Our People

Our aim is to help our people, both office and site-based, to live well and work well so we can deliver buildings that astonish our customers.

Our 2024 engagement survey showed 99% of our people feel leaders treat them with respect and 98% feel welcome, included and accepted. The fact that 98% of employees would recommend Willmott Dixon to others highlights our strong people-focused culture and commitment to excellence.

In 2024, we ranked 114th in the Financial Times Diversity Leaders List 2025, the highest placed construction company in Europe. This follows Willmott Dixon’s listing in the Times Top 50 Employers for Gender Equality, and Excellence in Senior Leadership (2024) award at the CN Inspiring Women in Construction Awards.

Agile Working

We champion agile working, supporting our people in balancing home, work and wellbeing. We were early adopters of agile working on construction sites through staggered shifts and flexible rotas, including our smaller sites. In 2024, 94% of employees felt supported in working agilely and over 75% of our people now work from home at least one day a week.

In our 2024 staff satisfaction survey, 96% of women and 87% of men agreed with the statement, “I am able to achieve a healthy balance between my work and home life.”

We were one of the first companies to introduce agile working on construction sites. In 2024, we completed a successful pilot to enable increased flexible working on smaller sites. We found upskilling site-based teams on three small projects with site management safety training schemes (SMSTS) and first aid training has added depth and resilience. We will continue to roll out this approach in 2025.

Support for families

We offer our people enhanced family leave benefits to further support working parents in recognition of the importance of family to us and our people. Our people receive enhanced benefits from day one, including 26 weeks full pay for maternity/adoption leave and eight weeks paternity/partner leave. A ‘welcome back programme' and manager workshops ensure our people are well-supported on their return from a career break.

Gender balance and women in construction

Operating within the construction industry, where just 14% of the workforce is female, we must attract and retain more women to address the skills shortage. Evidence shows diverse teams perform better and our customers want teams on their sites that reflect their communities. Enhancing workforce diversity is a long-held company value.

Our aspiration is to achieve a 50/50 gender balance by 2030. As signatories of the Inspiring Women in Construction Pledge, we are committed to help attract, develop and promote more women in our company and industry. Recruiting more women is essential to address this imbalance and, in 2024, women made up 45% of our total new hires across the business. At the end of 2024, the overall percentage of women in the business had increased to 32.8%, from 31.7% last year, and compared to 24% for our 2018 baseline.

% women and different ethnic groups  

We are committed to recruit highly motivated, trained women to the business. In 2024, women made up 14.7% of leaders and 13.6% of directors in our construction business.

Our award-winning Women’s Leadership Programme continues to go from strength to strength in 2024 (below). Delivered with Cranfield University, we aim to develop 100 female leaders by 2030, with 60 women already graduating from the programme. To date, 48% of women who have completed the programme since its launch in 2021 have been promoted or progressed their career in a different role to their initial plans.

Diverse workforce

We also aim to attract a more diverse workforce that reflects the communities we serve and to make us a better business. In 2024, 7.6% of our employees were from an ethnic minority background. We have been members of Black Professionals in Construction since 2021 and two of our regional offices are also members of Building Equality - the LGBT+ Construction Group.

We measure how inclusive our culture is through our staff satisfaction survey. In 2024, women scored 98% for the statement ‘I feel welcome, included and accepted for who I am at work’, and 95%% ‘I have equal opportunities regardless of my gender, ethnic origin, disabilities, religion, age or sexual orientation.’

We strive to close our Gender Pay Gap and recognise and champion the achievements of women.

In 2024, the mean average percentage difference in hourly rate between men and women was:

Disability confident employer

We are an approved Disability Confident employer and continue to be a member of the Business Disability Forum. At the end of 2024, 3.1% of our people had declared that they had a disability compared to 3.3% at the end of 2023.

Our Disability Affinity Group met during 2024 to provide a forum for our people to talk about disability, which could be their own disability, or that which friends and family experience.

Attracting the next generation 

According to figures by the CITB in 2024, 251,000 people are forecast to be needed in the construction sector by 2028. That equates to an increase of over 50,000 people per year over the five years from 2024 – 2028 to meet anticipated industry output.

We have one of the most established and successful management trainee programmes in the industry. We aim for gender parity in our recruitment, and this is demonstrated by 54% of our trainee intake in 2024 being women. In 2024, 48% of management trainees in our business were women, compared to 27% in 2018. 

At the end of the year, we had 97 directly employed apprentices in the business. This number has grown considerably since the beginning of the decade as we have changed the way we use the Apprenticeship Levy. Instead of a traditional degree courses, our management trainees are now registered for apprenticeships, including data, construction site management, chartered surveying, quantity surveying and construction site supervision. Completing a Level 6 degree apprenticeship means the trainee still achieves the same degree as they would traditionally have done. However, an apprenticeship route means this is delivered in a more cost-effective way with a wider package of support.

In 2024, we also registered trainees for apprenticeships in sustainability business specialist and professional risk and safety management among others for the first time.

