Understanding employees' views
In order to successfully promote our purpose, values, and culture we need to understand our employees’ views and priorities. An important way for us to measure and engage with the wellbeing of our employees, and the health of our corporate culture, is through regular engagement mechanisms. The annual employee survey, and the follow-up engagement with all our colleagues through the CEO Forums, is the cornerstone of our engagement programme. The annual employee survey was undertaken in April 2022 and included for the first time our BizSpace colleagues. We reached a total of 324 colleagues (214 for Sirius and 110 for BizSpace), achieving an 89.2% response rate for Sirius and 87.3% for BizSpace.
Listening to and acting upon employee feedback
The alignment in culture and perception between the Sirius and BizSpace teams was encouraging, with positive feedback related to colleague and team cohesion, communication, and actions on diversity and inclusion. Of Sirius and BizSpace employees, over 74% and 77%, respectively, signalled strong approval of leadership, with nearly 74% of employees across both companies indicating that positive changes have been implemented since the last survey.
Going forward, we intend to expand the number of sustainability related activities, as we recognise that our employees play an important role in delivering on the ESG ambitions we have set for the business.
Tenant engagement
Linked to this, we have also continued to develop our engagement with our tenants. In June 2022, we completed our tenant survey which for the first time incorporated BizSpace tenants. While the survey covers a number of operational questions, we ensure that we also keep our finger on the pulse of their engagement with sustainability issues including waste management, emissions reduction and biodiversity. We were pleased to see representation from our Top 50 tenants by revenue as well as offices, industrial storage, self-storage and First Choice Business Centres (“FCBC”). As discussed previously, our tenants will play a vital role in us being able to deliver on our net zero and decarbonisation commitments, and as such we recognise that we need to expand on our engagement with our tenants in this area. In order to support this area, and to drive enhanced engagement and collaboration with our tenants, we launched a dedicated and centralised customer care department in September 2022.