is to work from the inside to change the culture rather than look like it’s the chief executives project.
Gary Holpin 1:33
We actually took a normal Met office room that was just an empty office, and we made it into a cinema, and we have popcorn and ice cream. And we made into quite an event for them. And one of the reasons for doing that was that we wanted to show the importance of trying to do things differently. We never know what would have been said, if it weren’t for our chief executive standing up and essentially saying, this is great, well done, I fully support this.
Natalie Wilkie 2:03
We then followed that up with a series of workshops and what we developed was a vision. And this vision was really focused on individuals. And it was kind of in a way it was a strategy and innovation strategy, but it was more focused about how we would like individuals come to work at the Met Office and how we like them to feel when they are at work.
Gary Holpin 2:23
It doesn’t need to be business as usual. But there is a danger that business as usual means turning the handle and getting stale and carrying on doing shifting the culture to here and then just carry on doing that forever. And not evolving and changing.
Random Male 2:47
Support it, encourage it, let it happened and don’t over manage it. Give people time and space to be involved. Make them feel is part of their day job, not an add on so you know it’s a positive thing towards achieving targets or whatever bettering that purpose.
Random 3:17
One sees, you know, directors, having meetings out in the streets or whatever have seemed to be engaging in innovation, that kind of walk the walk and talk the talk
Gary Holpin 3:27
And I think the main way of getting around it was to try and educate the managers as to what we were trying to do. And that it wasn’t just a silly little sideline, which some people saw it as.
Natalie Wilkie 3:40
There’s probably about over 100 volunteers across everything. And these are people that are just doing it in addition to their day job, but their managers recognize the value of how they get actual facilitation skills and they can use that in their teams.
John Hirst CBE 4:09
All this Innovation stuff doesn’t really work if they don’t buy into what you’re trying to achieve.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai