Our values make us who we are and guide the things we do. They are at their most powerful when they are demonstrated through everything we do at every level.
Our employee awards scheme, known as ViVa (Vision and Values), is our way of saying thank you to our employees for doing a great job or going the extra mile.
Now in its ninth year it is still as popular as ever with around 1,700 employees in 2019 nominating teams and colleagues for demonstrating our values and behaviours.
Every year we hold a ViVa awards ceremony, and nominations throughout the year are shortlisted down to five per category.
This year the finalists included:
- Two teams who took the initiative to develop new approaches to understand what their customers wanted and to find ways to deliver unrivalled service
- A team who saved significant time and money by taking a different approach
- A team who developed an app, upgraded their equipment and supported their colleagues to learn how to use it
Case Study - Just an Hour
Our Just an Hour employee volunteering scheme is a cornerstone of how we support our communities and is something we are immensely proud of.
Every year each of our team have the opportunity to give a minimum of 15 working hours to support community initiatives.
We understand that our communities can benefit from the wealth of knowledge, skills and expertise our employees have to give. The programme is designed to have an impact on education, the environment and the general wellbeing of the community.
This past year we have supported 543 organisations with 42% of our people volunteering 9901 hours through the scheme.
In December alone, we recorded Just an Hour activity for 14.8% of our people. During the festive period, our people particularly enjoyed giving back to their local community by volunteering.
Our Water team, which is our biggest directorate, were stood down from their duties to get involved in planned activities across the North East, Essex and Suffolk areas. They helped with the Mission Christmas toy appeal, tree planting, litter picking, beach clean ups, river bank clearing and much more.
Lots of our colleagues in our Customer team got involved in the Christmas shoe box appeal sending a whopping 230 Christmas parcels off to children in need overseas. Planning has already started for Christmas 2020.
Colleagues across the north, chipped in together to provide Christmas hampers for over 50 families in the north east who are dealing with cancer and help cheer them up a little. We worked with FACT, Fighting All Cancers Together, to identify those families and are already looking at how we can make it even bigger in 2020.
It was a tag-team effort to support Cash for Kids in Newcastle and Teesside. Our colleagues who drive company vans, jumped on board Mission Christmas to collect donated toys from around the region. We then had colleagues working at Mission Christmas HQ making sure all toys were in order and ready to be donated to children across the region.