Valuing our employees
We rely on our employees to drive the success of our business. Our aim is to be the employer of choice in the US transportation industry. We aim to attract and retain our workforce by offering a quality and safe working environment.
Our people management framework
With the growth of the business in North America we have strengthened our people management framework. We have appointed an Executive Vice President for Human Resources to co-ordinate human resource management across the business and ensure consistency in approach.
The focus over the coming year will be to integrate the former Laidlaw employees and implement our North America wide people strategy. The strategy will:
- deliver a positive working environment;
- standardise effective recruitment strategies;
- enhance talent management programmes;
- provide effective total compensation and rewards programmes.
We have set in place an implementation plan to achieve these goals along with measures to assess their effectiveness.
Engaging with our employees
With a workforce spread across over 1,000 locations effective communication on core issues is essential. At local level we promote an 'open door' policy and hold regular employee and town hall meetings. For communication across the group we use methods such as newsletters and web mail services supported by regular briefings for communicating core issues.
During the last year communication on the merger of the former Laidlaw sites was of particular importance. Both First Student and First Transit kept their employees informed of developments through news updates. First Transit has also sought early feedback from general managers on transition issues to ensure that any issues of concerns are identified at an early stage.
In moving towards our goal to deliver a positive working environment we have undertaken an employee opinion survey of all our hourly paid employees. This will be followed by a survey of our management employees later in the year. The findings will inform the development of our action programmes and provide a baseline against which to assess future progress.