RWS Annual Report 2022 web - Flipbook - Page 22
Chief Executive Officer's Review (continued)
OUR PEOPLE
RWS is a truly people-centred organisation. Deep client
understanding, specialist sector expertise across multiple
verticals, and a rich understanding of culture and nuance
enable more than 7,700 colleagues to put the best
solutions in front of clients across the world every day,
aided by some of the sector’s smartest technologies.
Through our 'voice of the customer' programme and
the high levels of client retention that we enjoy, we can
see the positive impact that our people bring to our
clients’ success and the level of trust that we engender.
Once again, I would like to thank all of our incredibly
talented teams around the world for their hard work
and dedication which enables us to deliver best-in-class
solutions 24/7.
During the year we continued to focus our efforts on
RWS being a great place to work. As well as defining and
launching a new purpose and fresh values (with 56% of
colleagues taking the opportunity to have a say in their
development via a survey), we launched MyLX, a Groupwide learning portal, demonstrating our commitment to
building a culture of continuous learning. With hundreds
of courses available across multiple languages, take-up
has been very encouraging and we continue to add our
own bespoke training to the platform, where required, as
well as best-in-class external learning assets provided by
the platform provider Skillsoft.
In September 2022 we conducted our second colleague
engagement survey, with 85% of colleagues participating
(FY21: 81%). We evolved our approach, moving to an
Employee Promoter Score framework, which gave us an
overall employee engagement score for the first time,
as well as making the survey available in 12 languages.
The overall engagement score was 69%, with some
clearly articulated strengths, as well as a number of
opportunities for us to address. Partnering with our 'voice
of the customer' programme provider also gave us access
to valuable benchmarking data, allowing us to understand
the steps we need to take to match the global benchmark
for businesses of our type.
The nature of labour markets has clearly changed over the
course of the last 12 months and the importance of having
a compelling employee proposition to attract the right
talent is more pertinent than ever, particularly against a
backdrop of increasing wage inflation. We believe that the
progress made on our people agenda during FY22 moved
us closer to being the employer of choice in our sector
and I am encouraged by our voluntary colleague attrition
rate3 of 15.9% for the year (FY21: 19.2%).
We remain shocked and saddened by the situation in
Ukraine and we continue to focus on supporting our
colleagues in Kyiv and the wider humanitarian efforts. In
February we immediately implemented our crisis response
plan and continue to monitor the situation closely.
22
RWS — Annual Report 2022
STRATEGIC REPORT
In addition to the Board and Company Secretariat
changes outlined in the Chairman's Statement, we also
took a number of steps during the year to strengthen
our Executive Team. At the start of 2022 Jim McHugh
joined as Chief People Officer, with a remit to fully realise
the benefits of scale across all aspects of the colleague
experience, alongside shaping a more unified culture,
to ensure we have committed, energised and engaged
people at all levels of the organisation.
In the spring Maria Schnell was promoted to the position
of Chief Language Officer, leading the development
of the LXD – our unique production platform – with
responsibility for our 2,000+ strong team of in-house
linguists. At the same time Emer Dolan was promoted
to the role of President, Enterprise Internationalisation
Group (part of our Language Services Division), which
works closely with our largest technology enterprise
clients, building highly integrated solutions that enable
them to continually innovate, anticipate trends and scale
their global operations.
In September 2022 we appointed Terry Doyle as Chief
Information Officer, with responsibility for the Group’s
information technology infrastructure, data, security
and compliance, as well as ensuring the delivery of the
transformation programmes that we launched as part of
our medium-term strategy.
SUSTAINABILITY AND ESG
We have made encouraging progress on our sustainability
agenda during the year. As a participant in their
Early Adopter Programme, we submitted our 2022
Communication on Progress report to the UN Global
Compact in June 2022, and our Global Reporting Initiative
framework report was submitted in July 2022, following
approval by a third-party assessor.
On the environment we moved to a new web-based
platform to better facilitate measuring and tracking our
carbon emissions and have spent the year gathering the
baseline data that will allow us to submit science-based
targets to SBTi for validation in FY23. We also launched
our Sustainable Procurement Policy and rolled out the
supporting action plan across the Group.
RWS Campus, our global university partnership
programme, which inspires and develops localisation
talent worldwide, had an extremely strong year. We
merged the RWS Trados Academic Partner Programme
with RWS Campus, meaning that we now have more than
700 university partnerships globally across 76 countries.
3 Calculated
as number of FTE leavers during the financial year, divided by
average number of FTEs during the year, noting the constraints imposed by
having multiple HR systems
