What’s going on within... John Doyle

Founded in 1967, John Doyle now employs an 800-strong workforce and is on target to achieve an annual turnover this year of £170m. Focusing on a family-style working culture, the company hopes to generate loyalty and long service from its staff.

How many days annual leave?
20.

Can you take them when you want?
Christmas is prescribed, but operational staff are flexible to the demands of the business.

How long is the standard working week?
37.5 hours for office staff, 44.5 hours for those operators working Saturday morning as standard.

What is the average weekly number of hours worked?
42 hours.

Incentivisation – what % of staff can earn a bonus?
Overtime is available to the 500 of our people who are hourly-paid, while for management, staff incentives fall into various categories and can pay up to 25% of salary.

What is your churn rate?
3% to 4%. I think that’s remarkably impressive. We have lots of people with us who have 15 to 20 years’ service.

Is there a good work-life balance?
John Doyle has always been a people-orientated business and has taken a paternalistic view towards its employees. It’s an attitude and a culture rather than anything written down in a procedures manual.

Is there help towards employees’ fitness?
No.

Is there a free annual eye-sight check-up?
Yes, for those working regularly on computers.

How do you ensure employees are comfortable while at their place of work?
Both offices and sites are maintained in good condition, but we have to recognise the transient nature of our work and the compromises our staff make to reflect this.

Projects can be six to 10 weeks long – we turn up, do the job, and then move on. So the environment has to be different from that inside a headquarters building.

What is John Doyle’s average days sick/year?
Two to four days.

Are private e-mails allowed/frowned upon/censored?
Allowed – providing they are not excessive. For example, an employee can book a holiday without having to hive off for an hour or more to do it elsewhere, provided it doesn’t interrupt the work-flow. We can see the amount of non-work traffic that’s going through and our people are reasonable. There’s no need to pull any of them up.

Out there in the wider world, where people are sitting at a higher boredom level, such as in a call centre, I’ve heard of cases of 20 to 30 hours a week being spent browsing on non-work sites. I don’t think any contractor would run into that sort of situation.

Is the virus checker kept busy?
Not recently, but our firewall arrangements are continually under review.

Do you have an integrated network connecting all parts of your business?
No, but this is the subject of a current IT project.

Do you have a high-speed internet connection?
Yes, all offices and sites are connected.

What proportion of employees has access to the internet?
The majority of office-based staff have access.

Are there any restrictions on internet use, for example,
restrictions on the downloading of software, or rich-media presentations?
We operate some internet blocking, and access is monitored for excessive or inappropriate use.

Do you (Julian) personally make use of the internet and, if so, what type of information do you access?
The internet is used widely for information and research, plus updates and fixes are drawn from the net.

What is your favourite website?
Google.

Do you see the internet as an aid to productivity or a hindrance?
Definitely an aid.

Do you have access to mobile devices, such as a PDA/hand-held computers or a smart phone?
We have a limited number of Blackberries and G3 cards, but the majority of our staff are single-site located and connected to the web.

Does your company make use of project collaboration tools or engage in e-procurement?
We regularly engage in various project-specific portals. We use tools such as the market leader BIW when working for Bovis, Asite when working for Stanhope, as well as 4-Projects and CadWeb.

All main contractors use a project portal for drawings now, so there is an audit trail.The format tends to be prescribed for us. It is good to hear that there is a forum now trying to standardise their compatibility.

We do not at present use e-procurement, but are looking at extending the functionality of our accounting system. Our software package is Jobmaster. We’re looking at the procurement processes at the front-end so that there is a seamless transfer of information into the accounts.

How do you see the role of mobile technology evolving?
It will become ever more sophisticated and allow greater integration with existing systems.

Where do you see future challenges?
Maintaining the balance between the basics of our business and leveraging technology developments. We don’t have the scale or need to be innovative, so we aim to follow – but hopefully not too far behind.

What success can you report?
We have a rolling programme of consolidation and improvement of our IT and have a quarterly review forum, bringing together both the commercial and IT teams, to measure and plan developments.

[Contract Journal, 1 November 2006, p10]