Engaging employees in a professional services firm before relaunching the brand

Client: James Cowper
Sector: Business services
Service: Employee engagement

The client

James Cowper are a progressive firm of accountants and business advisers based in the Thames Valley with 16 partners and a diverse range of clients. The Managing Partner had called in a firm of branding specialists to consider the firm’s image internally and externally. Having conducted research they concluded that the firm needed a clearer sense of its own identity and needed to develop a shared vision, purpose and values with the staff and partners that could then be translated into the external brand positioning. Edgecumbe were recommended to work with the firm on this task.

Edgecumbe’s contribution

We developed a programme, not only for developing a set of vision and values, but also engaging the staff to adopt the processes and behaviours that would be necessary to support the values and embed them into the firm’s organisational processes and daily activities. Through a series of partner interviews, focus groups and creative workshops we clarified and articulated the purpose and values of the business, we generated a set of behaviours necessary to support the values and we convened a Project Management Group representative of the firm to ensure that the initiatives were coordinated and sustained. With the support of the company’s HR team, we also supported the partner group to encourage them to model the behaviours necessary to take specific responsibilities for leading implementation of the values throughout the company.

The outcome

Once our work was completed, the company’s external brand was updated and re-launched. A special event attended by all staff was held to underline the importance of the project to the future of the firm and to the employees. Adrian Rann, the Managing Partner, describes the value generated from the programme. “Edgecumbe helped us agree core values and related behaviours that have made us a better firm to work for and have helped us bring more focus to the services we offer clients – ‘A different perspective, a broader view’”.