What is the Environment Agency Behavioural Diagnostic Project? 

In April 2019, The Environment Agency launched new commercial arrangements founded on collaboration that resulted in changes to the way we work with our Delivery Partners to deliver our asset investment programmes. We recognise it takes time to embed changes in how we work, and that we all need support to do this.

We are now conducting a diagnostic exercise to understand and assess the effectiveness of our new ways of working and how well our collaborative behaviours are being embedded across our Integrated Delivery Teams, including with those who have a wider supporting role.

We would like to gain an understanding of:

• Your perspective on the new ways of working (i.e. how it is embedding)
• What is working well and how we are working well together
• Barriers to collaborative behaviours

To do this we will be working with a specialised and independent delivery partner, Zircon BeTalent, to help us conduct research through a behavioural diagnostic journey. To help us to understand the different perspectives across the Environment Agency and our Delivery Partners, four different data sources will be used:

1. Paired Comparison Behavioural Diagnostic 
• An online diagnostic tool which covers all 6 collaborative behaviours.

2. BeTalent Values card sort activity
• An online activity that supports your personal development;
• This activity can also be used in team development. Click here to download a team exercise that you may want to try after completing the activity.

3. Behavioural based interviews 
• 45 minute behavioural interview with an Occupational Psychologist;
• Gathering examples through more in-depth questions across the 6 behaviours. These interviews will  include senior leadership roles to provide a 360 view.

4. Environment Agency and Delivery Partners behaviour and values frameworks

A number of you will be involved in either a behavioural based interview or a paired comparison exercise. We will be inviting around 400 people across the Environment Agency and our Delivery Partners to complete the Paired Comparison Behavioural Diagnostic and BeTalent Values card sort activity. A further 150 people will take part in a behavioural interview. These individuals will also have the opportunity to complete the BeTalent Values card sort activity. To find out more about what each of these activities involve, see the frequently asked questions.

To hear more about the project, please click here to watch a short video:

If you missed the online briefings that took place in December, you can watch a recording here:

The aims of the project are to: 

  • Further empower ourselves and our Delivery Partners around the way we collaborate with each other;
  • Ensure our voices feel heard;
  • Gather evidence about our understanding of our collaborative behaviours and ways of working;
  • Understand how consistently the collaborative behaviours and ways of working are being applied across our Integrated Delivery Teams (IDT) and wider supporting roles;
  • Understand what is working and where, by gathering stories;
  • Understand what the barriers are to embedding collaborative behaviours;
  • Build our plan of action for continuing to develop the way we work together.

Why is this project important?

This project is important for two reasons:

1
Collaborative behaviour is a critical factor in delivering our EA2025 ambitions, therefore making sure that the behaviours are being lived by all colleagues and partners working on Environment Agency projects is key to our success. We currently have some understanding of the impacts that the framework is having but we want to explore this further.
2
This project will provide you with the opportunity to reflect on the way that you work and the values that are important to you through completing an online values exercise. As a thank you, you will receive a personal development report that you can use for your own reflection and development.
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What are we seeking to achieve?

Following the collation of these different data sources, the aspiration will be to understand what is happening nationally, as well as across the six collaborative delivery hubs across the Environment Agency. Recommendations will then be made about how the collaborative behaviours can be further embedded into our delivery culture. These recommendations, linking the behaviours to high performance, will be developed together through a series of action planning workshops, which will take place in February 2020.

What outputs can you expect from the behavioural diagnostic?

The expected outputs from this project include:

  • A baseline for benchmarking where we are now and how we can continue to monitor progress of our behavioural changeas the embedding of our collaborative behaviour’s framework progresses;
  • National overview report and recommendations;
  • 6 hub reports and presentation of findings to leadership teams;
  • 6 hub workshops to collectively develop action plans;
  • Communication of action plans in collaboration with local hubs and national teams;
  • A behavioural roadmap to enable us to plan and sustain ongoing change across our integrated teams.

Timing of the project

The high level timescales for the project are shown below:

Book your interview

If you have been invited to take part in an interview, we would be delighted to hear from you.  

This will help the EA and our Delivery Partners to understand how to best plan our next steps to improve working collaboratively to improve delivery of our programmes.

Book Now
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About Zircon BeTalent

Zircon BeTalent are an experienced team of HR Consultants and Psychologists who come together to work with clients to help them develop their talent requirements. They support individuals, teams and organisations across the public and private sector to reach their highest potential and maximise productivity. Their assessment tools, methods and approaches are developed to provide support and insight at all levels of an organisation, including providing expertise in supporting the senior management and executive levels.

