The strategic imperative of creating a high-performing culture informs and drives all our work in this area. This entails creating the right environment in which our employees can work to maximum effect in pursuit of our corporate vision.
We actively encourage employee initiative through successful schemes such as ‘Ideas in Action’ which enables employees to contribute to the continuous improvement of the organisation. We also aim to work in a collaborative, collegiate fashion with our employees: we try to ensure that command chains are short and we aim increasingly to encourage empowerment and accountability through our performance management process and we have made increasing efforts to ensure, via better internal communication, that our employees are fully appraised of the Company’s strategic goals and performance.
Employee feedback is important to us as it defines the quality and strength of the relationship between an employee and their organisation. In the latest employee survey we received our highest level of feedback with a response rate of 77%. Alongside the increased focus on matching resources to business requirements, we began a series of initiatives in 2008 to increase and diversify the skills of our workforce including lunchtime training sessions for managers and access to a number of internal and external training programmes through our online development resource, the Learning Network.
At the same time, we made a number of changes which will help our infrastructure to adjust quickly to changing new business volumes as the UK undergoes a period of economic turbulence. These included outsourcing [IT] application development, where we now have a more flexible resource which can be drawn upon as necessary, rather than a fixed cost. Further rigour has been applied to the procurement area so as to best manage our supply chain, and we continue to address the issues of functional duplication within the business. We continue to move the business towards products which require less capital, and towards a distribution model which relies less on the payment of upfront sales commissions to our distribution partners.
Managing an efficient and mutually beneficial supply chain is an important aspect of executing our business in a sustainable way. Legal & General regularly assesses its suppliers, ensuring that they comply with our environmental, social and ethical policies. The [Group] agrees terms and conditions for its business transactions with suppliers. Payment is made in accordance with these terms provided the supplier meets its obligations. The Company has no trade creditors. As at 31 December 2008, the average number of days of payments outstanding for the Legal & General Group of companies was 38 (2007: 32).