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G4S global staff survey reports "significant" increases in employee engagement

International security solutions group G4S, has today published the results of its 2011 employee survey of 625,000 staff, reporting "significant" increases in employee engagement.

The task of approaching all employees worldwide for the biennial survey, was undertaken in conjunction with 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 1% and 6% 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, said: "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."