Our people are our whole business. We're proud to support them to pursue their career and ambitions. Encouraging an inclusive culture is fundamental to the way we operate at AC. We have invested substantially and implemented strategies to drive engagement and satisfaction and inspire career development, removing as many barriers that society may create as we can along the way.

So, what have we achieved over the last 12 months?

The way people want to work and live is changing, and we’ve set the foundations to ensure we have the right platforms to learn, change and adapt when we need to. In the last year, we have been making our working practices the best they’ve ever been. We have:

• Reinvigorated our flexible working policy transparently promoting how and why to use it via articles and events – from empowering working dads to inspiring women in leadership.
• Upgraded our Maternity and Family Leave Guidance policy, which aims to support employees and equip line managers, as well as adding fertility aspirations into the policy.
• Targeted our social mobility vacation scheme by increasingly diversifying job opportunities to more non-Russell group universities. 
• Invested in our recruitment utilising a social mobility tool that independently weights applicants’ achievements based on their backgrounds to inform fairer recruitment for those who’ve had underprivileged starts in life. 
• Opened accessible opportunities by launching an apprenticeship scheme in our central management team, which we intend to grow year on year. 
• Created an expanded environment to qualify by providing routes for alternative legal qualifications, funding training for 16 colleagues this year.
• Empowered our leaders through our ongoing Living Leader programme, which aims to equip those who are passionate about motivating and inspiring our people. 
• Focused on our managers - our Great Line Management programme focuses on training our managers to put our people first whilst achieving great results. Over 60% of our line managers have completed the modules. 
• Supported career development - integrated career planning sessions into six-monthly check-ins to support career paths, identify development opportunities and provide clarity on our promotions framework. 
• Promoted health and wellbeing through our Wellbeing strategy, we support health and wellbeing topics including mental health and financial matters, and run firmwide well-being days. 
• Invested in reward and remuneration from profit share to salary reviews and benefits, we’re keeping our offer competitive financially and developmentally.

All the above, combined with our work to build an intentionally inclusive culture that aims to ensure people belong and feel represented, have all had a positive impact on our workforce. 92% of our people have recently told us that this is a great place to work and our positive culture is reflected in our voluntary turnover which sits below 10% this year; we are proud of these results which compare very well to the legal sector and best UK workplaces.

Learn more

To learn more about how we've supported our people over the last 12 months, download our B Corp impact report.