Valuing employees

Our employees are the people who make our success happen. So it's important that we know what they feel about the business, how it's run and how we can improve the way we do things.

To monitor employee satisfaction, Arriva holds groupwide employee surveys every two years. Our second survey took place at the end of 2005. Feedback was shared with the management team and in early 2006 every employee received a leaflet detailing feedback from their place of work.

As a result:

• We have made a number of corporate commitments, including action to improve communications across the business.
• Each business has reviewed its employee feedback and committed to local action plans.
• We have extended our range of employee benefits, with a share incentive plan.
• In the UK, we have launched two new employee benefit choices – childcare vouchers and the Home Computing Initiative – both tax-efficient salary sacrifice schemes.

Morale and motivation

In 2007 we repeated our biennial employee survey to gauge attitudes and opinions and understand what we can do better to improve employee motivation.

The feedback, presented to the Board, showed an overall response rate of 54 per cent, a healthy improvement on the 35 per cent recorded in 2005, and giving more meaningful representative feedback on employee opinion.

While overall employee satisfaction remains at 49 per cent, a figure we aim to improve, the survey results showed significant improvements in the responses relating to internal communication, which had shown up in the 2005 survey as an area meriting attention. During 2006 and 2007 we designed and produced a group-wide programme to help supervisors and managers to communicate better with their teams. We believe the improvement in scores reflects the success of this initiative.

To enable employees at all levels of the business to have the opportunity to raise ideas and feed back customer comments, each business has developed an action plan to respond to feedback from employees.

We intend to repeat our survey again in 2009 and will continue to use employee feedback as a valuable source of management guidance.

Employee representation

We make extensive use of works councils and endeavour to maintain close working relationships with the trades unions covering our industry. Arriva operates a European Works Council which provides a forum for a formal group-wide update on operations and business performance and best practice sharing, facilitated by visits to operational units in the host country.

Across our UK and mainland Europe businesses, the vast majority of our workforce is covered by collective agreements on working conditions, and we make appropriate arrangements for union officials to receive training and to carry out official union business.

Working time

Arriva policy is to ensure we comply with all local requirements, though the interpretation and specific implementation of EU legislation does vary across European countries.

Arriva across
Europe

View a Flash interactive map of our operations across Europe