SSEN has been awarded the prestigious 'Performance Improvement in the Private Sector' category at the Management Consultancies Association (MCA) awards.

The central southern England Operations Team, in collaboration with PwC, was recognised for their significant contributions to increasing capability, sustainability, and performance within the organisation. The judges highlighted a 30% improvement in company productivity, resulting in faster quotes and network connections for customers.

The award was presented at a ceremony at Grosvenor House in London, celebrating excellence in management consulting.

SSEN's Director of Customer Operations for central southern England Eliane Algaard said: "We're all working really hard to make even more improvements to the services we provide for all our customers, and this recognition encourages us to keep on making meaningful progress.

"The challenge of creating an electricity system that's ready for net zero is considerable, but as a team we're meeting this challenge, and working together in new and better ways to deliver for our communities. The way colleagues have pulled together to pilot and implement changes has been laudable; everyone has a stake in our success at these awards.

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"PwC have also brought so much to this process; their commitment to our goals and their thorough approach has been indispensable. And I'd also like to thank the MCA and the judges for their acknowledgement of the work we're doing."

How SSEN and PwC have worked together to deliver change

The electricity network plays a crucial role in the UK'st Zero. As the country moves away from fossil fuels, the surge in demand for electricity can only be met through a more resilient and flexible energy network. A significant transformation was required, to deliver increased volumes more efficiently than ever before.

To help deliver this, we sought PwC's help to make immediate and lasting improvements to our capability, sustainability and performance.

Given the need to make improvements quickly, the firm focused on embedding behavioural change throughout the business, by combining top-down and bottom-up initiatives.

PwC began by surveying 4,000 people across the company to understand where our cultural strengths and challenges lay. They then developed an operational excellence programme which empowered a pilot group of front-line team leaders, using a "see one, do one, lead one" coaching approach. They were equipped with the insight, confidence and momentum to embed new behaviours in their teams and, even in the pilot of 300 people, real performance improvements were seen in just three months.

The programme's subsequent scaling expanded its reach to a further 700 staff over six months. Half the delivery was conducted by the SSEN team leaders who had been through the pilot stage and, as a result, the client became self-sufficient in making further performance improvements itself, without external support. Meanwhile, PwC collaborated with the client's HR function to integrate the key behaviours into its people management process.

To ensure the performance improvements were measurable and would motivate teams, PwC drew on its data expertise to create a through-line from SSEN's top line "golden metrics" down to team-level Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The measurable performance gains have led to a regulatory reward of £3.4m. Meanwhile, operational improvements mean that field teams can work more efficiently to increase the network's resilience, and now have greater capacity to make longer-term network improvements.