NY Highways is a value-based business, and we rely on our people to represent our values in the workplace and in the community in which we work. We have circa 250 employees, people who largely reside in North Yorkshire and who operate across the County and will move into bordering authorities in time. Our operational front-line workforce represents circa 75% of our total staff. We are committed to being a modern, diverse and inclusive employer; an employer that creates and develops a future workforce and provides career development opportunities. In particular, we seek to welcome more female and younger colleagues into our workforce.

To achieve our vision and deliver our objectives, key areas of development activity are being progressed. These are aligned with and derived from our business plan and the emerging longer-term commercial strategy. They include:

• Promoting health, safety, and wellbeing through ‘Go Home Safe, Go Home Healthy ’, and meaningful policies, procedures, and processes, leading to positive behavioural changes.
• Correlation between company values and employee engagement leading to organisational commitment and improved performance.
• Consolidation and advancement of attainments in leadership and management styles in line with the latest standards, including a recognition of the role of leadership in ethical challenges.
• Understanding the benefits that diversity brings from within the business and local community, through richness of ideas and innovations, and ensuring equality in the workforce supports and sustains our business.
• Financial planning and surety of investment decisions, including accountability and the use of most appropriate financial decision metrics, e.g. return on investment, and cost-benefit analyses.
• Understanding of our business’s capabilities and ability to make connections across the business (and supply chain) in order to deliver solutions in the marketplace.
• Marketing our capabilities to promote effective and strong business-to-business customer relationships that bring value to the business and market research capabilities to gain competitive advantage.
• Providing training and development opportunities to our workforce is not simply a matter of getting more from our people. We know that work should be challenging, rewarding, and stimulating, which in turn provides new opportunities to overcome obstacles and develop skills. With this in mind, we ensure that all staff across every part of the business, have regular opportunities to learn and grow to keep them safe and further engaged. We have a dedicated training budget of £200k which supports development activities and the ongoing investment we make in skills maintenance for the workforce.

Cultivating the next generation of talent is also vital to our success. Instead of waiting for young people to learn the skills we want, we strive to provide those opportunities, with schemes like trade apprenticeships and our graduate and technician programmes to ensure the future agility and sustainability of our business. We are proud to set targets of supporting 20 trainee roles, including specialist highways technicians and apprentices and it is hoped that upwards of 90% of these will go on to secure permanent positions in this business and become our future. We also offer our people competitive employee reward packages.

We value our people resources above all else and need to retain high-performing teams and individuals. Succession planning is a key focus in our workforce development plan, and we will continue to invest heavily in leadership competencies and coaching skills.

We are proud of our workforce and the work we do in our communities and continue to invest in their development ensuring future success.