The millennials are on board. Are you?

Millennials have been labelled the Experiential Generation or the Giving Generation and they want more from a career than a large salary to spend on material possessions. Millennials are asking questions about their impact on society and how they can make a positive change through the work they do. They are looking for employers who can offer flexible working ensuring the ability to maintain a good work life balance, who promote staff health and wellbeing and one who can offer a higher sense of purpose than simply making money.

Millennials are the future leaders of our business, so it is important that we attract and retain the top talent. It is great news that we can see the similarities in what we are told Millennials are looking for and Cundall’s core values! ‘Ethics and Equity’ was identified during the materiality assessment as one of the six impact areas as being of most significance to our business.

One of the Roadmap objectives is to promote equality, diversity and inclusion. To have improved employee satisfaction, attract top talent, have better decision making and creativity and be more closely aligned to our clients we need to become more diverse. This view is now backed up by a wealth of research with one study by McKinsey Consultants showing that companies in the top quartile for gender or race and ethnic diversity have financial returns above their industry medians.

Simply looking at the diversity of the Manchester office we have staff from over 10 countries, speaking 7 languages and 20% of our services engineers are female. Although this exceeds the current industry figures of 8.7% (Women in Engineering ), this is far cry from where we want to be as industry leaders, particularly when looking at senior roles. There will be a multi-faceted approach to address the gender gap, which is likely to include further unconscious bias training, updated family friendly working policies and providing mentoring for female engineers. There will also be a focus on providing a unified effort across Cundall to undertake STEM outreach activities, particularly targeting underrepresented groups, as part of our investment into the UK engineering industry.

Two other Roadmap KPI’s are undertaking projects with Non-Government Organistaions and aid funded organisations. Cundall will also provide services pro bono for environmental and social projects.

Over the past few months a number of staff from the Manchester office have been working with the Reuben’s Retreat charity. We have offered our skills and expertise across all disciplines at no cost to provide design proposals for the refurbishment of a former Victorian hospital. The project will create a retreat to relieve the distress of families suffering from bereavement or families with a child suffering from a life limiting illness. It has been extremely rewarding to be involved in such a worthwhile cause and to be able to directly benefit our local community. It is fantastic that the Partners have committed to allocating paid staff time to be spent on pro bono project work, which will have a significant impact on the communities we live and work in.