Smiths

Managing people across a global business demands that we maximise the value of talent pools at every level in the company by unleashing their full potential. By adopting smarter working practices in lean operations, we are ensuring that knowledge and key skills are retained and managed to the best commercial advantage of the company.

Last year proved to be a tremendously exciting challenge as the numbers of employees in Smiths grew from around 17,000 to 37,700 worldwide through merger and acquisition activity. While some 75% of our employees are based in the UK and North America, we have seen a significant increase in our workforce elsewhere in the world, with large concentrations in Mexico, Malta, the Czech Republic and the Far East. To reflect this internationalisation, we have conducted a review of how we develop, recognise, motivate, communicate and reward our workforces throughout Smiths. The dramatic growth has also brought us a greatly expanded pool of highly talented people in every area of our operation. Our priority is now to enable as many as possible of these high calibre individuals to achieve their full potential and bring long-term benefits to Smiths.

With the multicultural, global nature of our business, the drive in many of our people management programmes is to identify and champion highly capable individuals and teams. The programmes focus on encouraging managers to think and act from an international perspective, and to operate outside their functional disciplines. It is key to the success of our management style in Smiths that we empower managers to take a more entrepreneurial outlook on the business challenges that face them in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. We have just completed the second year of our Management Development Programme 'Managing for Growth' with Babson College, Massachusetts. This programme helps to stimulate organic growth by promoting ideas and building entrepreneurial skills across the company. It draws together high-potential employees from different divisions and nationalities to work on real business ideas – creating sound business plans and taking them through to implementation stage.

In addition to the immense development value for participants, these real-time projects can make a visible difference to the bottom line. We believe that the concept behind these projects will increase the drive for organic growth, which is being led by our Chief Executive.

Succession management is fundamental to our future business performance, and in particular to developing employees for worldwide roles. By refining our succession management techniques, we are assisting line managers in thinking and planning well in advance to ensure that we have innovative, entrepreneurial and culturally
aware leaders in the years ahead. The importance of having the right people in the right jobs at the right time is escalating as companies strive to retain the best talent in their organisations. We firmly believe that time spent planning the future leadership of the company is vital to our continued strong growth. More effort has been focused on leadership training, which is seen as a critical success factor in training and developing top talent. At Smiths we aspire to offer people exciting, interesting and dynamic careers – not just a job.

As a company working at the leading edge of technology, young talent is our strength for the future, and at the corporate level we support the work of individual businesses in Smiths to attract and retain good people. This year we have doubled the size of our graduate programme, ensuring that more young people have the opportunity to demonstrate their potential at an early stage in their careers. Through our continued support for programmes like Year in Industry we provide opportunities for young people – either before starting their university career or as part of their course programme – to work in Smiths on specific projects.

Our experience demonstrates that work placement offers an excellent base for recruitment, especially of apprentices and graduates, and gives young people a realistic and exciting window into a future career with the company. Many of our businesses have active partnerships with local schools and colleges to encourage young people to take up opportunities in this challenging, technologically driven company.

We have also been successful with other forms of development, including graduate secondments to other countries and tertiary educational opportunities such as the inter-company MBA programme through Henley Management College. We have also started work on the development of a new graduate website, which our own current graduates will help to create.