That means they have lives outside their time with us: lives that deserve attention, respect, and support. Life and work have to be in balance.
Those lives sometimes make unusual demands, so we offer competitive holidays, paid time off, disability and leave benefits to help employees through all life events. In the case of one particular happy event, we also provide childcare support - we are a family-owned firm, after all.
We are also committed to employees' mental wellbeing, offering help with challenges ranging from finding child/elder care to coping with stress, relationship issues, or current events. Our innovative employee assistance partner is there to guide employees and their families to the right care at the right time.
And we're taking a careful look at what our physical business environment looks like, reimagining many of our facilities as collaborative working spaces. We're following an activity-based model: creating spaces for the specific working needs of real people.
We recognize, too, that the way people work has changed in recent years. Technology has made new patterns of work possible and, where they're genuinely feasible, we see no reason not to consider them. We are not a remote company, and we do value the time our people spend working face to face - but flexible working, and a robust system to facilitate it, are now part of our way of doing business.
We call our approach 'smart working' - which is appropriate; after all, our people are smart people.