Featured Client: Norman, Disney & Young

A genuine people-first engineering business with an innovative approach, not only to their projects, but to the way they structure their business and treat their people, Norman Disney & Young has a desirable culture and a reputation for working on prestige projects all over the world.

UK Regional Director, Ragz Padayachi, took some time out this week to talk us through the history, culture, projects and vision for engineering business, NDY. Having joined the business 14 years ago as a Junior Engineer in the NDY Manchester office, Ragz has worked his way up through NDY’s engineering development programme and, because of his experience, is in the perfect position to shed some light on why you should consider NDY as your next workplace.

Ragz took us through a presentation that NDY tailor and present to interviewees during the first 10 minutes of an interview to help them relax, feel at ease and provide a general overview of the company.

A brief overview

NDY are an Australian company and part of the Tetra Tech group of companies. Over 60 years ago, the business was founded in Sydney, and are now in every state across Australia with a head office in Melbourne; as well as having workplaces in New Zealand, Canada, The UK and, more recently, Dublin.

The hybrid nature of the workforce over the past few years has allowed NDY to get a post Brexit foothold in Europe with their Dublin office and the company will be looking to expand into other areas of Europe within the next 10 years – testament to the health of the business and their drive for sustainable growth in the future.

The London branch of NDY has been established for 26 years now, with 85 staff currently, and they have a huge array of prestigious projects to show for it.

Tetra Tech acquired NDY in early 2018. As NDY’s parent company, Tetra Tech have in the order of 21,000 staff globally, out of which 2500 of those are MEP consultants. The wider engineering services firm covers multiple sectors, Leading with Science in water, environment, infrastructure, resource management, energy, and international development sectors as well as the buildings sector.

“The benefits of being part of a larger group of companies is that there is a larger resource pool to draw on,” says Ragz. “We're now able to match and mark our clients globally where they have a global portfolio. We’re no longer limited to only being able to offer services in certain countries or disciplines. We now have the ability to compete with the largest, global players in the consulting world and can offer boots on the group across a much wider area.”

NDY have a broad spectrum of sectors in which they cover globally. From the London office, their specialism is predominantly commercial offices, mission critical and, more recently, Defence; with the former accounting for two fifths of their turnover, respectively.

Some of the firm's projects include:

• Millennium Bridge House
• The Angel Building
• The Whitechapel Building
• Virtus London Datacentres
• The Ned
• Westfield Stratford
• Queen Mary’s University – Life Sciences Labs

In the in London office, aside from the core mechanical, electrical and public health engineering capabilities, they also have core services in Sustainability & Low Carbon Consultancy, Fire Engineering and Digital consultancy & Smart Buildings and more recently, Commissioning Management consultancy. They then draw on their global resources for other disciplines when needed.

Global Experience

NDY encourage their staff to gain experience from their other offices and ensure there are opportunities to rotate staff between bases. Typically, NDY people from Australia will come to the UK on a 5 year VISA and work here; whilst there are also opportunities the other way around.

“One of my guys from Manchester put his hand up and said he wanted to move to Australia with his partner. At the time, he was commercial offices and interiors, so we rotated him over the next 2 years into different disciplines so that when the time came for him to join the team in Australia, he had more strings to his bow and would be more prepared, more versatile and utilised at maximum capacity when he touched down in Australia,” explained Ragz.

“We've got a really good progression plan from graduates all the way through to grad plus 4. Our Graduate Programme produces some really high calibre individuals, and it means that we can send them around to other offices with confidence.”

Ragz continued to explain how the offices are all very well connected and how well this works when there is a resource shortage on projects. The relationship between offices provides the opportunity to get overnight assistance where it’s needed, at a standard that NDY clients have come to expect. This resilience means that their teams are better resourced, not overworked and therefore happier.

The importance of values

The core of NDY’s drive for their recruitment and for their existing people is their values. Ragz says, “We hold our values really dear and as a focus on collaboration and our people first approach. We strive to keep these really high on the agenda to ensure we attract the people that will blend really well into our culture.”

NDY organise individual catchups for their people and their line managers every 8 weeks. During this discussion, values is high on the agenda; as well as revisiting personal and team goals, progress and support towards them.

