RLB Rider Levett Bucknall
| Benchmark Criteria | Scores |
|---|---|
| Pay & Benefits | 78.54% |
| Career & Training | 76.45% |
| Knowledge Management | 100.00% |
| Employee Relations | 89.48% |
| Diversity | 46.91% |
| Leadership | 78.46% |
| CSR | 97.57% |
| Environmental Sustainability | 100.00% |
| Total Average | 83.42% |
Company Profile
Intro
Rider Levett Bucknall UK (RLB) is a medium-sized professional firm specialising in project management, quantity surveying and building surveying, whose client list includes Tesco, the Ministry of Defence, Royal Mail, major banks, housing associations, government departments and local authorities. The firm has around 360 employees and seven main offices in Birmingham, Bristol, London, Manchester, Sheffield, the Thames Valley and Welwyn Garden City. Wholly owned by its staff, RLB is now part of an international alliance with partners in Australasia and the Pacific Rim. Turnover and pre-tax profit for 2006-7 were £25.1m and £2.1m respectively, up from £20m and £1.2m in 2005-6.
Executive summary
RLB was formed in June 2007 as a tripartite alliance between Bucknall Austin, a British project management and surveying firm, Rider Hunt, Australia's largest quantity surveyor with interests throughout Australasia and in the USA, and Levett & Bailey, the largest quantity surveyor in Hong Kong which also operates in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Macau. The three companies remain independent but now work as a team, sharing expertise and clients across six continents, with expansion plans in the booming economies of China, India, Africa and South America. RLB claims to be the world's third largest quantity surveying and project management practice.
For the UK company the alliance marks the high point in a 60-year rollercoaster ride that has embraced a stock market listing and delisting, rapid growth, diversification, near-collapse, receivership, and rebirth through a management buyout early in 2003. "The alliance is all about an exchange of global clients and establishing an international brand," says operations director, Ann Bentley. "We were already well known in our own industry but we weren't big enough to be really competitive. The alliance has given us critical mass and we're aiming to increase our headcount to around 500 in the next two or three years."
What you get
RLB aims to pay top-quartile salaries for its sector and commissions an annual peer review to benchmark this. There are six grades with broad salary bands, but individuals' remuneration is effectively performance-based. Typical graduate starting salaries are £24K, rising to £30K on qualification, £40K five years later and upwards of £50K for partners plus exceptional benefits. There are two bonus schemes, one paying a few per cent of salary to nearly everyone, the other offering up to 25% to a high-performing few.
"We love our flexible benefits programme and we're always trying to add to it," says the firm's HR manager, Hilary Richardson. Staff can add or subtract five days from the standard 25-day holiday allowance, vary their working hours and take various tax-efficient, salary-sacrifice options such as child care vouchers, season ticket loans, private health and dental cover and cycle purchase. Other benefits include discounted air travel, spectacles and AA membership (that's the Automobile Association, not Alcoholics Anonymous). The firm gives maternity and paternity benefits above the legal minimum, an employee assistance programme for staff and their immediate families, private health insurance guaranteeing 75% of salary during long-term sickness, and life insurance of four years' salary if in the pension scheme, one year's salary if not. There is a car allowance for most staff and a company car scheme is being re-introduced on a pilot basis.
Developing yourself
RLB works closely with schools and colleges to encourage young people into the construction industry, and it recruits about 10 school leavers a year as well as providing work experience placements for secretarial trainees and school pupils. "We get very good recruits, and after five years with us they'll have a degree and professional qualifications which we've paid for," says Richardson. The firm also recruits about 15 graduates a year - half of them from non-construction disciplines - seeing them through to professional qualification. It offers summer placements and sponsorship for good undergraduate candidates. "We'll do anything to get the best people," says Richardson. Once in, each graduate gets an individual training and development plan.
Around half of appointments are internal promotions (a lot considering the firm's rapid growth) but promotion is entirely related to performance and potential. "There's a significant drive to lift the lid and allow people to move up," says Richardson. Technical excellence is also prized, however, and nobody has to manage a large team to earn respect and a good salary. Annual staff turnover is about 10% but people often return.
Training is centrally co-ordinated, with an intranet-based "academy" and a continuous professional development representative in each regional office. The firm is placing increasing emphasis on "cascade training": senior staff passing on knowledge and expertise to their juniors. "We recognised a gap," explains Richardson. "We were using a lot of external and management development training but we weren't using the assets we had on our own doorstep."
As well as surveying and project management qualifications, staff can take qualifications in accountancy, marketing, HR, IT, plus MBAs and MScs. Formal mentoring is restricted to trainees but all managers are being taught coaching and motivation skills as part of a change management programme developed in conjunction with Cranfield University.
