A Great Place to Work

NATS people are professional, committed and proud of the roles they undertake at work and in our society.

In the period since NATS became a private company in 2001, they have taken part in a transformational journey from a public sector heritage company to today’s flexible, responsive and commercially orientated business.

Building upon this foundation, we want to provide a working environment that engages, motivates, supports and develops our workforce, so that they continue to produce unrivalled performance that contributes to NATS’ success.

Clearly, competitive pay and benefits, career development and equal opportunities are all fundamental to attracting, retaining and supporting employees. However, it is vital that we continue to improve how we work together and develop our people so that we remain a high performing company. Key to this are:

• Engagement – ensuring effective leadership, management development and employee communication and engagement. Employee feedback and benchmarking is used to identify our strengths as a company and also highlight key focus areas for improvement.
• Flexibility – balancing the needs of our business with the lifestyle choices of our people in order to provide a flexible and responsive workforce
• Focused development – identifying talent and developing career paths to ensure we have the right people, with the right training and skills to support our ambitions
• Motivated and mobile – people are able to thrive within our evolving business, are highly motivated and recognise the part they play in our continued success, and welcome the opportunity to deploy to the various parts of NATS’ business
• Encouraging greater diversity – which enables us to benefit from a wider cultural pool of talent
• An appropriate Human Resources infrastructure – to support our people as they contribute to delivering our targets and outcomes
• Positive and constructive Employee Relations – working together through constructive dialogue and partnership in addressing the challenges going forward.

Key Achievements 2013/14

Here is a snapshot of our achievements over the past year:

• As NATS business landscape undergoes significant change, driven by tighter regulatory conditions, more demanding market pressures on our costs and continued international growth opportunities, the need for excellent leadership and management skills to enable, defend and grow the business has become ever more critical. Following a review of NATS ‘bench strength’, a new NATS development programme called PATH was developed to support our corporate succession strategy and embed a robust talent capability framework across all areas of the business. This is a 5-tiered development framework and caters for all levels and roles within the organisation. The approach has transformed talent management, and will make the business healthier, more competitive and better able to fulfil its strategic objectives and commitments to customers and shareholders.
• A new system called Metis was implemented bringing together employee performance management, and training and development learning capabilities. Metis, an integrated talent management system (ITMS), offers NATS the opportunity to create robust succession planning, career development and the provision of real-time, on-demand information and reporting to support decision-making. This directly supports the goal that all NATS employees have a clear development framework against which their careers can be developed and opportunities identified.
• In April 2013, NATS launched Total Reward Statements, helping employees understand the true value of their pay and benefits package, all in one place. The implementation of Total Rewards statements followed feedback from employees who indicated that they wanted to receive more information about their total reward package. Based on individualised statements, the provision of this new information aims to increase employee engagement and raise awareness of the benefits of being a NATS employee.
• Viewpoint, was launched to gather employee’s views, suggestions and comments across a wide range of topics to get a full measure of how employees feel about working in the company. As NATS continues to grow and evolve it is increasingly important to understand what matters to our employees and drives the business.
• Reward Gateway continued to deliver increased employee benefit – a shopping discount platform allowing employees access to shopping discounts has been taken up by over 85% of employees and delivered over £450,000 in savings cumulatively since launch in November 2011 – £254k within the financial year, which marks a significant increase on the £140K in the preceding year.
• NATS benefits strategy continues to support our environmental objectives; for example, to support sustainable travel options NATS run initiatives such as salary sacrifice for bicycles and buses, car sharing, a low emissions car scheme and provides access to season ticket loans.