Empowering People

Overview

Our people remain the cornerstone of our growth strategy, driving IMI’s ambition to engineer a better world. In 2024 we’ve made significant progress in creating a culture that engages, empowers, and unites everyone at IMI. Guided by our core values – Always care, Be curious, and Create impact – we introduced a new brand, launched our refreshed Employee Value Proposition (‘EVP’), enhanced wellbeing initiatives, and deepened our commitment to learning and development, all underpinned by our sector-based structure.

Key 2025 priorities

1. Supporting growth and transformation: By aligning our sector-focused structure with our people strategy, we’re ensuring that our top talent can take on roles where they make the greatest impact. Cross-sector mobility and exposure to diverse projects are key enablers of our strategy, with many employees now working in multi-functional teams that drive our growth goals.

2. Increasing employee engagement: Employee engagement remains a cornerstone of our people strategy. Our structured approach involves regular town halls, targeted campaigns on our internal communications platform, and tools to gather and respond to feedback. In 2024, we saw a positive trend in our engagement scores in the One Big Voice survey, with 79% of employees reporting IMI as ‘a great place to work’, an improvement of two points from the previous year.

3. Enhancing employer brand: This year, we enhanced our EVP in order to help us deliver a best-in-class employee experience that supports wellbeing and development. Designed to attract and retain top talent, the EVP introduces global minimum standards alongside regionally tailored benefits. In 2025 we have the opportunity to build further on our employer brand, reinforcing IMI as an employer of choice and ensuring we are positioned to attract the best talent in the market.

Our people strategy

IMI’s people strategy is rooted in the belief that when our employees succeed, so does our business. In 2024, the shift to a sector-focused structure opened new avenues for collaboration, skill-sharing, and innovation. Our values are embedded across the business, shaping how we approach problems, connect with customers, and support one another.

Empowering our people for success

At IMI, we believe that when our employees succeed, so does our business. In 2024, we transitioned to a sector-focused structure, fostering collaboration, skill-sharing, and innovation. Our values guide our approach to problem-solving, customer connections, and mutual support.

Attracting and retaining top talent

Our growth strategy hinges on attracting and retaining high-quality talent. In 2024, we focused on building a leadership team that drives innovation and operational excellence. Our sector-focused structure enhances strategic focus and market expertise, ensuring agile responses to market needs and world-class customer service.

Our refreshed Employee Value Proposition aligns benefits and opportunities with employee needs, creating a compelling experience for new recruits and fostering engagement. Targeted campaigns have strengthened our employer brand, increasing applications for critical leadership roles.

Matching talent with opportunity

We use robust systems to track and align talent across the business. Dynamic dashboards provide real-time data on succession planning, helping leaders identify high-potential employees and match them with impactful roles. Monthly talent reviews and our sector structure promote internal mobility and development.

Leadership development

Leadership development is key to our strategy. Our flagship leadership program, in partnership with IMD Business School, has equipped 98 leaders with the expertise needed to drive growth. Our Catalyst program for high-potential talent has seen over 70% of participants achieve career progression.

Developing talent at every level

We ensure employees at all levels have the tools and opportunities to thrive. In 2024, we welcomed 27 graduates to our program, which will evolve into a Future Leaders Program in 2025. We also launched a digital learning platform to transform how employees access and engage with learning opportunities.

Culture and engagement

Strategic communication has been central to reinforcing our growth strategy, values, and vision. Initiatives like monthly updates, quarterly town halls, and our internal communications platform have driven better alignment and engagement.

Wellbeing and inclusion

Employee wellbeing is core to our culture. We introduced policies supporting mental, physical, financial, and social health. Our commitment to equality includes initiatives for women, wellbeing, health & safety, sustainability, and LGBTQIA+ awareness.

WELLBEING AND INCLUSION

Gender and Ethnicity pay gap

We are committed to creating an inclusive working environment for all, including equal pay. Our gender pay gap stands at 9.1% (mean) and 18.2% (median). We also report on our ethnicity pay gap to ensure transparency and accountability.

