Human Resources Review
Our people
Retention
Staff turnover improved markedly throughout the year with overall staff turnover reducing from 15.4% to 11.4%. Turnover by region was as follows:
| 2009 | 2008 | |
| UK | 10.0% | 15.0% |
| Middle East | 14.7% | 15.0% |
| China | 17.9% | 26.1% |
| Europe | 8.9% | 10.9% |
| USA | 10.2% | 14.2% |
We also monitor the stability index (i.e. the number of staff with more than a year's service at the end of the financial year as a percentage of the headcount at the beginning of the financial year) for the Group as a whole and for each major business. Our performance in this measure of the retention of experienced staff compares very well with most large professional services businesses with an index of 84.3% for the Group as a whole (2008: 82.2%). The indices for the individual regions were as follows: UK 87.2% (2008: 81.9%), Middle East 76.9% (2008: 83.3%), China 75.3% (2008: 71.2%), Europe 87.4% (2008: 91.7%) and USA 81.5% (2008: 88.7%).
We continued to monitor feedback from staff who left Atkins in the year. Encouragingly, over 80% would recommend Atkins as a place to work and would consider working with us again at some point in their career.
Employee engagement
During the year, we continued to invest in and develop two-way internal communications channels to enable us to share information to inspire, motivate and engage Atkins staff around the world and to receive their feedback. In particular, we hosted a conference for 500 live delegates and 9,000 online delegates to explain our vision to be the world's best infrastructure consultancy and to reinforce our strategy of Identity+Excellence. We have also launched a new intranet news centre which has enabled us to deliver better quality information to staff in a more timely, appealing and accessible multi-media format. Penetration statistics show that significantly more people are receiving information about Atkins than in previous years. Staff therefore have a greater understanding of our vision, strategy, performance, values in action and Group achievements than in previous years, which contributes to our objectives of motivating and retaining staff.
Most significantly, we measure employee engagement across the Group via our annual Viewpoint survey, an online survey open to all staff in the Group. This was completed by 77% of staff and showed an improvement in the employee engagement index for the third consecutive year. An employee engagement index of 75 represents excellent performance. Furthermore, our performance in each of the 10 principal criteria is now well above the benchmark for the organisations which use this survey. Our performance improved for each of the 10 factors and for 29 of the 30 detailed questions.
We were delighted to maintain our position in the UK's Sunday Times Top 20 Best Big Companies award with an improved ranking of 10th. This was particularly pleasing since 2,500 of our UK staff were invited to take part in this anonymous survey, which is important in allowing us to compare our performance against other leading employers in our sector and more widely.
