Employee Engagement

We have over 12,000 employees at RWE npower and our people are at the heart of the success of our business. The challenges are to attract the right mix of skills, talent and diversity to our business, create a healthy and safe environment and provide our employees with the opportunities, training and motivation they need to do their jobs to the best of their ability. In order to meet these challenges, it is essential that we understand of the needs of our people and those we wish to attract through effective engagement.

Engagement is primarily driven by our internal communications strategy to encourage dialogue, discussion and debate in the organisation through a range of channels, which are tailored to meet the different needs of our people and support our ‘one company’ ethos.

Our company intranet is a key communications channel and plays a pivotal role in how we communicate with our employees. In 2011, there was a significant increase in the number of times our internal news stories were viewed by employees on our company intranet, rising from around 480,000 hits in 2010 to over 800,000 in 2011.

In April 2011, we launched a brand new magazine called ‘nu’. The magazine provides an overview of activities and news stories across the business and is available to view online. Copies are also available at sites and are posted to our remote workers. In December, ‘nu’ magazine won an award for excellence from the Institute of Internal Communications.

An opportunity for employee engagement is provided by our Football League sponsorship programme. During 2011, we built on our previous success of the npower Football League Fan Club, which ran until summer 2011, by offering employees the opportunity to go to a Football League match. We were also able to provide employee volunteering opportunities at their local Football League clubs as we delivered our community programme initiatives at each club - a respect workshop; a coaching session; or improvements to local playgrounds.

We continued with our ‘Smile’ internal campaign, which encourages employees to become customers of npower, and more employees than ever took part in our RWE npower Games, with nearly 1,000 people registering their attendance – either as participants, volunteer helpers or visitors. This is an annual sporting event that enables our employees to compete in teams or as individuals in a variety of sports. It provides a focal point to raise awareness of occupational health and wellbeing and, in 2011, raised almost £2,500 for Macmillan Cancer Support.