2023 mean gap

2023 median gap

GENDER AND ETHNICITY PAY REPORT 2024

Health and Safety

Health and safety are uncompromising priorities. Our 'Think Twice' campaign has reshaped our safety culture, leading to a 26% reduction in total incidents. In 2024, our Total Recordable Incident Frequency Rate (TRIFR) was 0.38, with no fatalities, keeping us in the top quartile of the industry. We logged 37,200 hazard reports with a 92% closure rate within 30 days, exceeding our 90% target. Six sites achieved Certified HSE Excellence, scoring over 85% within our framework.

Community action

IMI is committed to sustainability and community engagement. In 2024, employees volunteered over 9,500 hours, supporting various initiatives. Our global volunteering leave policy empowers employees to make a difference in their communities.

Culture and employee engagement

IMI Way Day

Our commitment at IMI is to inspire a truly inclusive organisation that provides multiple opportunities to grow as teams and individuals. If there’s a key element of life here that does just this – and where our values really shine through – it’s our IMI Way Day.

The IMI Way Day is a global event, which allows every IMI site and team member to come together for one day to assess and communicate our progress, talk about our purpose, celebrate how each individual can contribute to our growth.

Community engagement

The IMI Way Day enables our employees to engage in volunteering activities which contribute to our local communities. Common activities included assisting at local food banks and helping clear and tidy local parks and woodlands for local residents to enjoy, in addition to raising and making direct contributions to local charities. In 2022 over 4,000 employees volunteered a total of over 10,000 hours. We ensure that all activities align to at least one of the 17 UN SDGs.

Wellbeing

Ensuring that all employees feel valued and supported is central to our culture. Our wellbeing framework is centred around four pillars – mind, body, financial and social. We have a team of wellbeing champions around the business who assist the Head of Global Wellbeing in communicating the programme to colleagues via our internal platform, Workplace, and also to our front-line workforce through townhall sessions. Awareness days such as World Mental Health Day are embraced around the business with events being held to support the wellbeing of colleagues.

Wellbeing

Employee representation

We are committed to upholding strong relationships, and engaging regularly, with union bodies – these are represented across many of our sites. We host an annual European Communications Forum, which took place virtually, and was attended by employee representatives from all of our key European geographies.

Pay and benefits

We continue to ensure pay, benefits, and wellbeing propositions are competitive and fair. 2022 was a year of great global economic uncertainty and, in many countries, there has been a backdrop of historically very high inflation. This is expected to continue in 2023, and, with that in mind we focused our resources on those who need it most by giving higher relative pay awards to employees on the lowest incomes.

Talent and people development

Talent was an Executive priority for 2022 and we have focused on three workstreams: Talent Attraction, Visibility and Development.

Talent attraction

We are committed to attracting high quality, diverse talent, through an impactful and excellent candidate experience. We have standardised our testing and interview processes to support our hiring managers and unconscious bias training is also being rolled out to further embed inclusion and diversity best practice into our processes.

Talent visibility

We have a performance management process to emphasise career aspirations, mobility and development conversations. We encompass performance and potential, with performance ratings reflecting delivery of results in the right way and identifying talent that will help us to grow. The Talent Review process also now incorporates reviewing cross-divisional and functional succession plans and development.

Training & development

Development remains a key enabler to both engagement and retention of talent and a core part of our talent strategy. We have continued to invest in IMI Learn, our e-learning platform that is accessible to more employees globally with multi-language capability.

The Growth Hub effect

We want all our people to see and own their part in our growth. We are engaging more people from right across the business and externally through our entrepreneur network to drive our growth accelerator programme, Growth Hub.

Inclusion and Diversity

Our Inclusion and Diversity strategy continues to focus on four key areas:

1.
ENGAGEMENT

Connecting with colleagues across IMI about inclusion and diversity and embedding into business as usual processes.

2.
RESOURCING

Ensuring that both external and internal recruitment processes are inclusive.

3.
DEVELOPMENT

Unconscious bias on who is developed within IMI, and supporting the development of diverse talent.

