Culture transformation for
Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service

Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service invited The Future Works to support a major culture transformation programme following a challenging period for the organisation, including changes at senior leadership level and recommendations from an HMICFRS review relating to leadership and culture.

The work has involved staff, managers, senior leaders, the People and Culture team and the Fire Authority. Its purpose has been to help the Service understand what was really happening across the organisation, rebuild trust, strengthen leadership and management practice, and create the conditions for culture change to be owned from within.

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.

Our approach treated the organisation as a living system. We looked at how leadership, structures, relationships, operational pressures, communication, decision-making and everyday behaviours were interacting to produce the culture people were experiencing. This helped ensure the work did not become a set of isolated workshops, but a connected process of listening, sense-making, leadership development and action.

Building an honest picture of the culture
We began by reviewing existing evidence and engaging people from across the organisation. This included interviews, conversations and workshops with operational firefighters, including whole-time and on-call colleagues, corporate staff, managers and senior leaders.

We created workshop spaces where staff and leaders were in the same room, hearing and responding to one another’s perspectives directly. This kind of two-way conversation was relatively new territory for the Service, and helped create a more open, shared understanding of what people were experiencing and what needed to change, while also embodying the shift to a more connected, high-trust culture which was desired. 

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 stated values and everyday behaviour;

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

• whether staff feedback led to visible action.

This created a richer and more textured picture than a survey alone could provide. It helped the Service see not only what people were saying, but also the patterns underneath – where trust had been damaged, where relationships needed attention, where systems were creating friction, and where people felt unclear about decisions, priorities or expectations. It also started to model the shift which was desired for the service by creating connection and robust conversation between different parts of the service from the outset.

Turning staff voice into shared priorities
We synthesised what we heard and brought the emerging themes back into conversations with staff, managers and leaders.

A central part of the work was helping the Service recognise its own patterns. The purpose was not simply to present findings from the outside, but to create the conditions for people to test what they were hearing, make sense of it together and take greater responsibility for what needed to change.

The process created structured spaces where staff could speak honestly, leaders could hear more directly how the organisation was being experienced, and different groups could begin to understand one another’s realities. For some colleagues, it was the first time in a long while that they had been in a room where these issues could be discussed openly and constructively.

The work also helped move the conversation beyond broad statements such as “communication needs to improve”. That theme was real, but it carried several different meanings. For some people it was about the formal communication channels. For others it was about understanding why decisions had been made, whether feedback was followed up, how managers passed messages through their teams, or whether different parts of the Service were talking to each other early enough.

By slowing the conversation down, we helped the organisation ask useful questions:

• Where are decisions getting stuck?

• What prevents challenge or insight from travelling upwards?

• What happens after staff offer feedback?

• Where are managers clear, or unclear, about what they can decide?

• How do operational and corporate colleagues better understand each other’s pressures?

• What conditions make it easier or harder for people to act in line with the Service’s values?

• What would make change feel visible and credible to staff?

Developing leaders and managers as culture carriers
A recurring theme was that culture could not sit with one team or one layer of the organisation. The People and Culture team had an important role, but they could not carry the whole change. Executive and senior leaders needed to create the conditions for change, but they could not be the only people responsible for it.

Managers were particularly important. They sit close enough to staff to shape people’s everyday experience, while also translating organisational priorities into action. They often experience the pressure between strategic expectations and practical delivery on the ground.

We therefore worked directly with the leadership and management community through:

• Senior Management Team development and alignment sessions;

• Individual and group coaching for the Executive Team and Senior Management Team;

• Coaching and development support for the People and Culture team;

• Manager-only conversations;

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

• Action Learning Sets focused on real organisational challenges;

• Communications support;

• Practical support between sessions to help maintain momentum.

The manager work explored what it means to be a culture carrier in practice. Managers were given space to consider how they communicate decisions, respond to challenge, create psychological safety, exercise judgement, role-model values, support their teams and contribute to the wider leadership of the Service.

An important part of the work was helping managers move from feeling caught between “the top” and “the ground” towards recognising their own influence. At the same time, the programme surfaced the support, clarity and infrastructure managers need if they are to take more ownership. The message was not simply that managers needed to “step up”; it was also that the organisation needed to help them do so.

Most recently, this work has evolved into supporting managers to step more fully into the ownership role being asked of them, using the build-up to the final Managers’ Day as a facilitated process through which managers can help shape the agenda, work through priority issues, practise decision-making and bring forward progress, challenges and asks to SMT.

Working with the Fire Authority
The programme also included work with the Fire Authority, recognising that governance is an important part of the cultural system of the Service. Fire Authority members play a key role in oversight, scrutiny and strategic direction, and the relationship between members and senior officers can influence the conditions in which leadership and culture change takes place.