Zircon BeTalent Case Studies

Here are a few example of the work that Zircon BeTalent have done in the past relating to culture change. Please note that the impact of these projects is confidential and therefore have been removed:

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Transport for London

Following the deployment of an organisation wide diversity programme, London Underground commissioned a project to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme in terms of knowledge, understanding and influence over change in employee behaviour. The programme incorporated the entire London Underground network and the diagnostic was a qualitative and quantitative research study which sought to establish the opinions, experiences and behaviours of the Senior and Middle Managers in connection with attitudes to diversity. Conducting over 80 interviews with representation from each tube line and management level, the interviews sought to inform focus groups and create recommendations for developing the content and delivery of the diversity programme. Conclusions highlighted opportunities for enhancement and recommendations to develop course content and delivery mechanisms.

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Anglo American

We were invited by Anglo American to conduct a global audit of all assessment methods used in all of their international locations. This included interviewing the HR leads in each country to understand the products and processes followed, and a full list of products used were identified. Each of these were then assessed, to check their validity, reliability and suitability for recruitment, development, succession and high potential assessment. Recommendations using the British Psychological Society BPS, American Psychological Association APA and the South African Psychology Association PsySSA standards were made. As a result a more streamlined set of tools were recommended for the organisation, a set of best practice guides for recruitment, succession, development, coaching and high potential assessment were designed and shared using a workshop approach. This project resulted in a the implementation of a robust suite of tools with high levels of useability for the HR team and face validity for the candidates and employees.

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British Army

We were invited by the British Army to conduct research into the high potential criteria for the Assessment of Stretch Potential and Employment Suitability of Army Officers on promotion to Major. Over a 6 month period we conducted in depth research to understand the criteria using interview and focus group methodology. We articulated the success requirements of Majors and benchmarked these criteria against robust and published requirements for high potential individuals. Once the model was created, a suite of assessment tools were designed, selected and piloted with an existing population of high performing Majors. Benchmark data was therefore created as a standard for future assessments for promotion.

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Iron Mountain

We have worked with an information protection and storage company to identify talent in key areas of their organisation and develop this talent further through individual feedback sessions and follow-up team workshops. We integrated information from 360 feedback as well as using psychometrics to identify personality preferences, management and cognitive capabilities. A team of consultants worked closely with individuals, sharing feedback from various psychometrics and 360 assessments, and agreeing potential areas to focus on for development. The workshops followed up the individual feedback sessions and enabled people to share their feedback and discuss team approaches as well as individual ones. The purpose of the workshops were to improve team effectiveness and develop individual self-awareness, as well as awareness of other people’s preferences and individual styles.

Who is the project team?

There are a number of the Environment Agency and Zircon BeTalent team members involved in this project:

Environment Agency

Jo Jolly

Project Sponsor

Julie Payne

Project Executive

Catherine Hall
Project Manager
Sarah Ward
Comms Lead & Project Support 

Environment Agency

Effie Burrows

Project Support

Joanna Kimber

Assistant Project Manager (Arup)
Simon Leek
CDF Framework Director (Atkins)
Helen Dobby
Area Director - Devon, Cornwall & Isles of Scilly

Sarah Chare

Director of Operations South and East
Mike Moylan
Deputy Director - Head of Infrastructure

Zircon BeTalent

Sarah Linton

Project Director

Amanda Potter

Lead Psychologist & Interviewer
Sarah Green
Project Co-ordinator

Helen Hargrave
Project Manager & Interviewer
Rhys Connolly
Interviewer
Julie Lee
Interviewer
Anette Morris
Interviewer
Tim Hepworth
Technical Director

Andrea Conti

Graphic/Video Designer

Frequently asked questions

Working as integrated delivery teams requires us to change the way we work and adapt our behaviours to be truly collaborative.

We are on a journey to understand how well our collaborative behaviours are embedding across the Environment Agency and our Delivery Partners. Having launched the six different collaborative behaviours 18 months ago, we are keen to understand your views around how the framework is working in practice.

We want to gather evidence on how we can continue to improve the way we work together, to achieve a truly collaborative culture.

We are working with colleagues from across the Environment Agency and our Delivery Partners to align this exercise with other data gathering activities that have taken place this year, including:

• The interim Business Change Measures;
• The ‘Voice of the Supplier’ survey;
• University College London Project 13 research interviews.

We will build on the existing data already gathered, rather than duplicating previous activities. The behavioural diagnostic will take a more detailed look at the behaviours across our delivery hubs. The existing data will be incorporated into the overall analysis so that we are able to develop a rounded view of how the framework is working in practice.  

Throughout the project, EDI is integral to our planning to make sure individuals from different age groups, gender and ethnic backgrounds are included. Within the analysis phase of the project, we will take time to look at the data and consider in any recommendations that are made whether behaviours are having an adverse impact in achieving an equal, diverse and inclusive culture.

A paired comparison exercise is a 15-20 minute diagnostic that provides you with two behavioural statements and asks you to choose which one you see most often.

