By Sarah Walker HR Director, BWB Consulting
Conventional wisdom might suggest that high performance in business involves the single-minded pursuit of success. And since BWB is a top two per cent company, maybe you’d expect to be walking into a hyper-competitive, always-on environment where there’s no room for faint-hearts.
We’re an ambitious bunch, for sure. But our view is that high performance goes hand-in-hand with humanity. That is, in fact, what makes us one of the two per cent of businesses who’ve attained Investors in People Platinum status.
If being an Investor in People is a journey, BWB and its people have been doing a workplace culture marathon for more than two decades. We first became an Investors in People business back in 2002, and since then we’ve progressed up the accreditation scale to a level that no other business in multi-disciplinary engineering has reached.
So, job done then – we’ve scaled the heights and we can go no further. Infact, the reverse is true: the whole point about Investors in People Platinum status is that it involves a deep-seated recognition that the relationship between BWB as a business and the people who make it what it is can never stand still.
Let’s unpick what being a top two per cent business actually looks like. For starters, it IS about a high-performance workplace culture because that’s literally how Investors in People defines Platinum accreditation. As a process, it’s become far more rigorous and intense, leaving no stone unturned in its assessment of how well our internal reality matches up to some incredibly demanding criteria.
But it’s what the business looks like from the perspective of our people that offers the most telling insight – we have to be a place where everyone can flourish and thrive.
Aiming for exceptional
If we start with first dates, then the way we attract and onboard people is a benchmark in itself. The days when these encounters were based on ‘have you got the skills/is our offer high enough’ are ancient history. Good people look for a career roadmap, where it will take them and what the milestones are. Yes, there are still occasions when big consultancies can wave a corporate chequebook, but that often leads to ‘boomerang hires’ – people who’ve realised a one-off salary hike is built on an unsustainable promise and returned to a better environment.
We don’t aim for better – we aim for exceptional. That requires clarity and purpose in connecting work to career pathways and team objectives, supported by trust and autonomy – people need the freedoms and tools to perform professionally and to feel empowered to speak up when they can see a route to improvement. They can see a skills matrix that plots progress, a coaching culture that supports it, and secondments that give them client-side experience.
That last point plays to a greater truth about high-performing workplace culture. It will deliver better outcomes not just for our own people, but for the clients we work with.
Our people policies are also designed take the guesswork out of progression opportunities because they’re clearly spelled out. Those policies extend trust to where and how our people work: we cast aside old assumptions about being glued to a desk a long time ago and replaced them with flexible, hybrid working based on outputs not locations.
Incidentally, we won’t be following the fad for questioning equality, diversity and inclusion. In a diverse world, supporting inclusion and belonging is unequivocally the right thing to do because we need the full spectrum of lived experience in our business – it adds value to what we do.
That’s also reflected in our benefit and reward offer, which has gone beyond one-size-fits-all to a package better aligned to life and career events. For early careers colleagues that might be help with travelling to work and insights into how they can get on the property ladder; for people further down the career path, it could be support with family life and planning for retirement.
For everyone, it’s also support with health and wellbeing because that too is inextricably linked with how well people are able to perform. Investing in wellbeing is recognised separately by Investors in People and our own embrace of its importance is illustrated by the gold standard we achieved last year.
I could have started this out with a boardroom view, but we’re not a top-down business. Nevertheless, leaders have to be role models and to live our people-first values.
While we’re incredibly proud of our Platinum status, our focus is on action plans for improvement: how can we improve diversity in leadership, reward people for the impact they have, strengthen our internal storytelling?
What’s shaped our journey is the belief that culture isn’t a one-time initiative, it’s ongoing, it evolves. We’ve learned, adapted, and improved over time. A lot of that comes from actively listening to our teams. Some comes from being intentional in our policies and people practices. And some of it is about having the courage to lead with integrity, even when things are tough.
We’re restless for improvement here. Bring on the next assessment, bring on the lessons we can learn. Bring on even higher performance!