EXCLUSIVE: Manchester City Football Club is to roll out a recognition scheme in October, which will align with a new framework of values it has developed.
The three values, which will be known collectively as City Spirit, are Involving, Game-changing and Driving.The football club’s 380 employees will be able to nominate each other for displaying between one and three of its new values. These names will then be submitted to the organisation’s employee forum and one person will be chosen each year and put forward for a prize.
Katie Best, HR manager at Manchester City Football Club, said: “We are looking at event-based prizes. We might send them on a weekend trip, some kind of occasion or ask them what they want to do.
“These three [values] are what we believe best captures the essence of Manchester City.”
Building City Spirit
The project has been in development for a few years. “We have talked for a few years now about performance, standards and tasks,” said Best. “As a business, we were very familiar to understanding the tasks we needed to do to be successful.
“What we did struggle with was understanding what it was that made us different, in terms of behaviour and attitudes. We never really had anything tangible, any kind of framework for identifying what we expected from employees.”
In 2012 the organisation began to conduct analysis to look at the difference between a good employee and a great employee, along with the gap inbetween.
“We spoke to a selection of employees across the business and asked them who in the business they saw as high performers and asked them to talk to us about how they do their jobs and what happens when they are facing a challenge,” explained Best. “We captured, through interviewing these individuals, the difference between a good worker and a really great worker.”
Through these interviews with staff, the HR team began to see a pattern emerging, which were broken down into its new three core values.
Best added: “We have ended up with a document that sets out those three behaviours and nails down what our expectations are in terms of those three behaviours.”
In October, alongside its new recognition scheme, Manchester City Football Club is to roll out the City Spirit framework formally to the business. “It has been launched informally through departmental briefings, going to speak to people about it and explaining where it has come from,” said Best.
“We want to make sure they know that the information was gathered from a wide range of employees. It’s not the business telling employees what to do. It’s a document that captures what we’re doing now, what makes us unique and what else we can do to make us better.”