Management trainees and apprentices employed   

These figures now capture all apprentices registered on our Digital Apprenticeship Service (DAS) account and is aligned with the Government definition of an apprenticeship.

Willmott Dixon pledge that at least five percent of our workforce will be in formalised apprenticeships, be sponsored students or on graduate development schemes. Our investment in upskilling saw Willmott Dixon awarded Platinum by the 5% Club in its 2024 – 2025 Employer Audit, recognising that over 10% of our team are in hands-on ‘earn and learn’ schemes compared to 6.7% in 2023.

Alongside this, we continued to run other events to attract young people into the industry, such as Career Advisor Days. We continue to sponsor the Construction News Inspire Me programme.

We have been signatories of the Care Leaver Covenant since 2019. We are also signatories of the Armed Forces Covenant and hold their silver award supporting the Defence Employer Recognition Scheme.   

Investing in our people   

Our people are our greatest asset, and we go to great lengths to provide a working environment which sustains a challenged and content workforce.

In 2024, Willmott Dixon Construction was awarded the Platinum Investors in People (IIP) status. This places us in the top two percent, coming 29 out of 1,774, within a bracket of companies who employ the same number of people.

This is a wonderful reflection of how people feel about working for our company, with only seven percent of eligible organisations achieving the platinum standard. One great bit of feedback was that 93% of our people think that we have a positive impact on society – our purpose beyond profit approach.

We believe that providing individuals with opportunity for personal growth is essential to their wellbeing. Our shift to agile working led us to creating learning resources to help our people understand how to work and lead virtually.

In 2024, 70% of our learning was available online through our virtual Willmott Dixon University that hosts courses, e-learning modules, videos and podcasts, providing people with learning they need as when they need it.

We invested £2.23m into our people’s learning and development in 2024. The average spend on training totalled £1,148.75 per employee.

Total amount spent on learning and development   

The Willmott Dixon University (WDU) is continually developed, linking learning resources directly to job profiles and offering more options for people to learn in a way that suits them - whether it’s a 9-minute online module, a deep-dive course, a 1:1 coaching session or a leadership programme.

Our people are taking advantage of the opportunities to get their learning exactly when they need it with our ’15 minutes or less’ resources accessed over 5,000 times to date and, in our business-wide survey in 2024, 94% said they have access to the learning they need to succeed.

In 2024, the WDU was also shortlisted for a ‘Training Excellence’ Award at the Construction News Awards with the judges commenting that the system demonstrated the business’ “commitment to professional and personal development, providing the best learning experience with clear pathways for progression.”

A key part of the WDU, the School of Coaching (SOC) is an innovative online portal where all our people can find a free coach to help them in their career development. We currently have 27 coaches in the SOC who all work for Willmott Dixon, giving up their time and using their skills to support their colleagues. This peer-to-peer learning approach has established a new way for our people to learn from one another beyond the training room and get tailored support for their career development.

One participant said: “My coach challenged me with thought provoking questions. This made me think outside my usual answers and gave me confidence for having tough conversations.”

Recently, the Willmott Dixon University was updated to provide visual vertical and lateral career paths for our people, diversifying traditional career routes and encouraging upskilling and cross skilling across the business.

Supporting wellbeing

Delivering brilliant buildings for our customers is an exciting and rewarding challenge for our people, but it can be stressful and demanding and so we are very mindful of the wellbeing of our people.

The ‘All Safe Minds’ initiative means we have more than 100 trained mental health first aiders (MHFAs) across the business, plus a dedicated app and a wellbeing hour. In 2024, we set up a core network of Mental Health Leads across the country, this team is dedicated to improving and supporting mental health of our people and have introduced quarterly campaigns, for example, supporting the national Stress Awareness and Suicide Awareness campaigns, offering advice and content for our people.

We have been a proud company supporter of Lighthouse – The Construction Charity, since 2023. Lighthouse provides emotional, physical and financial wellbeing support to the construction community and their families.

By the end of 2024, we had established eight Affinity Groups across the company. These groups provide a space for our people to share experiences, covering Armed Forces, Disability, Ethnicity, LGBTQ+, Women in Operations, Neurodiversity, Menopause and Parents. Senior management sponsor and listen to the groups; for example, the Menopause Affinity Group has been influential in our decision to fund 100% of the BUPA Menopause plan for its women and 75% for partners of employees.

Finally, we have enabled our people to take more time off to support their wellbeing by implementing ‘Buying Holiday’ as a new benefit.

Supporting sustainability

To recognise our people’s loyalty, we offer a £750 Personal Learning or Sustainability Fund after five years of service. This can be used for sustainable home improvements, such as installing a water saving tap, or to gain new skills and experiences such as sky diving, singing lessons or learning new languages. Over 150 people benefitted in 2024.

Our salary sacrifice car scheme continues to grow in popularity, covering the full cost of transition to electric or hybrid motoring, including servicing, maintenance, insurance and road tax. In 2024, 19% of our people were driving an electric or plug-in-hybrid vehicle. We also offer up to £1,500 per person to help cover the cost and installation of a home charge point.