Creating an exceptional colleague experience is the key to unlocking our future business success. We are a people-based, technology-enabled business – it’s our talented colleagues who design, deliver and manage the service delivery that keep our clients’ digital assets safe and secure.
Why colleague experience matters
For our business, a great colleague experience will help us attract and retain top talent. When colleagues feel empowered, heard and psychologically safe, they are more likely to innovate and contribute to a more positive client experience.
By creating the right environment, we can create a platform for their personal and professional growth, which directly contributes to NCC Group’s growth and adaptability in an ever-evolving marketplace.
Our approach to colleague engagement
We operate a speak-up policy, where colleagues are encouraged to respectfully share their feedback, ideas, and concerns through various mechanisms, including:
- Non-Executive Director led discussions, which provide direct feedback to the Board.
- Elected colleague representative forums in the UK, Spain, and Australia.
- Works Council in the Netherlands.
- Quarterly anonymous colleague feedback process through an independent third party provider.
- Local business and regional town halls, with open forum Q&A.
- Bi-annual performance management process and regular one-to-ones with managers.
Investment in learning and development (see page 12 of the full report on equipping colleagues with the skills they need to excel in their roles and adapt to the changing needs of our clients.)
We celebrate success through our annual NCC Diamonds programme, which is a peer-to-peer nominated programme against our core values. Regional and global winners are selected by a diverse judging panel, and stories are powerful examples of the talent within our organisation.
Our reward programme continually evolves to ensure we are competitive within our industry and positions us to attract and retain top talent by using various benchmarking sources and market intelligence to ensure pay and reward decisions are fair and equitable. Through our Non-Executive Director engagement activities, we seek feedback on Executive remuneration and reward too.
We operate a hybrid working policy, which was developed as we came out of the global pandemic. This provides a general framework that enables each part of the business to design a way of working that is appropriate to client delivery. This supports our overall health and wellbeing programme addressing both physical and mental wellness.
Our global giving back programme supports colleagues to get involved in their local communities – providing match funding up to the equivalent of £500 a year per colleague, as well as giving every colleague the opportunity to take one day off in service of a good cause. Colleagues can do this individually or as a team, which is a great way for them to engage in team-building activities.
Our progress
This has been a year of change across our business as we designed and implemented a new operating model creating global agility to evolve to meet the needs of our clients.
To support us in managing the change, and to ensure we received a more regular pulse on colleague sentiment and engagement, we moved away from the traditional annual colleague survey to a quarterly based survey. This empowers managers to make changes based on real-time feedback by providing direct access to anonymised results. The insights from this, as well as our other communication channels with colleagues, are discussed and considered in both Executive and Board decision-making.
We have improved our colleague benefits over the past year, providing colleagues with access to discounts and wellbeing support through Perkbox, as well as enhancing Employee Assistance programmes and benefits packages in North America.
Our colleague resource groups continue to help shape engagement activities and areas for improvement with direct access for the Committees to the Chief People Officer and other Executive team members.
Read more on our progress this year in our Annual Report and Accounts 2023 on pages 43 and 44
Our future and ambition
There’s always more we can do, and to take this forward we appointed a dedicated colleague experience lead at the start of our new financial year, who will work closely with various stakeholders across the organisation to develop a new colleague experience programme.