Daily work
Like many companies, RLB has developed a balanced scorecard to encapsulate its priorities. Unlike most companies, this places as much emphasis on people as it does on customers, technical excellence and profit. "We cope well with mavericks and like to have a few in the mix," says Bentley. "We're a pretty 'accepting' culture with a wide range of outlooks, aspirations and values, and we're very sociable."
RLB is so proud of its culture that it hired an external facilitator to analyse it and devise ways in which aspects of it can be taught to new recruits - for example the importance of giving colleagues honest feedback. "We're quite demanding and becoming increasingly so," Bentley says. "But we're also appreciative: we don't take without expecting to pay back." Innovation is encouraged and staff must be robust and open to challenge.
"People are staggered at how open we are," says Bentley. This can range from accessing management accounts and board meeting minutes to peer reviews of salaries. Offices are open-plan and senior managers are accessible. Relatively junior people have high levels of autonomy - with appropriate supervision - and may be spending billions of pounds of clients' money.
Surveying and project management are varied disciplines, ranging from the highly theoretical to "hard hat" work on-site. "We're very flexible and output-based," says Bentley. "The good thing about this business is that you can adapt it to the way you want to work." The less good thing is the frequent need to travel (70% of staff are office-based but may spend half their time away from it) and some long hours, especially in summer. Ad-hoc it is often possible to arrange working hours to fit in with other commitments as long as the project does not suffer, and part-time working and job-sharing are supported wherever practicable. The alliance with Rider Hunt and Levett & Bailey has opened up opportunities to travel to the Far East, Australasia and the USA.
What's different
RLB believes innovation is the key to competitive advantage. Professionally, the firm's biggest innovation is a "four-dimensional" cost model which takes account of running costs over time as well as construction issues, enabling clients to model many different options before the first stone is laid. Unexpected changes can bring real benefits, such as installing fewer doors to reduce security costs or trading cheaper construction for better insulation. The model also includes tax efficiency to maximise capital allowances, and sustainability factors such as calculating carbon footprints.
The firm takes an unusually collaborative approach with clients, favouring flexible contracts and bringing clients together in partnership to make more projects viable. There is an annual research and development budget of more than £100,000 and an innovation forum to consider new ideas. Digital dictation for on-site reports and a "paperless office" to process correspondence are also being trialled.
Some of RLB's internal processes are equally forward-looking. It was an early adopter of “SMART” pensions (see above) and its willingness to recruit school leavers and graduates from non-construction disciplines puts it ahead of competitors. Graduates in sociology, economics and even English have been successfully recruited, thanks to a specially-developed MSc conversion course. "Their ability and enthusiasm are phenomenal," says Bentley. "It costs us a few more grand to train them, but who cares if it means we get the cream?"
Corporate citizenship
Construction remains predominantly a white, male industry but RLB is working hard on diversity. With women accounting for nearly a third of staff and one of six directors, the firm is above the industry average, especially since the female director (Bentley) is a professional engineer. Ethnic minority representation has almost doubled in the last year to 7% and RLB takes advice from the charity Scope on recruiting disabled people. The age range is broad (18-69), although the average is falling and is now mid-to-late thirties.
The firm gives some cash to good causes, such as homeless charity Land Aid and a Bristol cancer charity, and encourages payroll giving by staff, but it prefers to make gifts in kind. It works extensively in schools through organisations such as the Salford Business Education Partnership and Sandwell Council in Birmingham, with staff visiting primary and secondary schools to give kids a hands-on impression of how rewarding a career in construction can be. RLB allows staff up to a week's paid leave for voluntary work, gives free professional advice to charitable organisations through Business in the Community and is involved with the Birmingham Foundation which gives direct support to community entrepreneurs. A dozen senior staff are qualified external assessors for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.
Governance
RLB has the quality standard ISO 9001, under which it has registered all its internal processes, and recently gained Investor in People certification. Compliance issues are handled at director level and the firm is particularly stringent on health and safety. Unusually for its size it has a full-time registered safety practitioner, who audits all premises every three months (the legal minimum is two years), and it has a very active health and safety training programme with every recruit gaining the Construction Skills Certification Scheme card in health and safety. In 2007 the firm won the Quantity Surveyor Employer of the Year Award from QS Week magazine.
Environmental footprint
While the construction industry has a vast environmental impact, professional firms like RLB have limited influence over their clients. However, the firm does what it can, notably with its 4D cost model which can "cut waste and emissions before they even start," says Bentley. It also promotes partnerships to regenerate brown-field sites and the company intranet has a personal carbon footprint calculator for staff.
Within its own operations, the firm has banned desk-side rubbish bins in favour of recycling points, uses smart light switches, low-energy bulbs and recycled paper, and regularly reminds staff about being good environmental citizens. Season ticket loans and tax-efficient bicycle purchase encourage staff to leave their cars at home and the new company car scheme takes account of sustainability and whole-life environmental costs.
