We have continued to use Gallup's Q12 measurement of employee engagement. This asks employees to anonymously answer 12 questions annually, linking to key business issues such as productivity, customer engagement and safety.
We carried out the third year of Q12 in June 2009 and achieved a participation rate of 78 per cent (62 per cent in 2008) – our best yet. Our 'grand mean' score improved to 3.67 out of 5, compared to 3.41 in 2008 and 3.07 in 2007, and moves us from 16th percentile to 31st percentile in Gallup's global database.
We now have more than 100 Q12 'employee engagement champions', who have volunteered from around the business, to support making Thames Water a great place to work and continue to improve engagement.
We developed and delivered employee engagement training for all our managers to further support this becoming 'business as usual' and enable them to more effectively engage with their teams.
Teams throughout the company then followed a process called 'impact planning'. This involved identifying issues for improvement in their part of the business and deciding what action to take, in order to make their team a better place in which to work.
At a corporate level, work to support local managers has included an event to celebrate the work of 66 'best practice' teams, who have achieved the highest 'grand mean' scores. In addition, we recognised 12 managers who consistently improved engagement between 2007 to 2009 and nominated them for a 'great managers programme', which they attended in early 2010.
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