Connecting people to purpose at Sellafield

Sellafield, on the Cumbrian coast, is Europe's largest nuclear site, with a mission that stretches across generations. With more than 10,000 workers across multiple sites, they faced a huge task to communicate their new people strategy. So, they turned to us to visualise how their everyday work connects with the wider mission.

Challenge

Sellafield's job is to safely decommission Europe's largest nuclear site. That means cleaning up hundreds of facilities, managing nuclear materials and retrieving and disposing of waste. It's a hugely complex mission, with work and decisions that can span generations.

Against this backdrop, Sellafield was transforming its people services and needed to communicate what was changing and why it mattered.

The project we engaged Scriberia on was very much about trying to make complexity translate into a simple visual that connected people's jobs to the vision for a people strategy. But most importantly, around the performance and the resilience of Sellafield, and the commitment that it's given to the UK mission for nuclear going forward.

Nic Westcott, Chief People Officer, Sellafield

The challenge was to make the strategy feel clear and relevant without oversimplifying it.

Solution

We worked with Sellafield's leaders to develop a series of rich pictures covering the key parts of the strategy. Before drawing anything, we spent time getting to the heart of what each picture needed to say.

What was really useful was the way that the visual evolved in front of our eyes. Scriberia slowed us down and really forced us to explore the narrative, to get underneath what is the requirement. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve here at Sellafield?

Mark Craghill, Chief of Staff, Sellafield

As the visuals took shape, our visualisers helped untangle the different strands of the strategy and find simple ways to represent them, while still reflecting the realities of Sellafield's work.

Results

The finished visuals gave Sellafield a clear and engaging way to communicate its people strategy, helping employees and stakeholders understand the changes ahead and how their work contributed to the bigger picture.

But the process created value too. By slowing down and making the thinking visible, it gave leaders space to develop a shared understanding of the strategy and how it connected to Sellafield's wider mission.

As leaders, we often think about the importance of collaboration, alignment, and shared ownership. This process absolutely embodied those principles.

Scriberia has added significant value to the work that we've done at Sellafield. It's about developing a shared understanding in a complex organisation that's delivering a very complex mission for the UK - and that's incredibly powerful.

Mark Craghill, Chief of Staff, Sellafield