Our People - opportunity, inclusion and belonging

Our people are our greatest asset. With almost 6,000 colleagues across the UK, we’re committed to creating a fair, inclusive, and supportive culture where everyone can thrive. One where every colleague feels valued, heard and empowered to deliver their best. Throughout 2025 and beyond, we’ll continue to invest in our employee offer and work hard to ensure we remain an employer of choice in the UK.

We’ll achieve this by delivering against our People Strategy, which focuses on ensuring we have the right people, at the right time, in the right place with the right skills to deliver our business strategy. Our people approach is built on four core pillars:

Creating our future workforce
Listening and acting on colleague feedback
A fair and inclusive culture
Investing in our people

Each of these pillar’s is the way we reward, recognise, attract and retain our people, enabling us to create a great environment for our people to thrive

Creating a future workforce

We remain committed to a forward-looking approach, supported by a highly capable workforce that enables us to achieve our business goals and deliver on the Group strategy.

To achieve this, we invest in development that nurtures future skills and enables us to grow our own talent, blended with attracting new skills and capabilities into the workforce. Our commitment to building skills and knowledge that positively impact local communities is clearly reflected in the success of our apprenticeship and graduate programmes.

In 2025, we recruited 127 apprentices, offering routes for school leavers and adults looking to retrain. Every apprentice has a personal mentor, tailored wellbeing support and access to development resources.

We've introduced a skills initiative designed to help employees identify and close development gaps, empowering them to shape their own career paths. It also enables managers to have more meaningful, forward-looking conversations around performance and progression.

Routes into management and leadership roles are supported by our internal management development course ‘emerge and embed’, designed to equip colleagues to move through the business to leadership positions within just a few years.

This comprehensive approach helps us to set out clear succession plans, where colleagues and the business benefit from the investment in our leaders of tomorrow.

Listening and acting on colleague feedback

Colleague voice is key to shaping the way we do things at Mears. Through our Employee Representative Team, Employee Network Groups, our accreditations, annual colleague survey feedback and MIND Workplace Wellbeing Index survey, colleague voices shape our actions and decisions.

We remain the only listed company in the housing or care sector, and one of only a handful of companies across all sectors, to have an Employee Director who represents employee voice at PLC Group Board, ensuring our Board receives full, open and honest insights into how our people are feeling and where improvements are needed.

Throughout 2025, the Employee Representative Team has been instrumental in championing the work of our ten employee networks, in driving the agenda, together with HR, to ensure appraisals work at every level and in facilitating how we engage with front line colleagues and on-board our apprentices.

We’re proud to be ranked among the Top 10 best big companies to work for by Best Companies. As a result of colleague feedback this year we’ve updated our uniforms particularly so they fit our female colleagues better, introduced a range of flexible working initiatives and are piloting a new way to digitally interact with front line colleagues.

A fair and inclusive environment

Fairness is embedded into everything we do. We hold silver accreditation for the Diversity Development Standard and MIND Wellbeing accreditation and have invested over £400,000 in pay parity over recent years to ensure equal pay for equal roles with the aim of closing salary gaps across our business. While a Gender Pay Gap does still exist across the Group (Group mean gender pay gap figure is 11.1%) we are working hard to bridge that gap and we will be looking at a range of ways we can do this throughout 2026.

We were recognised as Organisation of the Year at the UK Social Mobility Awards for our approach to advancing social mobility. We’ve worked hard to ensure inclusion runs throughout our employee lifecycle, supply chain, and wider industry partnerships. We attended one of two House of Lords oral evidence sessions on Social Mobility Policy, joining the conversation around social mobility in the workplace. We’re proud of our progress in this space and committed to continuing to make improvements to support our people to thrive.

We’ve worked hard to create a culture where people feel safe, supported and understood. From our dedicated team of over 150 Mental Health First Aiders to the brilliant Wellbeing Champions on our Asylum contract. We know the nature of our work can be challenging. That’s why it’s so important that we continue to build resilience, check in with one another, and create space for honest conversations about mental health.

