Our People Transforming our business responsibly

The commitment and dedication of our staff is vital to achieving our vision. We pledged to transform Camelot into a leaner and more efficient company as part of our successful bid for the third Licence. Making sure our people felt motivated, fully informed and well supported throughout these changes remained a priority in 2009/10.

We believe it is important for staff to understand how our values work in practice so we have defined behaviours that embed these values into our day-to-day operations. Our six behaviours are:

• Creative: Being imaginative, forward thinking and innovative in the way we approach our work.
• Empowering: Allowing our people to deliver their objectives within a framework that encourages individualism and independence.
• Ownership: Understanding the vision and goals of Camelot and recognising the part we all have to play in making them happen.
• Partnership: Working with each other, our customers and all of our stakeholders to maximise returns to the Good Causes in a socially responsible way.
• Passionate: Showing we care for the company and its aims in everything we do.
• Accountable: Being efficient, cost-conscious and clear about the consequences of our actions.

We reported last year how we changed these behaviours in order to reflect the transformation we started of our business. These behaviours have now been fully incorporated into our new performance management systems.

Transforming our business

To help win our third Licence we committed to reducing our operating costs from around 5% to roughly 4% of our revenue. This has involved some difficult decisions, as we restructured our business to make it more efficient and cost-effective. Although we achieved significant savings by introducing new technology, renegotiating leases and supplier agreements, we also needed to make redundancies to reduce operating costs.

We worked hard to minimise disruption, keep our people motivated and provide a stable working environment throughout the transformation of our business. We put measures in place to communicate openly and consistently with our people about the changes taking place, to treat them fairly and to support those directly affected.

We completed phase one of Transformation – a 90-day consultation with employees affected by the changes – in June 2009. September 2009 saw the start of phase two, which focused on continuous improvement in the company's core processes. This work identified several areas of our business that would benefit from restructuring and a second 30-day consultation period starting in September 2009. We also made changes to certain employee benefits, such as bonuses, company car and fuel card entitlements.

Supporting affected employees

We worked hard to ensure employees at risk of losing their job were fully informed and to keep any stress they experienced to a minimum. We produced comprehensive guidelines to explain the consultation process to affected employees, and made these available on a specially created transformation section of our intranet. This included a facility for employees to ask questions about the process and for senior managers to respond.

Our Staff Forum, the body that represents our employees, has worked closely with the Human Resources team to help ensure affected employees are treated fairly and answer questions about the consultation process. Employees could also contact the HR team directly with queries using a dedicated transformation email address.

We provided our employees with help to find new work, including career counselling which could be provided in person, online or on the telephone. The service offered objective and professional support, as well as advice on career management and job-search techniques.