Communicating with staff is key to making Govia companies a great place to work.
Southeastern became the first train operating company in the UK to provide a social networking tool for its 3,700 employees to share information and discuss work-related issues with colleagues. The site, named Workmate, means staff can interact with each other in the way that many of them already do with friends and family on sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Workmate has replaced Southeastern’s intranet and acts as a one stop shop for all employees to access useful documents, links to relevant sites, group forums, company policies and procedures and a live update stream. It has proved a great success amongst employees with a hundred times the numbers of visits compared to the previous intranet site. Ultimately Workmate will enable Southeastern to communicate more effectively with its customers – if a member of staff posts a question, the site is accessed and monitored by all 3,800 employees who have the power and ability to instantly respond.
We also listen to the views of our people through staff surveys. We have recently committed to undertaking an annual employee survey across all our rail franchises in order to continually identify ways to make our companies a better place to work. We plan to roll the survey out across all our companies again next year.
