At Oxford Instruments, our employees are fundamental to our business success. We continually invest in our people, developing the capabilities that we will need to succeed over the longer term. We are committed to being the Company where the best in our sector want to work. We strive to offer the opportunities that will attract, motivate and retain talented employees, enabling them to give their best.

Our people vision is to be proud to be recognised as the leaders in what we do and for the difference we make in the world. Our aim is to retain, attract and enable the best people to perform, creating an inclusive environment and culture, where difference is valued and people are recognised for what they deliver and bring to the team.

To improve the quality, speed and predictability of our people-related decisions, we are investing in a leading cloud-based Human Resources Information System. This will provide significant advantages in terms of how we operate across the business and provide an opportunity to standardise, simplify and automate many of our key people-related processes. The system will provide managers with key metrics and employees will be able to carry out personal transactions, which will deliver efficiencies across the business.

Training and development

To ensure we can deliver our long‑term growth plans, each business has undertaken a capability review. This has allowed them to develop a strategically aligned capability plan, which will ensure that we have the resources required to grow the businesses over the longer term.

A key element of developing capability is our ability to identify key talent. To support this, our talent management activities are moving into a new phase. We are focusing on ensuring that those within our Group that are ready to take on a more complex or higher level role have the opportunities and support to reach their potential. We also continue to make strides in relation to strengthening our succession planning through identifying credible successors for each of our key leadership and technical expert positions.

Our Talent Framework outlines the behaviours and skills that employees should have to be successful at Oxford Instruments. We use this insight to develop our Oxford Instruments Academy portfolio to offer a range of relevant training courses, providing our employees with programmes that can help build their capability and careers. Our flagship Management Development Programme (“MDP”) covers many of the skills needed to be a successful manager in Oxford Instruments. We see the positive impact that the MDP has on our employees, with 99% of participants recommending it to a colleague and 97% reporting a positive impact on their performance. ogress.

To further support our technologists and engineers to deliver innovative products and solutions that continually meet and exceed our customers’ expectations, we have introduced a Technical Development Programme. This programme integrates with our technical career ladder, offering technical employees a clear career path within Oxford Instruments, without the need to take on people management roles. This enables us to attract and retain the best engineers and scientists.

We offer Industrial Post Doctoral placements to high‑calibre researchers providing them with the opportunity to experience a role in industry. In many cases these individuals have decided to join us on a permanent basis, helping to ensure that our technical skill base remains at the cutting edge.

Our Early Career Programme continues to introduce high potential candidates to the business. We have adjusted the hiring cycle to better align with the academic cycle to support our aim of attracting the best candidates.

Communication

We are focused on building our communication approaches to ensure that all employees across the Group understand our strategy and how the business is performing. We make extensive use of the intranet and recordings of key presentations which are made available to the Company.

Many of our businesses hold “Espresso” meetings, short informal presentations over coffee or lunch, where topics of interest can be discussed. Examples of these presentations include a focus on new products and understanding our strategy.