Following the 2024 Engage Awards, we’ve had the privilege of sitting down with our winners to uncover the stories behind their award-winning strategies. Our ‘Meet the Winners’ series aims to provide valuable insights into crafting a winning entry while inspiring success and innovation across the industry.
Today we meet Wellcome, who partnered with Acteon on a striking project which grabbed the judges’ attention to win the ‘Best Use of Innovation in Employee Engagement’ award.
This project successfully delivered a surprising, completely different, and unique way to help people to do the right thing!
For the launch of its refreshed Code of Ethics to colleagues, Wellcome wanted to make a splash. The goal was to increase staff engagement and shift mindsets through making an emotional connection with ethics and integrity.
We worked with our partners Acteon (experts in using behavioural approaches for learning and engagement) on a highly innovative and impactful campaign. We created Connie – a puppet who represents your conscience, and we helped colleagues build a habit of asking themselves ‘What would Connie do?’ when faced with an ethical choice.
The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation, driven by a mission to solve urgent world health issues. All Wellcome colleagues need to uphold the highest standards of conduct and ethics to preserve the organisation’s leading reputation.
The launch campaign emphasises that ‘doing the right thing’ is intuitive. People are trusted to make good decisions. Because most of the time, the majority of us have a clear and consistent sense of whether something is OK or not. We need to pay attention to the inner voice that helps us decide if something is right or wrong.
Our puppet-based campaign is a bravely different approach and a creative risk. But it's a risk underpinned by clever thinking about human motivation and behaviour, along with a highly unusual campaign that got everyone talking!
The problem is that a Code of Ethics is fundamentally a set of policies. It’s dry. It’s boring. Nobody wants to read a compliance rulebook. In fact, most people see it as an obstacle.
We needed to reframe ‘ethics’ and ‘compliance’ as ways we can actually help colleagues to do their jobs better, look after each other, and protect Wellcome’s reputation.
At its heart, this comes down to empowering everyone to ‘do the right thing’ in the moments that matter. We needed to avoid unpopular, heavyweight training, and instead give everyone simple habits that can become embedded.
The core campaign message – pause, think, and ask ‘What would Connie do?’ – reinforces simple yet impactful behaviours.
The campaign launched with a short film featuring Connie taking over a compliance webinar.
There are different elements of the campaign, such as Connie’s monthly Ethics Gym emails, with dilemmas to challenge staff, and worked examples of how to approach them. Connie has interviewed Wellcome’s CEO, providing clear ‘tone from the top’. There are nudges, such as stickers and posters. And there’s iConnie, a Teams-based AI chatbot to signpost relevant policies.
A puppet captures attention and is inherently memorable and engaging. Connie breaks expectations, making campaign messages eye-catching and stickier.
Since Connie’s arrival, there’s been an unbelievable response and incredible engagement.
Wellcome reports more regular, more meaningful conversations with the Ethics, Governance and Compliance team. Over 50% of employees are engaging voluntarily each month with ethics training via Connie’s Ethics Gym.
Connie connects with the widest possible audience. They are non-threatening and inclusive, presenting moral dilemmas safely and supportively, and encouraging employees to reflect on their actions without feeling judged. Connie’s inclusive design ensures accessibility through print, braille, podcast and audio-described videos.
Most of all, Connie is being talked about, and people are asking the question ‘What would Connie do?’.
Our partnership, between Wellcome Trust and Acteon, is innovative and brave, and has resulted in a huge impact and ripple effect.
The approach has really given us the springboard to take conversations about ethics to the next level and we’re keen to share our approach with others – to demonstrate that taking this sort of approach works.
Be a little brave. Try some creative approaches. And anchor your change in human behaviour – what do people actually need to do?
To find out more about how to do this, chat with us at hello@acteoncommunication.com.
To view all of the our 2024 winners, visit our website.
To find out more about the Engage Awards programme, click here.