Heijmans’ strength lies in its people. This is why being a good employer is a major priority for us. We have an eye for our people. They must be able to do their work safely, healthily and with pleasure.
Satisfied employees
In 2023, we once again conducted an employee engagement survey. It is important to us that our people are comfortable in their own skin, and feel engaged and motivated. Appreciation ensures that employees enjoy coming to work and return home with energy. We used the engagement survey to measure what employees think is going well and what could be improved in our company. This is how we continue to learn together at Heijmans. No fewer than 83% of all colleagues completed the survey. In 2023, the organisation was given an Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) of +35. This was higher than the previous employee engagement survey in 2021, when the score was +25. This compares with eNPS of +14 in the construction sector as a whole and an eNPS of +25 in the installation sector (source: Integron October 2023 report). So we have a great deal to be proud of and we are looking to the future with confidence.
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We now have even more ambassadors. Our yellow heart is beating even harder!
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Heijmans’ greatest strength lies in its many motivated colleagues who take pleasure in their work. And who are very satisfied with the cooperation and relationships with other colleagues.
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Looking ahead, it remains important to appreciate each other and pay attention to personal growth.
100 years of Heijmans
In 2023, Heijmans celebrated its 100th anniversary and we were awarded the Royal predicate. This royal recognition is a confirmation of and appreciation for the craftsmanship and entrepreneurship of our employees today and in the past. Of course, we celebrated 100 years of Heijmans extensively throughout the year with all our employees, to thank them for their dedication and hard work. The pride and commitment of all Heijmans employees was clearly visible at the concluding grand party in the Brabanthallen congress centre.
Capacity and deployability
In the construction and infrastructure market, we are faced with a scarcity of highly employable workers. For the time being, we are managing to fill vacancies, but this requires an enormous effort on our part. We use the ‘Make it happen’ labour market campaign for all vacancies, which ensures that Heijmans is highly visible and recognisable in the market. We hired around 800 new employees in 2023. They all participated in an onboarding programme to quickly feel at home in the organisation. The total outflow within Heijmans has remained relatively constant in recent years. Based on analyses of unwanted turnover, in 2023 we took a number of specific measures aimed at employee retention. We completed the integration of Dynniq in July 2023, with the hiring of the employees involved.
In recent years, our learning programme for refugees with work permits ensured the influx of a group of highly motivated and driven employees. Heijmans now employs a total of 41 refugees. While refugees were initially only trained as technicians, the influx has now broadened to other positions, such as modellers, calculators, operators and building site employees. When we did this, we decided to offer each individual a tailor-made programme best suited to that individual’s level of education, experience and ambition. A working group supports the business and HR department in these tailor-made processes. Heijmans will devote extra attention to this path in 2024 and has the ambition to train and offer jobs to at least 50 refugees, giving them the opportunity to build a new life in the Netherlands.
In addition, we will use internal training courses - including those at the Heijmans Technology Academy - to retrain numerous colleagues to bring them up to speed with (technical) developments and to keep them employable within their own work fields. The pressure on the labour market is making it even more urgent to focus fully on employee retention. In that context, last year we looked more specifically for the underlying reasons people left the company. We analysed information from exit interviews and held talks with management and employees to look for targeted solutions and substantive adjustments in the work we offer. We also investigated the appropriateness of our job structure and the market conformity of our remuneration. Based on various benchmarks, we made adjustments for some specific groups. Finally, we launched measures aimed at guaranteeing equal pay for Heijmans employees.
Prevention and vitality
High absenteeism remains a concern: although the rolling figure varies greatly by business unit, the overall absenteeism within Heijmans has continued to fluctuate around 5% since the first quarter of 2022. In particular, we see a high frequency of absenteeism among younger employees (>1 in the age category up to 35 years) and an increasing duration of absenteeism as people get older. In recent years, we have devoted a great deal of generic attention to prevention and vitality. In 2023, we increased our focus on looking for a specific approach at group level. In certain parts of the company, we provided managers with training and guidance to strengthen their coaching role. In the older group of operational employees, we made an effort to hold individual discussions on sustainable employability. As long-term absenteeism in the younger age category is often due to psychological complaints, we used preventive interventions to help them find a work-life balance and increase their mental resilience. To prevent colleagues from carrying on for too long with stress complaints, we now use Absenteeism & Prevention meetings to teach managers to pick up signals at an early stage.
