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Press release

G4S appoints ETS to develop global employee survey

Security Giant's Staff Survey to be one of the world's biggest-ever, spanning over 150 businesses and more than 625,000 employees

London, 7 February 2011 - The world's leading international security solutions group G4S has appointed ETS, the UK's top provider of bespoke HR software and consultancy, to develop its global employee engagement survey.

G4S is the second-largest global private sector employer, with over 625,000 staff and operations across 150 businesses in over 120 countries. G4S faces some unique challenges in developing its employee survey and engaging its employees. This is due in part to the fact that many of its front line employees are remotely based at customer premises such as airports, prisons or sporting events or in volatile and high-risk areas such as Iraq and Pakistan, which means they are often very hard to reach, any may have no access to email or the internet.

The survey - which will offer the option of paper-based or online completion - will take place in February - April 2011 and will be available in a number of languages.

Jenni Myles, Director of Employee Engagement and HR at G4S, comments:

As an organisation, we are committed to creating a collaborative culture and maximising employee engagement. But with many of our employees remotely based and working in high-risk areas, engaging with them is a unique challenge. For our survey we therefore need to adopt a very simple methodology, allowing us to focus on the areas that really matter to our employees and business, but with the addition of sophisticated reporting and benchmarking tools. We believe that this will best equip us to identify and act upon engagement levels and trends both locally and globally and encourage meaningful dialogue with our employees.

G4S has provided all of its countries and businesses with a complete toolkit of information and marketing communication materials. And the bespoke system, which enables each country to administer the survey independently of other territories, includes a real-time reporting tool for administrators, meaning they can check on response rates, report on results and examine trends before surveys have closed. The automated system also generates a PDF country report showing how the results map against G4S's own employee engagement model.

Myles continues:

We're really pleased to have appointed ETS for this project - it quickly became clear that ETS understood exactly what we wanted to achieve and crucially, were able to take our brief and provide us with insightful questionnaire advice and a superior survey and analysis tool, which really matched up to our requirements.

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

We're excited to be working with G4S to develop their global employee survey. G4S already had a great starting point with a strong set of questions they'd used previously and we have applied our knowledge to meet their brief and develop an entirely bespoke 'ideal world' solution for them. They survey tool created offers in-depth reporting of data, allowing identification of trends and the capacity to compare results with historical data.