Gov Facility Services Limited (GFSL)

The challenge

GFSL delivers facilities services into prisons across the South of England, which means bringing together two very different working worlds under one employer, corporate staff and a frontline workforce doing maintenance, cleaning, catering and grounds work inside secure sites. When a new starter joins, they need more than a standard onboarding pack. They need something that explains the practical realities of the job and helps them feel part of one organisation, whichever side of that divide they’re on.

Health and safety sat alongside this as a defined priority for GFSL’s current strategic period. In a working environment with hazardous substances, site-specific paperwork and constant movement of people, safety messaging that gets ignored isn’t a minor inconvenience. GFSL needed staff to actually stop and read it, not file it under compliance and move on.

A third strand added its own complexity. Purposeful Prisoner Working sees prisoners train and work directly alongside GFSL’s teams in trades such as plumbing and decorating. The materials supporting that programme had to function, tracking real tasks and requests, while reflecting what the programme is actually for, without overstating it.

The process

We began with the induction booklet, art directing multiple photoshoots across GFSL’s sites to capture staff in the flow of their actual work. The brief was care, collaboration and breadth, showing what facilities services in a prison setting really looks like day to day, not a generic corporate stock shot. We then worked with GFSL to choose the final photography and shape it into content that read as a genuinely useful guide rather than an onboarding pack nobody opens twice.

For health and safety, we developed a standalone logo and the Safety Squad, a set of illustrated characters, to run alongside the core GFSL identity. Neon yellow, lifted straight from the hi-vis worn on site, became a new addition to the brand palette, giving the campaign a look that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else on the wall.

The poster campaign ran monthly, and every headline was written to be warm, direct and often funny, covering everything from trip hazards in offices to safe chemical handling to the paperwork required before starting different jobs on site. We ran two further photoshoots inside working prison environments, again with real staff across a spectrum of roles, and carried the photography and the Safety Squad characters through onto the intranet and into regular staff newsletters.

For Purposeful Prisoner Working, we built a sub-brand so the programme reads as its own initiative, then designed a work tracker and folder that prisoners use to record tasks and work requests as they train in their trades.