We will send all participants an invite to complete the BeTalent Values card sort activity. Within this exercise, you will be asked to select your top 5 values from a selection of 18 different values. The purpose of this exercise is to uncover what is important to you at work.

As a thank you for taking part, you will receive a personal development report based on your selections.

We encourage you to share this with your manager or a trusted colleague so that it provides you with time to reflect on the exercise. This can be a very powerful tool to use in personal or team development.

A behavioural based interview will explore your experiences to date of working within the Collaborative Delivery Framework and with its associated behaviours, to understand what you have observed in yourself and others since its launch.

This interview will last approximately 45 minutes.

We implemented our new Collaborative Delivery Framework (CDF) in April 2019 following a competitive tender process. All our CDF partners were assessed against six collaborative behaviours to help us align our cultures and ambition in delivery.

To understand how these behaviours are being embedded and where collaboration is working well and not so well, we need to ask for insights from those who have been actively involved and contributing to projects on the framework. This will provide a baseline and the outputs will be used to engage with other frameworks and wider operational teams. The baseline will also enable us to measure our performance into the future, as we create development plans for continued embedding of the collaborative behaviours.

The interim Business Change Measures (iBCMs) provides a baseline of responses focused on understanding how each of the integrated delivery teams are implementing the new ways of working, for example, early engagement of scopes, integrated programme delivery boards, etc...

The information focused primarily on activities which indicate changes in behaviour. This is required for measuring the performance of our framework in the early stages. We are using the insights gathered from this exercise to inform a deeper understanding of culture and behaviours and what is blocking us from achieving our ambition to work collaboratively to release value and potential.

We have carefully selected interviewees through our integrated behavioural diagnostics project team, to ensure we have a balanced, representative cross-section of views from across our Delivery Partners and Environment Agency teams.

To provide a wide breadth of views, we are also carrying out an online paired comparison exercise. This exercise will invite a range of people who have worked with projects delivered through the Collaborative Delivery Framework to ask about the behaviours observed in our day-to-day work. It also includes a ‘card sort’ exercise, which will generate a personalised report that to keep and use in development discussions with your team, line manager or mentor.

If you receive a link to the online paired comparison exercise, please do respond - your thoughts and opinions are valuable and will feed into action planning in your Delivery Hub. Your link will be personal to you, so please don’t forward it on.

Equally, if you receive an invitation to take part in an interview please do make every effort to attend. If you are not able to attend please do not forward your invitation on. Let us know as soon as possible if you can’t make it as we may be able to offer your space to somebody else.

Please note that if you have been asked to attend an interview, you will not also be asked to complete the paired comparison exercise, and vice versa. This will ensure there is no duplication of responses. 

Yes, we want to hear from as many people as possible. If you meet the criteria below and would like to take part, please get in touch with Sarah Ward.
 
To take part:

• You must have worked on or supported projects or programmes of work within the Collaborative Delivery Framework.

We would like to hear from:

• Practitioners from the hub who are in delivery roles, or those in roles that support delivery in the hub, and have experienced the new ways of working in the last 18 months.

Where there are large Areas or 3 Areas within a Hub, we will seek to reflect the sample size in the wider paired diagnostic exercise. 

The overall aspiration is to create sustainability and improve the performance of delivery across the Environment Agency as a whole. Using your valuable insight and feedback we will look to create a benchmark and a clear roadmap for future action. We will work with a number of you through workshops to further define the recommendations and actions moving forward.

We are really keen to capture a full range of views through this project and your opinion is really important to us. We want everyone taking part to feel they can be open and honest to make the outputs of this project balanced, representative and useful.

If you are invited to take part, please make every effort to participate. This is your opportunity to share what you think is going well and what you think could be improved, in a completely confidential space. 

All of your responses and opinions will remain confidential and will not be attributable to you. The project aims to pull out the main themes from the paired comparison and interviews so that recommendations can be made for the future.

You can choose to remove your data at any time, should you wish to do this, please contact Helen Hargrave.

Yes, once the reports are produced and finalised they will be used in workshops with Delivery Hub leadership teams. Once these workshops are complete all the outputs of this project will be available on the Delivery Hub SharePoint sites.

Expected outputs from this project include:

• National overview report and recommendations;
• 6 hub reports and verbal presentation of findings to leadership teams;
• 6 hub workshops to collectively develop action plans;
• Communication of action plans in collaboration with local hubs and national teams;
• A behavioural baseline for benchmarking and monitoring continued progress of collaborative behavioural change.

From this we will create sustainable change across our Delivery Hubs, through follow up action planning and ongoing monitoring and measurement of behavioural change to understand progress.  

If you require any reasonable adjustments, please contact Helen Hargrave with a description of your requirements and she will be able to support you in completing the activity.

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