Our people

Our aim is to help our people, both office and site-based, to live well and work well so we can deliver buildings that astonish our customers. In 2023, 97% of our people said they were proud to work to work for Willmott Dixon.

Willmott Dixon featured prominently on the Financial Times’s Diversity Leaders list of the top 850 companies across Europe, ranking higher than any other UK company in our sector at number 312.

Agile Working

We continued to support agile working with 86% of our women and 73% of our men working at least one day a week from home. In our 2023 staff satisfaction survey, 84% of people agreed with the statement ‘I am able to achieve a healthy balance between my work and home life’ (our women scored 88%).

We were one of the first companies to introduce agile working on construction sites. In 2023, we completed a successful pilot for smaller sites and will extend it to more of our site-based people in 2024.

Support for families

In recognition of the importance of family to us and our people, in 2023, we offered our people enhanced family leave benefits to further support 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.

A year on from enhancing our maternity and paternity benefits, we continue to receive really positive feedback from our people.

Naic Poulter (right), Senior Design Manager, said: “As the main income earner, the enhanced maternity leave benefit meant that I could spend six months with my baby rather than just three. As you can imagine this meant the world to myself and my family.

“I am really proud to work for a company that supports their women and understand that not all of us have the financial security to take a year off mostly unpaid. By bringing in these changes, Willmott Dixon has made the dream of a career and family much more achievable and I am eternally grateful.”

Gender balance and ethnic diversity  

Operating within the construction industry, where just 14% of the workforce is female, we must attract and retain more women to address the skills shortage. Evidence shows diverse teams perform better and our customers want teams on their sites that reflect their communities. Enhancing workforce diversity is a long-held company value.

Our aspiration is to achieve a 50/50 gender balance by 2030. At the end of 2023, the overall percentage of women in the business had increased to 31.7%, from 31.1% last year, showing significant progress on our 2018 baseline.

We measure how inclusive our culture is through our staff satisfaction survey. In 2023, women scored 97% for the statement ‘I feel welcome, included and accepted for who I am at work’, and 96% ‘would recommend other people to work at our company’.

% women and different ethnic groups  

Recruiting more women is essential to address this imbalance and, in 2023, women made up 35% of our total new hires.    

We have one of the most established and successful management trainee programmes in the industry. We aim for gender parity in our recruitment, and this is demonstrated by 53% of our trainee intake in 2023 being women. In December 2023, 47.8% of the total trainee population were women.

Watch the video to find out more about the management trainee programme from Trainee Design Manager, Charan Kundi.

Gender Pay Gap

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.

In 2023, the mean average percentage difference in hourly rate between men and women was:

We are Gold members of 'Women into Construction', underlining our commitment to recruit highly motivated, trained women to the business. In 2018, we had 99 women in core construction roles, e.g., site management. As a result of our work, at the end of 2023, we had 174 women in core roles, a 76% increase.

Our award-winning Women’s Leadership Programme (2022 cohort below) continued to go from strength to strength in 2023. Now delivered with Cranfield University, 30 women have completed the programme to date, including one supply chain partner. Two of the 30 women have now been promoted to Directors within their LCOs and sit on their Boards. Since its launch in 2021, 52% of women who have completed the programme have been promoted or progressed their career in a different role to their initial plans, and we intend that over 100 women undertake this programme by 2030.

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 2023, more than 7% of our employees were from an ethnic minority background. We have been members of Black Professionals in Construction since 2021.    

In 2023, we ran race and ethnicity workshops to develop appropriate strategies to address underrepresentation of ethnically diverse people. We are now piloting a programme where black colleagues reverse mentor our senior managers to share their lived experiences.

We are also an approved Disability Confident employer and continue to be a member of the Business Disability Forum. At the end of 2023, 3.1% of our people had declared that they had a disability compared to 2.94% at the end of 2022. In 2023, we set up a Disability Affinity Group to provide a forum for our people to talk about disability, which could be their own disability, or that which friends and family experience.

We have been signatories of the Care Leaver Covenant since 2019.

Attracting the next generation 

Of the 87 trainees we employed in 2023, 46 were female, taking the overall proportion of women trainees in our business to 48%, compared to 27% in 2018.  At the end of the year, Willmott Dixon had 66 apprentices in the business, with a further 12 level 3 data apprentices joining in January 2024. 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   

Willmott Dixon pledge that at least 5% of our workforce will be in formalised apprenticeships, be sponsored students or on graduate development schemes. We continue to be Gold members of the 5% Club, recognising our significant contribution to the continued development of all our people. At the end of July 2023, 6.7% of our people were in earn and learn roles compared to 6.3% in 2022.

Alongside this, we continued to run other events to attract young people into the industry, such as Career Advisor Days. We continue to sponsor the Construction News Inspiring Women in Construction and Engineering programme.

