Our People

We want our people to feel comfortable within our organisation, inspired and energised by their work, and supported by colleagues and managers. Every year, our employee engagement survey helps us understand what is important to our colleagues, and to act on the results. In 2024, the response rate for our survey was 80% (2023: 79%) and the engagement score was 83% (2023: 80%). We maintained or improved performance on every measure of the survey compared to 2023. We also track the mental health and well-being of employees through the survey. In 2024, this score was 79% (2023: 78%).

More than two-thirds of our employees (70%) reported having a good work-life balance. Although this score shows a 2% improvement compared to 2023, we continue to see the need to support managers to distribute work effectively and act when team members report problems in their work/life balance.

One area that needed attention was compensation and benefits. In 2024 we worked on a total reward project, developing competitive salary packages to attract and retain our talented people. We improved opportunities for internal mobility, enabling employees to develop meaningful careers within our organisation. All our vacancies are published on an internal career platform as well as to external audiences.

Being partly employee-owned and having more focus on delivering on our purpose (steward-ownership) is an attractive feature for existing and potential employees. We include information about this in our employee value proposition narratives. We also launched a global referring policy rewarding employees when they successfully bring new colleagues to join the company.

We aim to create the best possible start for new recruits, making them feel part of the team and quickly introducing them to our work and values. We continued to improve our onboarding process in 2024, ensuring we deliver a consistent employee experience across the world. The virtual Royal Start events that take place for new joiners in the Netherlands are now available for all our locations. Local face-to-face events are also held regularly to build connections and strong teams.

Enjoyment and shared experiences are part of the mix of a happy working life. Offices regularly hold events to bring people together. For example, colleagues from across the globe took part in World Clean up Day in September 2024 and in the Netherlands, around 500 employees joined a beach volleyball event organised by our young professionals. Charity fundraising events included the Brite Cycling Classic and the 500km team relay Roparun. Lively celebrations marked NACO’s 75th anniversary, along with the 20th anniversary of our presence in the Philippines and 50 years in Thailand. In Vietnam, employee birthdays of the past three months are celebrated with local colleagues every quarter. In Jakarta, colleagues held an Iftar gathering celebrating the end of Ramadan.

Our activities in learning and development help our people acquire skills and expertise for the future. They support our leaders so they can successfully guide their teams towards the company goals. We also focus on career progression, so we retain talent and help everyone achieve their personal ambitions.

Our Learning Academies continue to evolve. New training materials were added in 2024. We launched a Consultancy Academy to build learning around a range of consultancy skills at various levels of seniority to support our strategic ambitions to shift our service mix.

We recognise the role our managers play in developing our people. Our Leading Stronger25 programme for higher management tiers continued in 2024 for Associate Directors. Our Future Leaders Journey is a global learning programme for emerging talents lasting 14 months. We have a local programme supporting talent development in our Asia-Pacific region (APAC).

We identified a need for more clarity and guidance on what is expected of employees pursuing specific career routes. A new career development tool indicates the skills and experience required for various career pathways. The first of these was completed in 2024 and relates to careers in consultancy. Graduates and people joining our organisation early in their career often experience similar uncertainty in deciding which route to take. Traineeships in various part of the organisation provide a range of experiences so our trainees can make informed choices about their career direction. In 2024, we appointed an early career specialist to support our graduate programmes globally, ensuring people feel challenged and supported to develop themselves in the initial stages of their careers.

Two global Learning Weeks in 2024 reinforced our culture of learning. The theme of the first was Explore the (im)possible with a wide variety of sessions on topics including innovation and challenging your thinking. The second learning week was entitled AI Horizons - Embracing our digital future. More than 30 sessions were available on the exciting digital future ahead. The more we can automate or digitise our work to increase efficiency, the more time we gain to add value for our clients.

