Half year highlights, August 2023

How are we at half year results already?

Time flies in a business like ours, and as we mark Morgan Sindall Group’s half year results, we wanted to share just some of the highlights and achievements of our Responsible Business plan, which we updated in February 2023.

To find out more about our Responsible Business plan, click here.

Our mental health training is continuing at pace for our Supply Chain Family.

Our commitment to Protecting People has seen us deliver three Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) courses this year, and 10% of our business are trained Mental Health First Aiders. We have two fully qualified instructors to deliver our training (the brilliant Julie Simpkin and Chris Westlake), with Andrew Bickers (equally brilliant) who will be complete his training shortly followed by two more people who will start their instructor training soon.

But with a strong network of mental health first aiders and instructors in our own business, the focus of our training has been on working with our supply chain to ensure they have access to quality training in place too.

We’ve trained 49 members of our Supply Chain so far in 2023 which brings us to a total of 140 people to date. Helping them to access professional training, free of charge to support those in their own businesses – whether they’re working on our sites or elsewhere in the industry.

The awareness of mental health in the construction industry needs to continue, and there are a lot of our competitors, partners and customers offering quality training. Please contact us for training or take a look at one of the many opportunities available via one of our Morgan Sindall Group companies or Framework partners. By all supporting this very important training, we can all be contributing to a better industry.

Following the success of our Investors in People (IIP) Platinum accreditation in January, we’re continuing to work with IIP to review how our people feel about working for Morgan Sindall Construction, by taking part in Investors in People’s Wellbeing Accreditation. This will be the first time we’ve worked towards this accreditation, and although we do hope to achieve it this time, we know that the results from the survey will provide us with a variety of feedback, positive and negative that we can use to develop our wellbeing offer to our team and potential new recruits!

In the second part of the year, we’ll also be campaigning to raise awareness of modern slavery in the workplace and these statistics from the National Crime Agency, have highlighted why this awareness is needed now so that those who work for our business or as part of our Supply Chain can spot the signs of this unlawful practice.

We’re committed to developing people at key points in their careers.

We firmly believe that the majority of our learning comes from on-the-job experience and learning from the talented people around us. But where we identify a skills gap, we are well positioned to offer a range of formal training opportunities and as a result.

• 14% of our people are on early career development programmes, a broad spectrum of training that covers apprenticeships, T-Levels, placements and our graduate scheme.
• 34% of our people have undertaken 360 feedback allowing them to take personal ownership for their development in alignment with our very own management and leadership behavioural framework, aligned to the values of Morgan Sindall.
• 131 people to date have completed either our Stepping into Management or Developing Management Excellence programmes, the second half of the year will see a further 104 either complete a programme or join a new cohort. Whilst 19 of our senior leaders will complete an intensive business programme with Cranfield School of Management.
• Our operational teams have attended 6,510 hours of safety training and completed 3,000 online technical training modules.

We’re already in a great place, but to ensure we’re providing the best experience for our people we’re continually reviewing and enhancing our learning offer and tools to support people with their day-to-day learning. Including an improved eLearning system and a focus on the development of a robust mentoring framework.

We continue on a positive trajectory when it comes improving the environment and reducing carbon from our operations and in the projects we deliver for customers.

CarboniCa, our in-house tool, measures the carbon impact of the whole life cycle of buildings. CarboniCa is used on 80% of our secured projects over £10M and informs decision-making to reduce our – and our customers’ – climate change impact. Through our 10 Tonne Carbon Challenge we have demonstrated over 14,000 tonnes of carbon savings to date.

Our organisational net zero progress is underpinned by a focus on switching away from burning fossil fuels.

For instance:

• 45% of our company fleet is now fully electric
• 11 of our projects are entirely diesel free
• 50% of the fuel purchased across all sites is renewable biodiesel.

When it comes to nature recovery, we continue to collaborate with our customers and maximise habitats for wildlife. We now have 17 projects with a biodiversity net gain assessment in place, all indicating that an on-site improvement of 10% or more is achievable.

The introduction of our project Sustainability Charter in February means that we now have 22 projects who have set ambitious targets that cover our own ambitions as well as our customers targets.

All this is backed by a number of collaborative components, such as:

• Our research-backed approach to decarbonisation on new build and retrofit projects, which we’re using to support our customers to access Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme (PSDS3c) funding.
• Our 40-strong regional and national carbon champions, who are working together across regional boundaries to share best practices and successes that have been achieved on our projects.
• An increasing number of dedicated roles in sustainability and environment management – something we see across the industry too – and also a network of individuals who identified in their appraisals that they want contribute specifically to improving the environment as part of their existing role.

So that’s just a small snippet of some of the work we’ve completed to date and an insight into our next steps. As ever, we’ll be sharing everything we’re up to on our social media channels, but it’s our purpose-driven people who are the ones who will tell you any number of things they’ve been working on to support our Responsible Business goals.

So it’s a big thank you to them, and we look forward to sharing some of the next highlights at the full year mark.