What our Staff Told Us...
Last year we made a commitment to seek feedback from our employees on our CI programme, in order to take their views into account in planning our future activities. The main conclusions we drew from a staff survey of employee opinions on CI, and our responses, were:
- Employees think that support for local communities and employees' charitable involvement are the most important aspects of our CI programme. For 2006, we have directed more of our budget towards these areas.
- The best ways of supporting employees are sponsorship matching and GAYE. This was reflected in the significant increase in staff participating in both of these schemes during 2005. A GAYE promotion was undertaken in the last quarter of 2005 which further increased take-up. Find out more about GAYE.
- A number of staff expressed a wish to know more about our CI programme, and to have the opportunity to be more involved. To complement the Gazette, our staff magazine, an online version, the eGazette, was launched in 2005. This has already enabled us to increase our reporting of CI activities and this will continue in 2006. In 2005, we also produced our first Community Involvement Report, giving details of our Major Community Partnerships and support offered to employees. This was promoted to staff and is available on our CI intranet.