Comfortable in your own skin
Creating a healthy living environment works best if you yourself are fit and healthy. Which is why we consciously devote attention to the subject of vitality. Depending on their age, every Heijmans colleague receives an invitation for a Periodic Occupational Health Examination (Dutch: PAGO) once every two or four years. A PAGO is a preventive examination of the individual health of our people. It identifies any health risks and the lifestyles of our employees. The most frequently identified risks from the PAGOs in 2022 were translated into a Heijmans-wide Vitality Programme in 2023.
The themes are:
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Healthy life
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In balance
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Prevent and adjust
We organised a programme of various initiatives over the course of the year, such as: a workshop given by nutrition specialists from the Voedingsacademie (nutrition academy), inspiring lectures by Erik Scherder and Dai Carter, a work-out by Olympic champion and colleague Stefan Groothuis, the working conditions consultation hour, regional initiatives such as stress-resilience training, a Vitality Challenge in Amersfoort and the #fietsnaarjewerkdag (cycle to work) initiative. Over a thousand colleagues participated in parts of the programme.
Talent development
The importance of developing potential is even greater in a tight labour market. That is why Heijmans invests year after year in bringing in and guiding young talent: trainees and other starters. Each year, we also launch a Heijmans-wide talent programme for young potentials with around three years’ work experience. For the more advanced group of management potentials, we have an annual leadership programme, ‘Leaders of tomorrow’. Participants are carefully selected and may only join once they have passed a positive development assessment and they have a concrete plan for an early, next career step. We do this because we want to prevent well-trained and motivated talent from leaving the company because they cannot move on internally quickly enough. In addition to the Heijmans-wide talent programmes, we also offer specific development activities within the business areas for all the high potentials in a specific business area. These activities are organised and supervised by management, with the support of HR. These include skills training, mentoring and content sessions around a strategic theme that plays a role within a particular business area. Everything in this process is aimed at investing more in the potential within the organisation and steering more actively towards internal mobility. We are steering towards a KPI that measures the percentage of internal appointments in key positions (the top 10% of our population). We easily achieved our target of 60% in 2023 (66%). We want to continue to attract the remainder of our talent from outside the organisation because they offer a fresh perspective and new input.
Human rights: Minimum Social Safeguards
At Heijmans, we believe that - in addition to our own employees - every employee in our supply chains deserves a pleasant and healthy working and living environment. Through their activities, companies can have a direct or indirect impact on human rights in the Netherlands and the rest of the world. Heijmans endorses the general principles of the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises and the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, which describe the special role of companies in respecting all human rights.
Last year, Heijmans performed an analysis of the most relevant aspects with regard to the theme of human rights. We describe the outcome of this analysis in Appendix 20.6.13. This analysis shows that providing a safe and healthy working environment for our employees and the employees of our subcontractors is one of the most important aspects, followed by human rights deeper in the chain. We have implemented measures, taking into account safety in design, supervision and audits during execution and the analysis and follow-up on incidents, to mitigate potential negative impacts resulting from our activities.
One important risk-limiting factor is that Heijmans carries out virtually no construction activities abroad and most of our raw materials and products come from Europe. However, the rest of the supply chain is exposed to such risks. Examples of potential risks could be those associated with the extraction of raw materials and poor working conditions in the production of these materials. Some of these risks are covered by buying certified products and working with certified suppliers. An example of this is the measure to only buy sustainably certified wood (both FSC and PEFC).
Many topics related to this theme are a standard part of our safety, HR and procurement policies. These include matters such as ensuring good working conditions, freedom of association (trade unions), applying fair and equal pay, and taking sustainability aspects into account when purchasing.
Heijmans also has the ‘How we work’ code of conduct. The implementation of actions taken by Heijmans, including the introduction of a construction site ID system within the framework of the Dutch Act on Combatting Spurious Labour Contracts (Wet Aanpak Schijnconstructies - WAS) is also part of this theme. We also give internal and external stakeholders the opportunity to make abuses in the chain known, for example via our whistleblower scheme.
Suppliers and subcontractors are involved in procurement and chain responsibility and sign their own declaration (supplier sustainability declaration) indicating compliance with human rights. This is how we try to embed human rights in the Heijmans sustainable procurement policy and account management as much as possible.