Our ambition to Enhance Society Together is embedded in our commitment to an inclusive culture. In 2024, we appointed a global ED&I manager who oversees and drives the ED&I activities initiated within our organisation. We also conducted our first global ED&I survey to understand the diversity of our people as well as the challenges faced by our colleagues when it comes to equality, inclusion and belonging. We invited everyone to participate, and almost 1,900 people shared their experiences and opinions with us. The scores for equality, belonging and inclusion were each 70% or above (equality 70%, belonging 72%, inclusion 71%). Our managers are considered inclusive (83%), and our teams are also perceived as inclusive (82%). Our employees feel psychologically safe (76%). The survey revealed only 57% of our employees actively support ED&I indicating a need for more communication around the topic to aid understanding and awareness. The results from the survey will support the development of our future plans. During the year, we held various activities across the organisation to encourage a culture where all our people, regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, physical ability, or nationality, feel valued and inspired to do their best. This included celebrating International Women’s Day in March and Pride month in June. We are committed to diversity in recruitment and talent sourcing to become a diverse company reflecting societies and cultures where we work. This includes ensuring vacancy texts are inclusive and we are continuing unconscious bias training sessions.

Our gender diversity is improving. The percentage of female employees increased to 29% in 2024 (2023: 28%). Our target is 32% by 2030. We are realising the target through a high percentage of female new hires (36% in 2024). The percentage of women in line management positions however unfortunately decreased to 23% in 2024 (from 25% in 2023). Our target here is 30% in 2030. We will realise this target by encouraging the presence of at least one female candidate for each vacant management position. In addition, gender diversity targets are addressed in structural meetings between our CEO and Global Directors.

Gender diversity concerns more than the binary male/female ratio mentioned currently, 10 people within our organisation have indicated in the ED&I survey that they are non-binary or genderfluid. Due to the rounding of percentages in this report, the non-binary/genderfluid people are unfortunately not visible in the figures mentioned in this report.

The gender pay gap analysis we conduct in the United Kingdom was extended to the Netherlands in 2024. It will expand outwards across other locations in coming years, demonstrating our commitment to fair and unbiased compensation practices. The UK Gender Pay Gap report for 2023 was published in 2024 and shows we made positive strides. We reduced our overall mean gender pay gap by 1.2% in 2023 and the mean gender bonus gap saw a significant decrease of 20.6%. The 2024 gender pay gap reports for the UK and the Netherlands will be available in 2025. On International Women’s Day, our CEO Marije Hulshof signed the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles at a global online event. Local activities took place alongside the global event.

Communication is at the heart of inclusion. In 2024, we launched in-house language courses in the Netherlands. The programme includes English courses and one for Dutch aimed towards those who have moved to the Netherlands from elsewhere. A similar programme exists in Vietnam for the English language.

Our people care about positively impacting the lives and living environment of people. They do this through their work, and also contribute their own time, expertise and money to individual initiatives and our BrITE Foundation. This is a charity set up and run by our employees which delivers small-scale projects for people and planet globally. In the Netherlands we are also actively involved in increasing employment opportunities for people with a distance to the labour market; so-called Social Return on Investment. Individual initiatives included employees in Australia raising money for Christmas toys for disadvantaged children which was matched by our Australian operation.

Our BrITE Foundation
In 2024, employees donated more than 40,000 euros to BrITE through monthly donations and/or their end-of-year gift from 2023. The company donated some 43,000 euros.
BrITE provided more than 30,000 euros to small-scale charity projects that underline the care employees show for our planet including support to Australia’s Reef Restoration Foundation (submitted by a Brisbane colleague), and encouraging biodiversity of historic fortresses in the Netherlands (submitted by an Amersfoort colleague). Alongside these environmental projects, BrITE helped the establishment of safe drinking water for a children’s home in South Africa (submitted by a colleague from our South African partner company), donated 1,450 kg rice for typhoon-struck families in the Philippines (submitted by a Manila colleague), and provided funds to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement to support the victims of the war in Gaza.
Read more about these initiatives on our website.

Social Return on Investment
We purchased products and services from suppliers who employ people with a distance to the labour market, supporting their businesses and promoting inclusive employment practices. Examples include office cleaning, garden maintenance and the Sinterklaas gift to all employees in the Netherlands. We targeted internal recruiters and managers in a campaign focused on hiring new employees distanced from the labour market.
We also worked with organisations like the Refugee Talent Hub that aim to decrease refugees’ distance to the labour market.