4.
MEASUREMENT

More effectively capturing and using employee demographics, establishing external benchmarks, measuring pay gaps, as well as measuring the opinions of different employee groups through One Big Voice.

Inclusion & Diversity

Women in senior leadership

We are targeting ‘Women in Management’ as our key metric for improving gender balance in leadership at IMI. This is defined as anyone who oversees an area of responsibility involving planning, organising, leading and/or directing the responsibilities of employees. We have chosen this as our KPI because it is this population we need to target to broaden the succession pool for leadership roles. In 2022 it was 22% and our target is 25% in 2023.

Parker Review

It is five years since the publication of the first Report into the Ethnic Diversity of UK Boards in 2017 by Sir John Parker and the Parker Review Steering Committee. For FTSE 250 companies, the target is to have a person from a minority ethnic group on their Boards by December 2024. We met the requirements of the Parker Review in 2021 and have one non-executive director from an ethnic minority on our Board.

Gender pay gap*

We are committed to creating an inclusive and diverse working environment and fair treatment for all, including equal pay. Overall, our statistics remain similar to the sector in which we operate. In the UK we have around 1,000 employees and there is a 72% male, 28% female gender distribution which is fairly typical in the engineering sector. We have seen our mean and median pay gap increase slightly compared to 2021, but 2022 results still point towards longer-term sustainable improvement since we began reporting in 2017.

* Does not include Heatmiser, acquired in December 2022.

Ethnicity pay gap*

This year we began collecting data to analyse our Ethnicity Pay gap for UK employees. Currently, there is no statutory obligation for IMI to report our ethnicity pay gap results although we will publish our full Ethnicity Pay report alongside our Gender Pay report on the IMI website. Data has been voluntarily provided by c40% of all UK employees, and we have determined that IMI has a median ethnicity pay gap in 2022 of 6.4%. These results show a pattern that is seen more generally in the UK, where employees from some ethnic groups are underrepresented in roles that command higher salaries. Our efforts will be focused on how we can effectively recruit and develop employees from these under-represented groups into higher paid positions.

* Does not include Heatmiser, acquired in December 2022.

GENDER AND ETHNICITY PAY REPORT 2022

Health and Safety

Accountability

Prioritising health and safety and keeping our employees, and any individual entering our sites, safe is our number one priority. We take a proactive approach and strive to continuously improve our performance. Our Group Head of Health, Safety & Environment reports directly to the Chief Executive who has ultimate responsibility for health and safety. The Executive Committee reviews health and safety matters every month and regular reports are made to the Board.

Safety priorities

Investing in our people remains a top priority. We are committed to ensuring we have highly skilled, trained employees especially those with safety responsibilities. During 2022, where a skill gap was identified we have upskilled our supervisory, leadership and HSE professionals to recognised industry standards such as NEBOSH certificate in Health & Safety, IOSH managing safely or OSHA 30 and other regional equivalents. As a result, during the year 424 employees were trained, attaining certification in one of the standards mentioned. 18 of our 51 manufacturing sites are accredited to ISO 45001, the international standard for Health and Safety Management.

Occupational injuries and recordability

In 2022 we achieved a significant reduction of recordable accidents across the Group year over year. This included 12 Lost Time Accidents in 2022 vs 23 Lost Time Accidents in 2021. Our recordable accidents have reduced to 34 in 2022 compared to 53 in 2021. Our Total Recordable Incident Frequency Rate (TRIFR) has also improved, decreasing to 0.35 in 2022 from 0.56 in 2021. IMI remains in the top quartile of safety performance within the industry sector, however we remain committed to our ambition of an accident free workplace and HSE excellence. There were no fatalities during the year.

IMI in Action

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Featured Content

IMI in Action

Empowering People

Overview

Key 2025 priorities

Our people strategy

Empowering our people for success

Attracting and retaining top talent

Matching talent with opportunity

Leadership development

Developing talent at every level

Culture and engagement

Wellbeing and inclusion

Gender and Ethnicity pay gap

Health and Safety

Community action

Culture and employee engagement

Talent and people development

Inclusion and Diversity

Health and Safety