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Press release

Global security giant reveals record employment survey results

G4S findings show increased employee engagement across its worldwide workforce

London, 28 July 2011 - Leading international security solutions group G4S, has announced the results of its 2011 employee survey – one of the biggest global surveys of its kind in the private sector.

The enormous task of approaching all 625,000 G4S employees worldwide for the biennial survey, was undertaken in conjunction with leading HR consultancy ETS. The results showed a significant increase in employee engagement where elsewhere other companies have recently recorded a downward trend.

G4S particularly excelled in the area of job enablement with 95% of employees saying they understand the procedures to do their job and 89% believing they have been well trained to do their role – an increase of one percent and six percent respectively since 2009.

A number of other key measures of employee engagement have increased since the first global employee survey in 2009, including willingness to recommend G4S as an employer and job satisfaction.

G4S is one of the world’s largest employers and faces unique challenges in engaging a diverse and disparate workforce. Many front line employees (who represent 96% of the workforce) are remotely based at customer premises such as airports, prisons or sporting events or in hostile environments such as Iraq and Afghanistan, which means they are often very hard to reach.

Sue Pym, Employee Engagement and Brand Manager at G4S, comments:

We’re delighted with the results of this year’s survey because having so many remotely-based employees with little or no access to technology is challenging but we’re committed to developing a collaborative working culture. We have introduced a number of initiatives to maximise employee engagement since 2009 including a new strategy to provide increased training to develop the skills, knowledge and capability of our front line managers. While this is a global strategy the training is based at a regional and local level to ensure that it is tailored to local needs.

Hannah Stratford, Head of Business Psychology at ETS, adds:

Companies have faced a really tough task in engaging employees over the last few years but G4S has made this a top business priority and has successfully bucked the trend seen elsewhere of decreased engagement. G4S is a great example for other large organisations to follow showing what can be achieved by prioritising employee engagement as a business objective.