Our people

We attract, develop and promote the best people in order to provide a high-quality service to our clients and customers.

In 2022, we were listed as the number one ‘Best Big Company to Work For’ in the prestigious Best Companies awards, which recognise the UK’s top workplaces. One of three accolades won at the awards, the event also saw Group Chief Executive Rick Willmott named ‘Best Leader’ in recognition of how his style and approach has guided Willmott Dixon’s success (below). We were also proud to take home the award for ‘Best Company to Work For’ in the Best Companies Construction & Engineering sector.

Our aim is to help our people, both office and site-based, achieve a better work life balance while ensuring that we deliver brilliant buildings for our customers. We supported our people through new policies that enabled agile working, homeworking and sustainable transport. This included our salary sacrifice car scheme. Since we launched the scheme in 2021, 97% of vehicles selected have been electric or hybrid with over half fully electric.

In recognition of the importance of family to us and our people, we added a package of enhancements to our family leave benefits to further support our working parents. We doubled our maternity and adoption pay so that it increased to 26 weeks full basic pay and quadrupled our paternity/partner leave so that it increased to eight weeks leave at full basic pay, all offered from day one in the company.

From November 2022, we introduced a Personal Sustainability Fund, as an alternative to our Personal Learning Fund, for those with over five years’ service. This fund was created to help our people make sustainable choices and home improvements. Originally due to be launched in January 2023, we decided to bring this forward in response to the cost-of-living crisis to help more of our people make energy efficiencies to their homes over the winter months.

Mindful of the impact of the cost-of-living crisis, we wanted to support our people. We made a one-off payment of £500 to those most affected by the rise in the cost of living. In addition, we also gave those eligible the choice to take 25% of their bonus early to help cover rising energy costs and ease the financial burden felt by many during this time.

Gender balance and ethnic diversity  

Our aspiration is to achieve a 50/50 gender balance by 2030. By the end of 2022, the overall percentage of women in the business had increased to 31.1% from 29.1% last year. Recruiting more women is essential to address this imbalance and, in 2022, 40% of our hires and 44.7% of our management trainees were women.    

As signatories of the Inspiring Women in Construction Pledge, we are committed to help attract, develop and promote more women in our company and industry. We strive to close our Gender Pay Gap and recognise and champion the achievements of women.

We are Gold members of 'Women into Construction', underling our commitment to recruit highly motivated, trained women to the business.

Our Women’ s Leadership Programme won the Excellence in Business Culture prize at the inaugural Inspiring Women in Construction and Engineering Awards in October 2022 (below). Created by existing women leaders in Willmott Dixon, the programme aims to increase the number of women in senior roles to 100 by 2030. In collaboration with Cambridge University and the Cambridge Judge Business School, we select a number of our women each year to support their development as leaders of the future. Many of those who have completed the year-long programme have since been promoted, as part of our aim to drive more diverse, complementary leadership teams across Willmott Dixon.

For the fourth successive year, we appeared in The Times' Top 50 Employers for Women list and we also featured in the Financial Times’ Diversity Leaders Index, ranked 136, making Willmott Dixon the highest placed Tier 1 construction company.

In 2022, we introduced a Career Change programme to attract people from diverse sectors and backgrounds to contribute new thinking and experience to our business. We have welcomed applications from people interested in project management from a range of industries including telecoms, manufacturing, retail, armed forces, public sector, financial services and hospitality. The year-long programme focuses on giving individuals experience and offering a long-term commitment to fulfilling potential with support, mentoring and ongoing technical and leadership training.

Willmott Dixon has embraced this throughout the business and to date we have hired six people from archaeology, sales, telecommunications, military and bioscience into site, operational and commercial roles with great success.

Percentage of women and different ethnic groups in the business  

Inclusion  

We know we need to attract a more diverse workforce to build complementary teams that reflect the communities we serve and to make us a better business.  In 2022, nearly 8% of our employees were from an ethnic minority background. We have been members of Black Professionals in Construction since 2021 and two of our regional offices are also members of Building Equality - the LGBT+ Construction Group.    

We are also an approved Disability Confident employer and continue to be a member of the Business Disability Forum. At the end of 2022, 2.94% of our people in WD had declared that they had a disability compared to 3.06% at the end of 2021.

We have been signatories of the Care Leavers Covenant since 2019. We are also signatories of the Armed Forces Covenant, and hold their silver award supporting the Defence Employer Recognition Scheme.   

Attracting the next generation  

2022 saw us continue to recruit and train new starters in the business.   Of the 103 trainees we recruited, 44.7% were female.  In 2022, Willmott Dixon had 70 apprentices in the business. This figure now captures all apprentices registered on our Digital Apprenticeship Service (DAS) account and is aligned with the Government definition of an apprenticeship.

Management trainees and apprentices employed   

As members of the 5% Club, we pledge that at least 5% of our workforce will be in formalised apprenticeships, sponsored students or on graduate development schemes. At the end of 2022, 6.3% of our people were in earn and learn roles.

Investing in our people   

Our people are our greatest asset, and we go to great lengths to provide a working environment which sustains a challenged and content workforce.

Our Construction business holds an Investors in People Platinum award, the highest accolade possible and currently something only 2% of organisations achieve. This follows on from the Gold accreditation for Willmott Dixon Interiors. Reassessments for both are due by the end of 2023.

In 2022, we launched the Willmott Dixon University, consolidating a wealth of content into a new learning platform to make it as easy as possible for our people to develop their skills and knowledge. This includes our new Schools of Learning, such as the School of Technical Excellence, the School of Leadership and the Customer Academy, to enable our people's personal and professional development.

To further foster professional development in 2022, we launched the Willmott Dixon School of Coaching and developed more than 130 new on-demand learning resources. We now have an online portal where our people can volunteer to become a coach so that they can support others development or find a coach to tap into the wealth of expertise that already exists in the business. They can also develop their coaching skills, through courses and nationally recognised qualifications.

To date, we now have 31 internal coaches and have also seen a strong uptake in people aiming to develop their coaching skills through nationally recognised coaching qualifications.

We believe that providing individuals with opportunity for personal growth is essential to their well-being. Our shift to agile working led us to creating learning resources to help our people understand how to work and lead virtually. In 2022, 70% of our learning was available online through virtual courses, e-learning modules, videos and podcasts.

The average spend on training per employee totalled over £1,000.

Total amount spent on learning and development   

Supporting wellbeing

Delivering brilliant buildings for our customers is an exciting and rewarding challenge for our people, but it can be stressful and demanding and so we are very mindful of the wellbeing of our team.

In 2022, we supported the wellbeing of our own people throughout the year. The ‘All Safe Minds’ initiative has trained more than 300 of our people as mental health first aiders, since its launch in 2018, and we offer a wealth of online support materials, including access to the Thrive: Mental Wellbeing app and WeCare the 24/7 support service. In 2022, our mental health campaign focused on loneliness, including development of the Alone Not Lonely e-learning module. We have also made many of these resources available to our supply chain partners to support mental health in their workforce.

Following successful collaboration in 2022, we have become a company supporter of the construction industry’s very own dedicated charity, The Lighthouse Club, in 2023. The Lighthouse Club provides emotional, physical and financial wellbeing support to the construction community and their families.

In addition to support wellbeing, we offered our people free health checks, pension review meetings and supported the establishment of 'affinity groups', such as the Menopause Café events hosted across the business, to create a peer-to-peer support network.