We introduced two new Employee Networks this year, Women in Leadership and Women’s Health, adding to our existing thriving range of Employee Networks which include: Armed Forces Network; Diverse Network Group; Menopause Forum; Mears Men; Pride at Mears and the Women Operative Support Group.

A comprehensive training programme to re-train the entire workforce on fairness and inclusion was also rolled out this year, ensuring that every colleague feels valued and heard.

Investment in people

We are focused on ensuring that we improve the structure, consistency and access to opportunities to enable our workforce to learn and grow. To support this, we launched a new learning management system this year, part of a £290,000 three-year investment, supporting skills growth and career progression for every colleague. Our new system will help to ensure all job critical training is undertaken and recorded and will also help ensure we offer a strategic approach to learning that supports a diverse workforce offering.

Over the past few years we have improved the benefits package we offer, adding enhanced policy entitlements to support and recognise the diverse needs of our workforce including family friendly policies. We offer extended paid time off for medical appointments and have introduced life assurance, salary sacrifice and a green car scheme.

Throughout the year we ensure that we say thank you to our colleagues by offering free entry to our family fundays held at theme parks across the UK and by providing everyone with a Christmas voucher as a thank you from the Senior Leadership Team.

Our annual Amazing People Awards’ provide colleagues with the opportunity to nominate their colleagues for recognition for going above and beyond in their role. The finalists in each category are invited to the annual awards ceremony, which this year was held at The Belfry in May.

Every colleague has access to 24/7 wellbeing support and two volunteering days a year to give back to good causes they care about.

Our People

Sunday Times Best Big Companies – 10th
Social Mobility Awards – Organisation of the Year
Social Mobility Index – rank 32 Top 75
Mean gender pay gap (Group) – 11.1%
Employee turnover – 19.8%
Total number of apprentices - 348
Number of mental health first aiders - 150
Women in senior leadership - 36.3%

Our culture - The Red Thread that connects us

Over ten years ago, Mears wove its values into the fabric of the business through the Red Thread, our unique way of working that connects everything we do and everyone who works here. In 2024, we listened to colleagues from across the business, gathering data and developing a proposition to refresh the Red Thread. We reimagined these behaviours to reflect who we are today and where we want to be in the future. From this we developed four strands which capture our refreshed Red Thread behaviours and the essence of Mears today.

People – We always put people first
Purpose – We do the right thing with clear intent
Better – We take responsibility and make it better
Together – We work and achieve together

Throughout 2025, these values were embedded across our business from branding in our buildings to recruitment and onboarding through to our appraisals and our awards process.

Our Red Thread reinforces who we are now, modern, connected, and united by a shared purpose and they guide every action and decision we make.

Community impact

Our culture extends beyond our walls. Through our apprenticeship programmes, volunteering, and the Mears Foundation, we continue to invest in the communities we operate in.

Social value isn’t just a box we tick, it is at the heart of who we are and what we do. From refurbishing community hubs to supporting inclusive sports, our teams are making a real difference across the country.

As part of our social value commitment, we provide our employees with two days a year to volunteer for good causes. Through the Mears Foundation, we support a range of initiatives that help to alleviate food and digital poverty, social isolation and projects that help to keep the planet healthy.

In Milton Keynes, colleagues transformed a nursery into a wellbeing hub with help from a £10,000 Mears Foundation grant and the support of ten suppliers, together contributing over £40,000 in labour and materials.

In Leeds, a grant helped fund storage for specialist powerchair’s to be used for powerchair football for the children at Bishop Young Academy.

Through our partnership with FareShare, we’ve helped deliver over 740,000 meals to people facing food poverty, thanks in part to our drivers who volunteered their time to deliver food parcels.

The Foundation also provide two grants:

Healthy Place, Healthy Planet supports access to green spaces and environmental wellbeing in local communities
Inclusion Through Sport helps young people access sports opportunities that foster teamwork, confidence, and a positive outlet

Through our colleagues, communities, and supply chain partners, we create lasting social value that goes far beyond our contracts. Every service we deliver and every partnership we build is an opportunity to make a positive difference, strengthening local economies, supporting skills and employment, and helping communities thrive.

Social value