We have identified a number of imperatives within the strategy.
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Technical excellence
Atkins has a huge range of technical skills, evidenced by the vast array of services that the Group offers. Our drive for improvement and growth has been organic, although supplemented by targeted bolt-on acquisitions. We have continued to make good progress in acquiring new skills and extending our capabilities in recent years.
Our ability to mobilise multidisciplinary teams and deep expertise from around the Group for local projects is a demonstrated capability that we have continued to successfully develop.
We constantly strive for excellence and harness the range of skills that the Group possesses to answer our clients’ questions better.
Carbon critical design
As all major world economies struggle with the transition to low-carbon operation, a number of challenges and opportunities arise for firms at the forefront of infrastructure design.
Our carbon critical design programme is producing new ideas and ways of working. We are aiming to embed low-carbon design in all our work as a fundamental design parameter.
Health, safety, diversity
We set our own challenging targets for health and safety and our performance remains better than industry performance as compiled by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in its Labour Force Survey. We are keen to continue to improve, by expanding our safety leadership programme and reducing our tally of manual handling accidents, which account for 40% of serious accidents in construction. We also actively encourage the reporting of incidents and near-misses as a positive step towards accident prevention. All our operations are covered by OHSAS 18001 and we have achieved certification to the revised standard OHSAS 18001:2007. We achieved a Group-level RoSPA Gold award for the first time. In addition, our Highways and Transportation business received a Gold award for the fifth consecutive year and Asset Management achieved an Order of Distinction for the 23rd year running.
Innovation is important for success. Our ability to look at new ideas requires us to approach issues from several points of view and therefore diversity among our teams is essential to drive the rate of innovation. It is also essential that we attract, retain and develop talented individuals who reflect the diverse nature of the areas in which we work. Success in this regard is critical for us in order to build a balanced workforce to meet our clients’ needs, to broaden our skills base and to address a growing skills deficit in the science and engineering disciplines.
Flexing resources
Having a flexible resource base means the ability not only to react quickly when market conditions change but also to move work to where the Group can most effectively deliver it. The Group is agile and flexible enough to continue to hire as necessary and shrink where required to maintain levels of performance. Our local management teams are also able to draw upon the Group’s wide range of skills and resources to leverage capability from one region to another – collaborating and sharing knowledge across the Group.
Business improvement
Improving every aspect of our operations remains an ongoing imperative. We constantly aim to become more efficient in everything we do to deliver cost-effective solutions for our clients. We draw on the talent of our people and enhance their capabilities, driving efficient project management in our principal activities.