Employee Satisfaction and Wellbeing
People
Our people are Reliance’s greatest asset. Our investment in them and their wellbeing are at the forefront of everything we do.
Diversity
Reliance has long been committed to a policy of equal opportunity and of encouraging diversity among its workforce. It takes pro-active steps to ensure that current and potential employees do not suffer discrimination, whether on grounds of gender, age, disability, race, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation. Reliance believes that a diversified workforce is a stronger one. All office based staff and site managers have to undergo a training day to learn about managing diversity and to understand their role and responsibilities in that process.
Training
Each year every new employee undertakes a comprehensive induction and training programme. Other training programmes are run constantly throughout the year on a huge range of topics to equip our people fully for the tasks that they will undertake, to improve their health and safety at work and to enable them to do a better job for our customers.
Health and Safety
Health and Safety is an integral part of everything we do. Our focus on this has led to a number of external accreditations for the quality of our management systems and last year all our businesses received awards from The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) – three gold and one silver.
Health and Safety training takes place at all levels throughout the business, including directors and senior management who regularly attend IoSH Safety for Senior Executives courses.
Recognition
For the fourth year running, Reliance has been recognised as one of Britain’s Top Employers by the Telegraph Newspaper and The CRF Institute. This is based on best examples of HR management and illustrates the success that Reliance has had in communicating business objectives, developing its people and recognising and rewarding achievement.
Reliance’s long-standing Investor in People accreditation powerfully affirms our belief in the value of enabling all our people to improve their knowledge and skills. It also underlines our sound approach to setting and communicating business objectives and training and developing our people to meet them.
Innovation is actively encouraged through our Red Book scheme where a red book is placed at every site and into which employees are invited to make suggestions for improving site operation. These suggestions can either relate to our own service provision or something concerning our customer’s business operations. All suggestions are reviewed by contract managers and awards are made monthly for the best ideas. Not only does this continuously improve our own service but it also can have quite significant benefits for our customers. At Swindon this year, the Reliance team commissioned the engineering and installation of electronic barriers made up from spare parts and machinery stored on site. This dramatically improved security and saved the customer some £4,000 in costs. In Reading our team sourced and introduced ‘magic’ marker boards for all the customer’s meeting rooms on site, thereby reducing waste and daily flipchart replacement costs.
Consultative Groups
Throughout Reliance, there are a number of national and local consultative forums at which employees are encouraged to participate and where key issues can be raised and discussed. Meetings are minuted and the minutes are distributed to a wider group and posted on our intranet. The feedback provided by these meetings is an invaluable aid to opinion forming and decision making. Reliance also conducts regular employee satisfaction surveys, the results of which are reported on and shared with all employees, together with details of any action plans proposed in order to address issues revealed by the survey.