Our Culture
Without our 1,400 unique individuals all working together as one team every day, we couldn’t do what we do. We constantly invest in our people, support them personally and professionally, whilst injecting a bit of fun. Everyone has their own unique set of skills and experience to offer and we have lots of amazing opportunities for you - whether you’re passionate about customers, environment, improving infrastructure, or water.
Wellbeing at Affinity Water
None of us are at our best unless we’re healthy and happy. The jobs we do are important, but that should never stop us from enjoying our lives at work and at home.
Our Wellbeing Committee is here to put people’s wellbeing first, with an established programme to support every team at Affinity Water.
We hold company-wide health and wellbeing webinars on a range of topics including Seasonal Affective Disorder, resilience, mental health, sleep, stress and finding your work-life balance.
We also partner with established charities to raise awareness about health issues.
We hosted a Wellbeing Fortnight, where we held mindfulness sessions, online exercise classes and a Walk/Run/Cycle Our Chalkstream Challenge.
Our internal network of qualified Mental Health First Aiders understand how to listen to an individual’s challenges and needs. They can offer a friendly ear if our employees need someone to talk to, but can also give advice about looking after your emotional and mental health.
Hear from our wellbeing committee
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I joined the committee so I could help to make our workplace a supportive one, for everyone through implementing initiatives that may help people in ways perhaps we thought work couldn’t. I also joined as my son was born with a condition and I often wonder how that will be managed at work when he is an adult. The NHS and school have done a great job thus far and I hope by the time he is in work, that companies like Affinity Water will be in an even better place at supporting people than they are now.
David Fosci
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I joined the wellbeing committee to champion my passion, financial wellbeing. With high inflation, cost of living, covid, Ukraine and more recently Israel-Palestine conflicts have had a massive impact on our financial wellbeing. I felt strongly about opening doors to help our colleagues stay informed and happy that we are doing everything we can to support them when they need it most
Kim Sektnan
Equality, diversion and inclusion
We have a duty to treat everyone with fairness and respect
Supplying water to our customers is an essential public service, so we have a duty to treat everyone with fairness and respect. We must also be accessible and remain responsive to different needs.
We need to attract, retain, and develop talented people across our diverse communities to help us build trust and better serve our diverse customers.
With diversity comes a breadth of knowledge, insights, and different perspectives, which we need to help us innovate and meet the big challenges we face. To get the benefits of diversity, we need to be inclusive and show we care. When people feel valued and accepted for who they are, they feel safe sharing ideas and voicing concerns, and confident taking on challenges and learning from feedback. This is essential to achieving high performance and safety at work.
Our Diversity and Inclusion strategy explains why it matters to us as a business and to our people, and how it can help us deliver our purpose and vision.
What our people think
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Keith
Chief Executive
"EDI matters to me personally because I want to create a more inclusive and fair organisational culture where everyone can contribute and participate, and where everyone feels valued and respected”
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Alice
Asset Specialist
"EDI is my passion as I believe that the best work environment is one where everyone feels valued and respected for who they are. I believe each individual has so much to offer, and the way to unleash all that potential is to encourage them to bring their whole self to work. I joined the EDI committee to make sure that I was playing my part to make Affinity Water a place where everyone feels included, and therefore can thrive."
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Rohan
Meter Reader
"Affinity Water is really committed to taking care of our wellbeing and supporting initiatives aimed at empowering its workforce. I champion neurodiversity here and the team really supports me in this. I organised a neurodiversity webinar earlier this year, and it was attended by over 80 people including several from senior management - I was impressed to find there was so much interest in the subject and an appetite for bringing neurodiversity to the forefront."
Listening to our employees
We continually listen to our employees and ask them for feedback through our quarterly ‘Tap In’ survey.
Employees score us and give anonymised feedback on how engaged they feel at work, and how well we support health and wellbeing, and diversity and inclusion.
Over 90% of employees have participated in the survey in at least one of the surveys in the previous 12 months.
We review and discuss the feedback with our people and use the valuable insights it gives us to drive improvements in our culture, at both team and company level.
Over 2023, our engagement scores have improved in every round and been above the average for the wider utilities sector. Our people score us above average for diversity and inclusion and we’re at the sector benchmark for health and well-being too.