We facilitated workshops with Fire Authority members and senior officers to strengthen mutual understanding of their respective roles, pressures and responsibilities. These sessions created space to explore what each group needed from the other in order to support the Service well, provide effective governance and enable the desired culture to develop. The work helped build a more shared understanding of how governance, leadership and organisational culture connect, and how both members and officers can contribute to creating the conditions for trust, clarity and constructive challenge.

Connecting insight, action and programme delivery
Culture work can create cynicism if people are asked for feedback and then do not see what happens next. We paid close attention to the link between listening, sense-making and action.

Alongside facilitation and leadership development, we provided programme management, coordination, communications support, evaluation and regular sense-making. This helped connect the different strands of work so that insight from staff workshops informed senior leadership development, manager conversations connected to wider organisational priorities, and emerging themes were not left sitting in separate rooms.

The programme also created feedback loops between different parts of the Service. Themes from staff engagement were brought into conversations with the Executive and SMT. Manager feedback shaped the next phase of support. Learning from the Culture Working Group, Action Learning Sets and staff survey helped inform the ongoing direction of travel.

This integration was important because the issues being raised were interconnected. Communication, decision-making, trust, priorities, systems, capacity and accountability could not be dealt with as separate problems. They needed to be understood together in real-time as part of the Service’s real work.

What changed

The work helped Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service develop 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 being experienced by people in different roles and at different levels. Recurring themes were brought together and translated into practical areas for attention, rather than remaining as disconnected feedback.

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

The People and Culture team provided a useful example of this shift becoming more practical and ‘granular’. Through dedicated sessions with the team, they took time to explore what the wider cultural themes meant for them and what was within their gift to change. This helped translate the programme from whole-Service insight into more granular questions about team ways of working. The current phase of work with managers is intended to build on this principle – helping managers take the broader culture themes and work out, in practical terms, what they can influence, what they can lead, and where they need to ask for support. The aim is to equip managers to recreate this kind of focused reflection and action within their own areas.

The programme also helped senior leaders see more clearly where organisational systems, decision-making arrangements, feedback loops and patterns of accountability were making cultural change harder. This supported a more nuanced understanding of the work ahead – some changes were about leadership behaviour; others were about structures, processes, capacity and organisational rhythm.

The spaces created through the programme were valued. Following one Managers’ Day, 94% of respondents said they would recommend that kind of session to a colleague. This reflected strong engagement with the work and the value people placed on honest, facilitated conversations across the Service.

The work also created momentum for the next phase. By the second Managers’ Day, it was clear that some progress had been made, including greater leadership visibility, Action Learning Sets, the Culture Working Group, station and team visits, more connection between green and grey book teams, and further opportunities for managers to come together.

Culture change was not ‘completed’ through this programme. Sustainable improvement will require continued leadership attention, manager support, visible follow-through and evidence collected over time. What the programme created was a stronger foundation and set of principles for how to keep ‘culture’ central and proactively cultivated as the Service moves forwards.

Our 'special sauce' on this project

The value The Future Works brought was the ability to hold the whole system in view while helping different parts of the organisation take responsibility for change.

We brought together five areas of expertise.

1. Whole-system culture change:
We helped the Service look at culture as something produced through leadership, management, structures, relationships, operational pressures, communication and everyday behaviour. This meant the work stayed connected to the real conditions of the organisation, rather than becoming a generic culture or training programme.

2. Sensitivity to the emergency-service context:
We understood the tension between the clarity and hierarchy required for operational command and the openness, challenge and participation needed for organisational health. The work respected the realities of a fire and rescue service while helping leaders and managers think differently about authority, voice, accountability and shared ownership.

3. Leadership and management development:
We connected organisation-wide insight to the practical behaviour and capability of leaders and managers. Coaching, Action Learning Sets and facilitated development sessions gave people space to work with real organisational challenges, not just abstract leadership concepts.

4. Independent, psychologically informed facilitation:
As an external partner, we were able to create spaces where people could speak more openly than they might have done internally. We helped surface difficult patterns, hold tension constructively and prevent the work being dominated by any one group’s interpretation of the problem.

5. Sense-making and programme integration:
We translated complex human insight into clear themes, choices and next steps. We also helped connect discovery, staff engagement, leadership work, manager development, communications and evaluation so that each strand reinforced the others.

Our independence mattered – an internal leader of this work, such as the People and Culture team, would have been part of the same system it was trying to change. Likewise, senior leaders are both listeners to the feedback and subjects of the feedback. Our role allowed us to hold the space between those perspectives.

Our contribution was also to listen and respond rather than go in with a ‘ready-made’ solution. This created a change process which was dynamic and adaptive to a highly complex system which was changing as we went along.