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.

In 2023, Willmott Dixon held Platinum Investors in People (IIP) status - the highest accolade awarded to only 2% of organisations - for our Construction business, and Gold for Willmott Dixon Interiors, with both being reassessed at the start of 2024.

We believe that providing individuals with opportunity for personal growth is essential to their wellbeing. Our shift to agile working led us to creating learning resources to help our people understand how to work and lead virtually. In 2023, 70% of our learning was available online through virtual courses, e-learning modules, videos and podcasts.

We invested £2.34m into our people’s learning and development in 2023. The average spend on training totalled over £1,200 per employee.

Total amount spent on learning and development   

In 2023, we opened our new in-house training facility for Willmott Dixon University at our head office in the Spirella Building in Letchworth Garden City. Along with a large training room, named in honour of the late Peter Willmott, this newly refurbished space includes a collaboration space and a large café area, providing a flexible and modern space for our people to develop their skills and collaborate in the office. A key part of the Willmott Dixon University, the School of Coaching (SOC) is an innovative online portal where all our people can find a free coach to help them in their career development.

We currently have 31 coaches in the SOC who all work for Willmott Dixon, giving up their time and using their skills to support their colleagues. This peer-to-peer learning approach has established a new way for our people to learn from one another beyond the training room and get tailored support for their career development.

One participant said: “My coach challenged me with thought provoking questions. This made me think outside my usual answers and gave me confidence for having tough conversations.”

Supporting our Armed Forces

Four years after being award silver level for the Armed Forces Covenant, we are supporters of the Defence Employer Recognition Scheme and have strengthened our armed forces pledge with the intention of achieving the gold standard in the future.

In 2023, we established our Armed Forces Affinity Group to raise awareness of issues relevant to the armed forces family and to provide support for new starters from a military background, several of whom have successfully joined Willmott Dixon.

An armed forces friendly company, we have introduced policies such as increasing our commitment to additional annual paid leave for reservists of 10 days. 

Supporting our people's 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 people. We recognise our responsibility to support the wellbeing, both physical and mental, of our own people and the hundreds of partners that work on our sites every day across the country.

In 2023, we enhanced wellbeing support for our people through a range of activities and new initiatives. We have a dedicated business lead for mental health, who has a team of people across the whole company with responsibility for mental health in their business unit or team. Working together, this team works hard to support over 200 Willmott Dixon-employed Mental Health First Aiders.

All our sites have mental health first aiders and we actively support mental health first-aider training in the wider industry. One of the ways we do this is by annually supporting the Pagabo Feelgood Games, which brings our industry together for a day of sports to mark Mental Health Awareness week.

Our Employee Assistance Programme (WeCare) now also has a MyStrength app. This free app offers personalised support based on individual circumstances and preferences. It offers hundreds of activities, articles and videos covering a wide range of wellbeing topics. Within the app, people can set goals to track mood, access exercises and access practical guidance on mindfulness, how to manage anxious thoughts, pregnancy and early parenting and improving sleep.

We established our partnership agreement with the construction industry’s dedicated mental health charity, The Lighthouse Club, in 2023. The Lighthouse Club provides emotional, physical and financial wellbeing support to the construction community and their families. Willmott Dixon is a Company Supporter of the Lighthouse Club which enables our people and their families to access a 24/7 helpline offering free support on physical, emotional and financial wellbeing, 350 Lighthouse Beacon support groups for people to socialise, talk and share concerns, plus training sessions including wellbeing masterclasses.

We continue to establish affinity groups, including our ‘menopause cafe’ which is run regularly for our women and men as allies. We continued our commitment with the Menopause Workplace Pledge and we promoted a menopause film. In addition, in 2023 we introduced a subsidised menopause health plan for partners as well as for our own people.

Finally, we have enabled our people to take more time off to support their wellbeing by implementing ‘Buying Holiday’ as a new benefit.

In 2024, we will publish new guidance to help identify and support our people experiencing stress in the workplace.

Supporting sustainability

Our salary sacrifice car scheme continues to grow in popularity, covering the full cost of transition to electric or hybrid motoring, including servicing, maintenance, insurance and road tax. Alongside this, we also launched our Electric Charge Point Claim, allowing our people to claim up to £1,500 per person to help cover the cost and installation of a home charge point.

Our Personal Sustainability Fund allows anyone with over five years’ service to spend up to £750 on sustainable home improvements. So far in 2023, 120 people have used it on measures to make their homes more energy efficient and sustainable.

In 2023, our car scheme scheme pipped other schemes from household names likes of Evri, First Bus, Rolls-Royce and Vodafone to win Transport/Fleet Management Project of the Year at the edie Awards (above).