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OUR PEOPLE

Virgin companies employ over 43,000 people in over 20 countries worldwide. Plus a few thousand more people are employed by partner organisations but deliver a service on Virgin’s behalf to our customers.

The Virgin brand is built upon Richard’s philosophy that if you keep your staff happy then the customer will be happy, and if you keep the customer happy then the

shareholders are happy. The size of our shareholding in the Virgin companies can vary dramatically but the principles of how we treat our staff are consistent. It’s Virgin people who deliver brilliant customer service, who give the company its personality, who shape its culture and who innovate. Virgin people are Virgin’s greatest asset and we believe in treating them as such: with respect, looking after their welfare and allowing them the freedom to be themselves. We do this by focusing on key areas of people practice: culture, diversity, health and wellness, development, reward and saying thank you.

1. Culture

Virgin has a strong set of brand values which shapes the way we do business and so we select people to work with us who share those same principles. We want people to bring their personalities to work and our lack of hierarchy fosters a culture that encourages freedom of expression at all times. Our guiding management principle is this; give individuals the tools they need, outline some parameters in which to work and then let them get on and do their stuff!

Building on a progressive culture is part of doing business the Virgin way and so we regularly invite employee feedback through a mixture of formal and informal mechanisms (staff communication events, CEO lunches, blogs and interactive intranets, employee satisfaction/

engagement surveys, focus groups). At present around half of Virgin companies report having run a formal staff survey in the past two years. Of those that have been surveyed:

- 84% of employees said they are happy working at Virgin,

- 77% said they intended to keep working at Virgin for the foreseeable future,

- 85% said they are happy to recommend Virgin as an employer to others.

In the past year we have developed our ‘People Stats’ to measure things such as staff turnover, absence and engagement levels across all Virgin companies, allowing us to understand the implications of these key people measures thus providing a focus for future action. We also consolidate these numbers at a group level to give us an overall picture of Virgin as an employer as well as benchmarking ourselves regularly against other external companies to highlight if there are things we need to work on.

From these stats we know that in 2008 the Virgin Group had an overall turnover rate of 27.6% (slightly above the average of our benchmark group) which is mostly due to a higher turnover in our leisure and hospitality companies. High turnover is concerning when we pride ourselves on our efforts to make Virgin a great place to work and so this year we are undertaking a project to dig into the reasons why people leave.

Virgin believes that anyone who delivers a service on behalf of Virgin should be treated in a way consistent with our people principles and this includes employees of third parties. Virgin therefore has a clear set of outsourcing/ off-shoring guidelines which our companies are required to adhere to when services are contracted out to a third party .

In 2010 we aim to have at least 75% of Virgin companies running a staff survey every two years. We set each Virgin business a target of having a minimum of 70% employees satisfied, or very satisfied working at Virgin. In the near future this will form part of the formal requirements we place on new businesses when they agree to operate under the Virgin brand licence.

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Following employee feedback, Virgin Media ran an initiative last year called ‘Trading Places’ in which two employees from the UK swapped places with two employees from the call centre in India for a week to promote understanding of working environments in different countries.

They were filmed throughout their visits. The team concluded that although culturally

the environments were very different, everything else was just the same -

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