Mace celebrates a decade in Building's Good Employer Guide

Mace has placed in Building Magazine’s Good Employer Guide 2016 for the 10th year running, which celebrates the top 50 firms to work for across the UK construction industry.

The Good Employer Guide assesses companies based on employee satisfaction ratings, benefit packages and schemes. A key theme of this year’s guide is the increasing effort by companies to appeal to more diverse and often under-represented groups. With the threat of an ever widening skills gap, it’s more important than ever to look at training and attracting new talent as well as keeping current and experienced staff.

We are proud to have a high number of women at Mace with women making up 40% of 2016’s graduate intake. We’re also working with the Major Projects Association on their gender diversity work to share best practice. In line with this, Mace’s first cohort of 132 women from the company’s Women of the Future programme recently graduated, with the second group due to start next year.

We also continue to expand our other development programmes: building on the success of our Developing Success and Developing our Future programmes, this year we held the first Programme Management of the Future training, run in partnership with Cranfield University.

In addition to our successful placement in Building’s Good Employer Guide, as an industry leader in graduate and undergraduate employment, for the third year in a row Mace has been voted as the Top Company for Graduates to Work for in Civil Engineering and Construction by TheJobCrowd.com and this year, for the first time, Mace was ranked as one of Rate My Placement’s top 100 undergraduate employers – based on feedback from students on undergraduate placements. There are currently 144 graduates enrolled on the Mace Graduate Development Programme and 22 students on a 12 month industrial placement to help them gain experience in the workplace. Mace is currently working to recruit 108 graduates and undergraduates, both in the UK and internationally, to join in 2017.

At Mace we also recognise the importance of employee wellbeing both physically and mentally. We have recruited 80 mental health champions from across the business who are helping to reduce the stigma associated with mental health and drive positive, healthy behaviours.

To support a healthy work-life balance, in addition to annual leave entitlement of up to 27 days, all Mace employees are entitled to two Mace Days, which give two additional days off per year at short notice. This gives employees the opportunity to wait for home deliveries or attend their children’s sports days. Remote access portals and company laptops and phones are also provided to support flexible working.

Our charity and volunteering work has also gone from strength to strength, with support from our independently run charity, the Mace Foundation, people across the business ran, cycled, swam, danced and sky-dived to raise money for our chosen charity partners. In addition, Mace continued its commitment to donate 1% of annual net profit to the Foundation. We saw a 32% increase in the amount donated to charities via the Foundation rising to over £522,000.

Tracey Locke, Director of Mace People said: “We have always put a lot of time, effort and resource into our people, from a sourcing, training and wellbeing point of view but this year we have gone above and beyond. This is welcome recognition and 10 years as a top employer in the industry confirms the great work we are doing.”