Creating a Behaviour Framework for the UK’s Largest Library

The Challenge

The UK’s largest library already had organisational values, but employee-engagement feedback revealed a gap between the values written down and the behaviours people experienced day to day. Concerns around negative behaviours had prompted action, yet it quickly became clear that addressing isolated issues alone would not deliver the wider cultural shift the organisation needed.

• Employee-engagement feedback had highlighted concerns around negative behaviours, but tackling issues individually was not enough to create the wider cultural shift the organisation needed.
• The Library had established values, yet there was no consistent understanding of what those values looked like in everyday decisions, relationships, and ways of working.
• Employees needed clearer behavioural expectations, while managers needed a shared and constructive language to recognise positive conduct and address behaviour that did not meet expectations.
• The organisation needed values that reflected both its current identity and the culture it wanted to build for the future — embedded throughout recruitment, onboarding, management, development, recognition, and leadership.

The Results

• Let’s Talk Talent helped the Library review and evolve its existing values into five refreshed organisational values, each supported by clear, observable behavioural descriptions
• Real-life examples made the framework practical, clarifying both what living the values looked like and the behaviours that were inconsistent with them
• Manager and employee interventions embedded the framework across the employee experience, moving the work beyond an HR initiative into an organisation-wide conversation about culture
• The rollout achieved 80% attendance and 100% organisational adoption of the methodology
• Behavioural-related grievance rates reduced by 36% within six months, while employees and managers gained a common language for clearer, fairer, and more meaningful behaviour conversations