Halcrow is competing against four other companies for the award (Accenture; Happy Ltd; Hewlett Packard and Jaguar and Land Rover). Mandy Clarke, Halcrow’s director for human resources, said: “I am delighted that we have been short-listed as a finalist, the only construction industry representative amongst the five short-listed. We understand the issues and work-life barriers that are faced by our employees and have worked to assist them in dealing with these.”
“We have not looked at focusing on women or providing female-only solutions, just emphasised that flexible benefits and family friendly policies and practices should be available to all. Our approach has been very effective in assisting staff to have an appropriate work-life balance – this is Halcrow’s real strength and it is valued by all employees.”
Halcrow’s employment package is aimed at attracting and retaining the best people. Benefits include flexitime, 24 days’ holiday, private medical care, contributory pension, healthcare insurance, and a range of flexible benefits which employees can chose such as childcare vouchers, dental insurance and the ability to purchase additional holidays. Their open and positive culture has resulted in a rise in female senior managers from less than 1% to 6% in under four years and 26% of employees at Halcrow are female. This is well above the construction industry norm.
Working Families, chief executive, Sarah Jackson said: "We are really impressed by the standard of entries this year and we look forward to finding out more about the finalists' policies and practice when we interview them. We feel sure that their examples will inspire other employers to create workplaces which not only enable work-life balance for their employees, but also bring tangible business benefits to their organisations."