“Our people get a lot out of these 8 week catchups and so does the business. During the course of lockdown particularly, any personal challenges were exacerbated, and we knew that everyone working in their respective homes meant that we’d be less connected. Luckily, this catchup programme had already been running for 5 years, so there was already a natural catchup routine, so we just stepped that up to a daily 15 minute chat to bring the team together,” says Ragz.

“Even now with a hybrid approach, the danger of only ever meeting people on a Teams call and just talking about projects is that you don’t develop deeper relationships or get to know the depth behind people, what their drivers are or what challenges they’re facing. It’s important that we provide a space that offers that sense of togetherness and human interaction.”

The purpose that drives NDY

NDY places importance on reinforcing their purpose regularly as well as their values. As a global business, their purpose is simply ‘Making Spaces Work’.

Ragz says, “We collaborate with the architect. We contribute to the vision, look and feel of a building or development, but our primary purpose is that we bring the life and functionality to that space and make the space work. It’s a great purpose and I think it’s what gets us out of bed in the morning.”

In making spaces work, sustainability must be considered and NDY are proud to have a very strong sustainability offering. Net zero carbon is a key area of focus for the business and has been for over20 years. Ragz told us of how they’re in a prime position to support clients with their cross-portfolio strategies for net zero carbon and driving towards 2030 targets; and whilst there is no silver bullet of how to solve the issues on every project, it’s more about the partnership and the journey that is taken together.

When we questioned NDY’s Revit training capability, Ragz told us how there is absolutely training available and went on to discuss their unique business structure that allows their engineers to perform at their best.

“There is a danger that a design engineering consultant gets drawn in to modelling and spending all their time within the model drawing things up, but we’re consultants. The magic happens in the room with the Architect. If we’re locked behind a screen we’re missing the interaction part that makes good consultancy” says Ragz.

“We have a local BIM consultant that coordinates a pool of outsourced partners. We’ve flown them over for a couple of weeks at a time, doing some training and localization, meet the team etc…so whilst they’re outsourced partners, they’re very much part of the London team.”

This balanced approach and motivation for efficiency has also led NDY to provide Technical Project Assistance on each project to complete administrative tasks and alleviate that burden for the engineers.

Ragz says, “Sending our engineers to a meeting, fresh minded, knowing that they don’t have to do loads of admin when they return back to their workplace is key to making sure that collaboration is optimised. Overstretched engineers because of too much administrative work isn’t going to see them at their full potential and therefore, it’s not maximizing their engineering ability to Make Spaces Work.”

Breeding a positive culture

NDY are obviously very passionate about looking after their people first and ensuring that their staff maximize their career potential within the business. Alongside that, the internal culture is driven largely from the top down with the CEO, Stuart Fowler, driving initiatives for recognition, diversity and inclusion.

Every week they issue staff recognition awards and talk about little wins among the team to pump up morale. There are also other initiatives in place such an internal and external CPD, interdisciplinary training and a strong mentorship programme when working towards becoming a chartered engineer.

The business has a very active Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) committee who are responsible for driving diversity and inclusion throughout the business, including social events. This year the firm have 50 tickets to London Pride and will be marching together in the Pride parade.

The London team are very sociable, getting together at weekends, annual golf days and annual weekends away which have included hiking on Snowdonia, rafting and canoeing; and their lawn bowls annual event.

A lot of importance is placed on togetherness now that the company operates under a hybrid approach, with people working 100% flexibly between the office and their home workspaces, choosing when and where they work from, to best delivery their client and team needs.

Progression of their staff is also a huge focus, and one of their recent initiatives sees a semi-retired Director chairing a design direction committee once a week. This gives engineers the opportunity to sanity check their ideas, bounce new ideas around, and it gives more junior employees the opportunity to dial in, listen and harness the experience of the company’s most senior operatives.

“It’s another way of bridging that gap between home and office working. Graduates and juniors can still overhear the conversations that might have previously taken place in an office environment, just by dialling in to a virtual space” says Ragz.

We're sure you'll agree that NDY put their people first.

To find out about opportunities at NDY, get in touch.