Valuing our people

Our You Make The Difference awards celebrate our colleagues who have made an outstanding contribution to the business.

Creating the right environment for employee engagement

A key factor in emotional well-being at work is successful communication and we use a wide range of communications tools to reach and motivate our people.

For example, in 2009 around 8,000 employees attended our annual Business Briefings road show. At this series of events held around the country our Executive Directors discussed the key issues facing the business for the year ahead and employees had the opportunity to question them on any aspect of the business.

We strongly believe in the importance of consultation on issues affecting our people and in 2009/10 this has included continuation of discussions with the trade unions on the modernisation of terms and conditions of employees from our Infrastructure Maintenance function.

Our annual You Make the Difference awards reward and recognise staff who have made outstanding contributions and who best demonstrate our values of determination, respect, teamwork and pride. In 2009 we received 1,256 employee nominations (2008: 1,159), we shortlisted 43 individuals and teams with 18 overall commendations and winners.

Q12^® employee engagement

We measure employee engagement through Q12^®, an annual survey which Gallup independently has run every year since 2002. We invite all employees to take part in the anonymous survey either by post, phone or web. Response rates remain high, averaging 69.8 per cent over the last three years – a total of 26,903 (72.4 per cent) of our people completed the Q12^® survey in 2009 up from 66.4 per cent in 2008.

We ask staff to score how strongly they agree or disagree with 12 statements and then send line managers a scorecard containing their team’s results and the organisation’s overall score (or grand mean). Line managers use the results to form a framework for discussion within their team, create the action plans to focus on ways to further build engagement. Teams can benchmark themselves with others in the Company, as well as against other businesses.

We use the results of the Q12^® survey as a key measure of business performance. Our long-term aspiration is to score within the top 25 per cent of the overall Gallup ^® database (comprising the scores of all 504 participating organisations). Since we began ^® in 2002, our engagement score has increased by 16.8 per cent, which is great progress but falls short of our 2009 target of achieving a grand mean score of 4.21.