Our Employees
We strive to involve our employees in managing the business at all levels. Staff in most of the UK operating companies elect an Employee Director to their Board for a three-year period. The rail companies also have staff and management representatives on their Company Councils. Every three years all Employee Directors elect a representative to sit on the plc Board.
Many of our employees are represented by trade unions. UK union membership remains at around 90% of the workforce, while in the United States 66% of our employees are represented by trade unions, an increase of 11% on last year. The US average for union representation in the private sector is around 7%.
We engage regularly with the unions on a range of issues. In the UK we have worked closely with them to develop our network of learning centres and to introduce our new bus driver advisory systems.
In the United States we continue to promote our Freedom of Association Policy. This commits us to ensuring that employees are free to choose whether or not they wish to become a member of a union without influence or interference from management.
We also operate an independent Compliance Monitoring Program that protects our employees against anti-trade union behaviour. Under the Program any employee who believes that our Freedom of Association Policy has been violated can file a complaint with Professor William Gould of Stanford University Law School in California. A former Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, Professor Gould investigates such complaints and reports on the outcome to both the complainant and the Company. Where he finds a violation of the Freedom of Association Policy, he issues recommendations for the Company to consider.
Although the Program does not bind us to accepting them, most recommendations have indeed been adopted. Where this has not happened, there are good reasons associated with the particular circumstances of the complaint or the exigencies of the business at the relevant location. This does not dilute our commitment to the Program, which is both unique and industry-leading in the United States. No other company has gone as far in formally protecting the right of employees to decide freely whether or not they wish to join a union.
- Between January 2008 (when the Program was launched) and March 2009, 145 complaints were made of which 33 (23%) were upheld.
- Between April 2009 and March 2010, 124 complaints were made and 21 (17%) were upheld.
The number of complaints made and upheld is very small in relation to the size of the workforce covered by the Program. Since the introduction of the Program over 330 ballots have been held: nearly 90% of them resulted in unionisation of the location involved.
These trends demonstrate the successful implementation of our Freedom of Association Policy and Compliance Monitoring Program. Together, these initiatives provide a robust mechanism to identify and manage any isolated incidents of inappropriate behaviour. Both Policy and Program are prominently displayed at all our sites in North America and are included in our Employee Handbook.
Employee engagement
We use a number of tools to assess levels of employee engagement in the business. As well as one-to-one feedback and discussion we also measure our progress through more formal means such as employee opinion surveys.
During the past two years all our employees have had the opportunity to contribute to an employee opinion survey. We have completed annual surveys in our UK Rail division and will conduct a further survey across the rest of the business during this financial year. We have also made extensive use of focus groups to further research the findings of our 2008 survey in UK Bus where our engagement scores were lowest. We followed this up with a small touch point survey at the end of 2009 to inform our 2010 survey.
In our Rail division we achieved a marked improvement in response rates from 45% to 53%. The overall engagement score remained fairly consistent in a difficult economic climate dropping by one percentage point overall.
Common areas for improvement across the survey responses include improving management style and training provision, greater recognition of employees and better communication on Company plans and performance. As a result we have realigned our management development programmes to strengthen managers' skills in engaging employees at local level. We are also helping our managers to use the surveys to plan action that will raise their teams' engagement.
Copies of our employee policies can be found here