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Culture Change

Culture change · Public services · Leadership alignment · Staff engagement

Culture transformation in a Fire and Rescue Service

A fire and rescue service needed to rebuild trust and change ways of working. We ran an end-to-end culture transformation programme involving every layer of the organisation.

The challenge

A Fire and Rescue Service was facing a significant culture challenge. There were signs of low trust, variable morale, siloed working and an “us and them” dynamic between different parts and levels of the organisation. Some staff felt unheard or that change was being done to them. Leadership visibility and accountability were experienced inconsistently, while people did not always feel confident that speaking up or offering feedback would lead to meaningful action.

The organisation had values, behaviours and professional frameworks - including the national Code of Ethics - but these were not yet consistently reflected in people’s everyday experience.

The challenge was intensified by the context. This was a stretched, high-pressure emergency service bringing together whole-time and on-call firefighters, corporate and support colleagues, managers, senior leaders and an overseeing Fire Authority. Operational hierarchy and clear command are essential in an emergency, but culture change required greater openness, participation, constructive challenge and shared responsibility.

Everyone knew that culture needed to shift. What was less clear was how to create the time, trust and structure needed to make that change real.

The organisation needed to understand what was actually happening across the system, involve people meaningfully and build the capability and ownership required to sustain change from within. It did not need another culture model imposed from outside or a series of disconnected training interventions.

What we did

We designed and supported a whole-organisation culture transformation process, working across staff, managers, the Senior Management Team, Executive leaders, the People and Culture function and the Fire Authority.

Rather than treating culture as a standalone programme, we approached the organisation as a living system. This meant connecting insights across different levels, examining the relationships and conditions producing existing patterns, and ensuring that work with one group informed what happened elsewhere.

Building an honest picture of the culture:
We began by reviewing existing evidence and engaging people from across the organisation.

Interviews, conversations and workshops involved operational firefighters - including whole-time and on-call colleagues - corporate and support staff, managers, senior leaders and Fire Authority members.

The engagement explored people’s experience of:
 

  • trust and alignment across the organisation;

  • leadership visibility and impact;

  • communication and transparency;

  • accountability and constructive challenge;

  • inclusion and psychological safety;

  • the relationship between organisational values and everyday behaviour;

  • morale, wellbeing and people’s experience of change;

  • and whether staff feedback led to visible action.


This created a richer picture than a conventional staff survey could provide. It helped identify not only what people were experiencing, but the relationships, behaviours and organisational conditions contributing to those experiences.

Turning staff voice into shared priorities:
We synthesised what we heard across the organisation and brought the emerging themes back into leadership and staff conversations.

The purpose was not to produce a report that diagnosed the organisation from outside. It was to help people recognise the patterns, test whether the findings felt true and develop greater ownership of what needed to change.

We created structured spaces where staff could speak honestly, leaders could hear the lived experience of the organisation more directly, and different groups could begin to understand one another’s perspectives.

The work helped move conversations beyond individual incidents or simple explanations of “poor communication” towards the deeper systemic questions underneath them:
 

  • Where were decisions getting stuck?

  • What prevented challenge from travelling upwards?

  • Why did some people feel disconnected from senior leadership?

  • What happened after staff offered feedback?

  • Were managers clear about what they could decide and influence?

  • What organisational conditions made it difficult for people to act in line with the stated values?
     

Developing leaders and managers as culture carriers:
Culture could not be delegated to the People Team or led by the senior team alone.

We therefore worked directly with the people responsible for shaping employees’ everyday experience. This included:
 

  • Senior Management Team development and alignment sessions;

  • individual and group coaching for Executive and senior leaders;

  • coaching and development sessions for the People and Culture team;

  • manager workshops and manager-only sessions;

  • action learning focused on applying learning to real organisational challenges;

  • Managers’ Days bringing together SMT and managers across the service;

  • and practical support between sessions to maintain momentum.


The manager work focused on helping people understand their role as culture carriers, not simply as the layer responsible for implementing instructions from above.

Managers explored how they communicated decisions, responded to challenge, created psychological safety, exercised judgement, role-modelled the organisation’s values and translated strategic intentions into the day-to-day experience of their teams.

Connecting insight, action and programme delivery:
A common risk in culture work is that organisations gather extensive feedback but struggle to convert it into visible change. This can reinforce cynicism rather than build trust.

We helped connect the different strands of work, translating complex staff and leadership insight into clear priorities, practical activity and ongoing feedback loops.

Alongside facilitation and leadership development, we provided programme management, coordination, communications support, evaluation and regular sense-making. This helped ensure that learning from staff workshops informed senior leadership work, that manager development connected to wider organisational priorities and that emerging issues were not left in separate rooms.

What changed

The process gave the organisation a clearer and more widely shared understanding of the cultural barriers affecting trust, collaboration and performance.

Staff voice became more visible within the change process. Leaders and Fire Authority members heard more directly how the organisation was experienced at different levels, while recurring themes were translated into practical areas for attention rather than remaining as disconnected feedback.

Managers developed a stronger understanding of their own role in shaping culture. The conversation began to shift from looking solely to the senior team for change towards recognising the influence managers have through everyday decisions, relationships and behaviours.

Senior leaders also gained greater insight into where organisational systems, decision-making arrangements and gaps between feedback and action were making cultural change harder.

The spaces created through the programme were valued. For example, following one Managers’ Day, 94% of respondents said they would recommend the session.

These results demonstrate strong engagement with the work, not the completion of culture change. Sustainable improvement requires continued leadership attention, manager support, visible follow-through and evidence collected over time.

The programme created a stronger foundation for that next stage: a shared picture of the culture, greater clarity about responsibility and a more practical route from listening to action.

Our 'special sauce' on this project

The value we brought was not simply the ability to facilitate workshops. It was the ability to hold the whole system while helping different parts of it take responsibility for change.

Our approach combined five areas of expertise:

1. Whole-system culture change. We understood that culture was being produced through the interaction of leadership, management, structures, relationships, operational pressures, communications and everyday behaviour. This prevented the work from collapsing into a training programme or a list of actions for individuals.

2. Understanding the emergency-service context. We could work with the tension between the clarity and hierarchy required for operational command and the openness, challenge and participation needed for a healthy organisational culture. The answer was not to reject hierarchy, but to help the organisation become more deliberate about where authority sat, how challenge was welcomed and how people could influence change.

3. Leadership and management development. We connected organisation-wide insight to the behaviour and capability of leaders and managers. Coaching, action learning and facilitated development created opportunities to work through real challenges rather than discussing leadership only in the abstract.

4. Independent, psychologically informed facilitation. As an external partner, we could create spaces in which people said things that may have been harder to express internally. We could surface difficult patterns without becoming captured by one group’s interpretation, while helping people stay in constructive relationship with one another.

5. Sense-making and programme integration. We are skilled at translating messy human insight into clear themes, choices and practical next steps. We also managed the programme so that discovery, staff engagement, leadership work, manager development, communications and evaluation reinforced one another rather than becoming separate initiatives.

An internal People Team is both part of the system and responsible for supporting it. Senior leaders are similarly required to listen to feedback while knowing that their own leadership is being examined. Our independence created greater permission for honesty and allowed us to hold connections that would have been difficult for any one internal team to hold alone.

Another provider might have delivered culture workshops, leadership training or an employee-listening exercise. Our contribution was to connect all three: helping the organisation hear itself, understand the system producing its current culture and develop the shared ownership needed to change it.

We did not arrive with a ready-made answer. We created the conditions for iterative learning and response, honest leadership, focused action and culture change that could increasingly be owned from within.

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