Case Study: SAGA Plc

Inspire Case Study: SAGA Plc

Saga Plc is home to a range of products and services exclusively for the over 50s, including insurance, holidays, money and the UK’s best-selling monthly magazine. With over 5000 employees and a turnover of £337m, they are based in Folkestone in the UK.

Saga are a champion of age in the workplace. They’re a dynamic and forward-looking business with a clear, single-minded purpose; to create exceptional experiences every day and be a driver for positive change in our markets and communities.

Situation

​As part of Saga’s ongoing leadership development programme, they were looking to introduce a different kind of learning experience as part of their L&D strategy; one that brings the outside world in. One that would provide their leaders with an understanding of what is happening in the outside world, to inform their business’ change journey.

As a result, they selected 40 members of their leadership team to participate in the Wavelength Inspire programme back in February 2021.

Bringing the outside world in for Saga's leadership team

Each month Wavelength Inspire provided their leadership team with live, curated access to some of the world’s most progressive organisations and accomplished leaders.

From iconic disruptors like Airbnb, to the CEOs of Unilever and IKEA, Inspire provided them with unrivalled access to global practitioners. No academics or gurus, just real leaders their team could relate to, putting Saga in the very best place to shape their own future.

The dedicated online portal provided Saga participants with access to extensive pre- and post-event materials, podcasts and recordings of each session, plus concise, edited highlights and a written synopsis of each session.

How SAGA made the best use of Wavelength Inspire

Saga also introduced some practical measures to ensure they made the best use of the Inspire programme, to develop the bond between their cohort and get maximum impact and participation from individuals and the group.

They appointed a Programme Champion internally to drive communications about upcoming sessions (in addition to the info automatically sent to every participant).

They also appointed a Sponsor of the group who would tune in themselves and could understand the content that was shared and how it could then relate back to their organisation and the group.

They set up a WhatsApp Group connecting all their participants.

They co-ordinated a time for all participants to tune into the live sessions together. In fact, only illness or holiday were excuses not to do so!

During the recordings, their cohort used WhatsApp to communicate key take outs and to drive conversation).

At the end of the session, they immediately arranged a 30 minute debrief, to land the learnings and get input from the whole group on key takeaways and how they could consider implementing any aspects in their own business.

The ’Sponsor' would come onto the call with not only their own key reflections, but also ‘The Disruptive Questions’ to ask the group.

They then got their group to break out for 12 minutes, to reflect on the disruptive questions and then each group nominated one person to present back for two minutes.

Not only did Saga use the programme as ‘a cultural book club’, but it also had a great additional benefit of breaking down silos as the same group of people would come together collectively every month for a couple of hours to learn, reflect and share.

What SAGA said

Wavelength Inspire

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