VALUING OUR PEOPLE
Reed Elsevier strongly believes it can gain competitive advantage by developing the talents and skills of its people through

• continuing to upgrade management by attracting and retaining the very best talent
• developing its people to the fullest potential
• building a winning culture
• communicating and sharing knowledge and experience across the business

These are key priorities and we devote significant resources to extensive programmes addressing each of them.

We continue to upgrade our management team with the appointment of Patrick Tierney as CEO of our Education division. We now have in place a high quality management with clear responsibilities and accountabilities.

We extended the Personal Development Programme (PDP) to every employee, enabling our people to develop their fullest potential through appraisal and annual objective setting. Management development is a high priority and we now conduct an Organisation and Talent Review annually. All senior management vacancies are regularly reviewed by our Management Committee to ensure that we identify our best people to fill these roles.

We further embedded a winning culture across Reed Elsevier with the engagement of all employees in the Reed Elsevier values: customer focus, valuing our people, passion for winning, innovation and boundarylessness. We monitor the progress of each business in establishing the values in their processes. Senior executives were assessed in the way they lead the values through 360° assessments.

As part of our enhanced internal communications programme we launched a global intranet, aREna, a platform for text and video news, information and group working forums for all of our staff. aREna hosts “Crispin’s Open Door” enabling staff to direct queries to our CEO, whose response is sent directly to them as well as being posted on the site.