Retention

Staff turnover was at a record low during the year. Whilst to a large extent this reflected wider market conditions, our relative performance against our peers gives us confidence that it also reflected our credentials as an employer of choice.

Turnover by region was as follows:

As shown above, performance improved significantly in the UK, Europe, USA and China. The only area where performance remained relatively unchanged was the Middle East where for a period there was a general loss of confidence in the region affecting all organisations. We continue to monitor retention trends closely.

We also monitor the stability of our workforce using a stability index (the number of staff with more than one year’s service at the end of the financial year as a percentage of the headcount at the beginning of the financial year).

The stability index for the Group was 80.6% (2009: 84.3%). The indices for the individual regions were as follows: UK 85.8% (2009: 82.7%), Middle East 65.1% (2009: 76.9%), China 74.1% (2009: 75.3%), Europe 80.5% (2009: 87.4%) and USA 78.8% (2009: 81.5%).

We continue to use a third-party consultant to receive and report independently on feedback from those employees who voluntarily leave the Group. It is encouraging to see that over 80% of those who completed the questionnaire said that they would both consider coming back to work at Atkins and would recommend Atkins as a place to work. Compared to last year, fewer leavers have expressed dissatisfaction with either their job or Atkins as the primary reason for leaving.

Employee engagement

We continued to invest in internal communications during the year, mindful that maintaining a proactive, two-way exchange of information with staff is critical to maintain staff support, understanding and motivation during a period of economic uncertainty when colleagues are saying goodbye to their friends and, in many areas of the Group, are experiencing pay freezes. The first half of the year saw an increased appetite for the consumption of news and information about the Group, particularly through audiovisual channels. However, towards the year-end we experienced a slight dip in penetration figures for our internal communications channels, which shows us we have to work harder to maintain staff engagement.

Against this background and in addition to internal communications activities which focused on exchanging and broadcasting information about our vision, values and strategy to colleagues, we stepped up our programme of employee engagement to ensure that colleagues understand what actions are being taken to enable us to remain successful and the role they play in contributing to this.

For the past seven years, we have conducted an annual survey across the Group (called ‘Viewpoint’) to measure employee engagement. During this time, we have used the survey to measure our performance against a stable set of indicators, thus providing excellent data on both our absolute and relative performance as a Group and within and between businesses and regions. This has proved invaluable in allowing us to highlight areas of good practice and areas where we may be falling short of our high expectations.

The latest survey was conducted in April/May 2010 and so provides an up-to-date assessment of our performance. The survey is open to all our staff worldwide and can be completed in several different languages. Overall 76% of staff completed the survey with a reduction in the Employee Engagement Index (EEI) from 75 to 73. Whilst this only takes the EEI back to the same level as 2008, it is disappointing and provides several useful pointers as to where we need to do better.

Similarly, we were disappointed for the first time in six years to drop out of the Sunday Times Top 20 Best Big Companies to Work For ranking. Having reviewed the results in detail, we have concluded that this was as a result of several factors, most particularly our failure to explain sufficiently well the context within which we have had to take a number of hard decisions in relation to redundancies, pay awards and cost reduction. We have recognised the need to engage staff at every level on these issues, not simply those in senior management roles.