This is a question that I have been asking myself for a few weeks. The answer takes me back to happy days when I worked at a railway company called GNER (Great North Eastern Railway) in the 1990’s. I used to bounce out of bed on a Monday morning and look forward to getting to work, and that happy state of affairs continued for at least three or four years, and encompassed some very trying times. I will attempt to put the feeling into words.
GNER took over from British Rail at the time when the railways were being privatised. At that time I had been in the industry for over fifteen years, and it would be fair to say that I wasn’t a fan of privatisation. Many of my colleagues thought that this new company would come in and get rid of them – I didn’t fear that, as I knew that our new bosses would still need us and our skills, but I did fear change, as most people do. When the takeover happened, nothing much changed as far as the front line people were concerned, for the first few months. However, we were communicated with much more than we had ever experienced with British Rail. Our new Chief Executive, Christopher Garnett, made sure that we were all kept up to speed with what was going on and once we started to hear about the changes that were coming, I noticed that most of them were positive ones. For example, there were going to be 400 new people starting work with us, as not only were GNER going to run more trains, they were also going to raise the levels of customer service on the trains, and that meant more people to serve the customers.
There were frequent roadshows where we were told what the changes were going to mean for us, and our questions were answered honestly. We had never been treated like that by our British Rail bosses. Most (but not all!) of them had been too busy looking after their own status to worry about the ‘insignificant’ people that looked after the customers on the front line.
The GNER culture change gave me the opportunity to move into training and developing people in the business, something I will always be thankful for, because it helped me to achieve dreams that I didn’t even know that I had! It wasn’t long before I saw directors and senior managers of GNER helping customers with their luggage at busy times and when trains had broken down, and there wasn’t just one isolated incident of that. It happened all the time, and it was because we had a ‘hands-on’ Chief Executive, the aforementioned Christopher Garnett, who would never get on a train without asking the front line people if they needed any help, and was often to be found pouring tea and coffee, collecting rubbish or even washing up on trains! If the service went wrong on a Friday, which for some reason it always did, he would come down from his modest office at King’s Cross station and help the station people deal with the customers.
That was true leadership, and of course, it led to a very engaged workforce – we really felt that we were supported and listened to, and performance increased as a result. I look back on the happy years I spent there and wonder why it all changed. I’m very glad, however, to have had the opportunity to be part of a really engaged workforce – it was wonderful!