NatWest Group
A learning narrative to inspire employees

The Challenge
Employers are not only fighting to recruit a finite set of workers with key skills needed for the future. They are also quickly upskilling their existing workforces to be equipped for the future.
At NatWest Group, the purpose is clear – to champion potential for businesses, families and communities. That purpose extends to employees, and NatWest has committed to helping all employees be future-ready by 2025.
But how do you galvanise an employee base to upskill or reskill themselves.
“We know that learning is the future. We know that people will have to keep developing their skills to be fit for the future, and to stay relevant in the marketplace,” our director for Employee Engagement, Cliff Ettridge told us. “And, it’s likely that in rational moments, 99% of people would agree, but still only a quarter of people take up training at work. That’s the industry average. So something is not right.”
Sometimes resistance will be down to accessibility issues. It will also be down to time, but it will also be down to an individual’s commitment to the idea of training.
The question is this:
Why won’t people do what is good for them?
Something deters them. Something excites them. We just needed to tap into what that essence was for NatWest colleagues.
The Solution
We wanted to leave NatWest with a narrative toolkit that could be used by anyone inside the bank when communicating the learning story.
The narrative needed to convince people as to why learning was important, and more importantly, get more employees to take the first step in the reskilling or upskilling journey.
Our narrative toolkits always present communicators the following tools:
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- The narrative and the compelling call to action
- Key messages and how these can be used differently for different audiences
- How this gets deployed creatively with different audiences
We start by looking at key personas and behavioural insights. With NatWest we ran workshops based on existing data to understand what would motivate a specific group of employees to act.
We invited participants from across the banks learning and communications SME groups to participate in initial behavioural workshops (COM-B).
This allowed us to consider the capabilities, opportunities and motivations for each audience. Work like this means we can pinpoint what will resonate with which audience and which audience might have the biggest halo effect when influencing behaviour change in other groups.
There are 3 steps towards developing a full narrative that’s ready to use.
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- COM-B model workshop: understand what is motivating your audiences and get to the heart of what will shift behaviour change.
- SWAT analysis of different territories: looking at the relative strengths of different narrative positions through the lens of different personas
- Application: how the narrative can come to life through vents, offers, communications and on different materials
We then test our conclusions with colleagues, applying potential learning narratives to real life examples of communications that might appear in channels like Workplace. This way we understand how it influences behaviour change. To do this we undertake both workshops and surveys.
We know that learning is the future. We know that people will have to keep developing their skills to be fit for the future. People would agree, but still only a quarter of people take up training at work. That’s the industry average.

The solutions
We developed our 7 positions on learning with the SME groups. These were reduced down to 3 positions which the bank felt would work with all employees and those already committed to learning.
We also developed 3 key messages as well as an over-arching narrative for use throughout the bank.
The positions we tested included:
- Wellbeing: exploring how learning is good for the individual on an emotional as well as rational level.
- Belief: working on the assumption that colleagues just need that last gentle nudge to take the first step.
- Sharing: seeing learning as an act of sharing, between the teacher and the student and then from student to student: people love to share what they have learned.
Our testing indicated one front-runner amongst audiences and from this a call to action – ‘Yes you can’ – and supporting messages and proof points were developed.
A toolkit was circulated to all communicators and learning professionals in the bank.
‘Yes you can’ was first used during (LAWW) Learning at Work Week 2023.

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