Metro is the business name of the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Authority, or PTA. The Passenger Transport Executive, or PTE, is the professional body that coordinates and executes the provision of transport routes and services across West Yorkshire. It shapes the framework for a multitude of transport operators, procures services and provides a range of passenger facilities e.g. bus stations, bus stops and shelters, travel information services, including a busy call centre, ticketing schemes and concessions and subsidies. Metro has £750 million to spend on capital expenditure over the next three years. The Metro Executive employs 390 people.
Executive Summary
This is a Passenger Transport Executive with a difference. While in the public sector, it behaves like an enterprising company. It loves ‘buzz.’ It innovates. And an energetic management team is obsessed with providing value-added, quality and a positive culture for its employees. It can boast awards in abundance, regularly tops business surveys and has the most widely recognised logo in West Yorkshire.
Metro is acknowledged nationally as being in the vanguard of transport planning. Metro was named PTA of the Year three years in a row – if it was the World Cup trophy, they’d be allowed to keep it.
Metro, obviously, is financially sustainable. It is funded from Council Tax levies, Government transport investment grants, rail grants and the European Union. It also generates ‘external income’ by selling advertising space, and transport operators contribute to bus stations and information centres. Metro’s annual revenue budget is around £150m.
With the Government envisaging a greater role for PTEs, developing partnerships, vision and good planning is crucial to Metro. And with successes such as its Yellow School Bus, a groundbreaking Real Time Passenger Information System and Guided Buses, it can demonstrate best value through innovation.
Pay and Benefits
The taxpayer funds Metro’s activities, so it does not have excessive bonuses - but it does offer competitive salaries, attractive benefits and work-life balance. The evidence is that Metro attracts top people from the private sector, often consultants who have seen Metro in action by working for an operator or another partnership. ‘This is an organisation where people can make a difference,’ says Sheena Pickersgill, Director of Corporate Services. ‘They can realise their full potential here.’
There are a variety of roles within Metro, and salaries vary enormously. Pay scales are softened by flexibility. For example, graduates might join a different scale and Metro pays market rates to take into account and attract experience, competencies and specialisms – somewhat unusual for a PTE.
The pension scheme - based on half final salary - is excellent by today’s measures. Employees contribute 6%, which is matched or bettered by Metro. Then there is an array of other benefits. Every employee receives a Metrocard for free travel within West Yorkshire and there are childcare vouchers, a BUPA counselling line covering everything from stress management to tax advice, free health checks and flu vaccines. There’s even a massage service in-house!
Generous holidays start at 28 days a year, increasing by two days for five years’ service and another two for ten years. You can earn an additional day a month if you build up the necessary hours through the flexitime policy, based around core hours of 10-4 and a 37-hour week.
Metro is a very sociable organisation, bonding through parties, quiz evenings, sports teams or just drinks in the pub after work. During the football World Cup, employees were allowed to watch the early morning kick-off games on a large screen at work with breakfast thrown in.
Promotion and development
‘People put their heart and soul into their work,’ says Kieran Preston, Metro’s Director General. ‘They don’t move from the private to the public sector for “a rest.” They come to Metro because they can make a real impact and realise their goals. They can see that we are players who punch above our weight. In turn we look for people with drive and ambition.’
‘Because Metro is always involved with innovative schemes, there’s always a challenging new project to work on’ says Pickersgill. The Corporate Services Director herself has successfully driven the Yellow School Bus project forward, despite it being in the domain of passenger services rather than corporate services. ‘Because I wanted to do it,’ she adds.
‘We have taken a lot of risks to get ahead of projects,’ says Preston. ‘Transport planning skills in particular are in demand.’ But Metro also turns people into transport planners. ‘Short, fat courses’ are used to augment the personal skills of its bright, energetic people.
Metro is committed to the policies it delivers and equally to its staff who make all of that possible. Its training and development programme is comprehensive and definitely one of Metro’s great strengths. In a recent Leeds University survey of 50 regional companies, Metro ranked top for management development. All new starters are given a thorough induction and any essential training is given priority and undertaken almost immediately. Every six months employees have a development review, which evaluates individual performance, what they want out of the organisation and translates into a training and development plan.
Company culture
Metro is a forward thinking and fast moving organisation and has had a Quality Framework in place for years to ensure that it is ‘fit for purpose’. ‘To deliver quality services, we need a quality culture embedded in the organisation, and that begins with commitment at the top level,’ says Pickersgill. The constituent parts of the Quality Framework are customer focus, staff commitment, managerial effectiveness, and planning and corporate performance.
Culture is a participative process and one that is under constant review. ‘If you had the resources, what would you change?’ is one question that staff are asked, the answers being fed up the organisation to contribute to service improvement plans. It’s also horizontal – looking across the organisation - so people are asked ‘what do you need others to do to help you deliver your targets?’
Annual staff satisfaction surveys ensure that the culture is natural and organic, never imposed. With investment in employees, this is a very open, flexible organisation. The mood is friendly and real team spirit is evident. ‘Buzz is an important word,’ says Pickersgill. ‘People who come on site say they cannot believe it is a public sector organisation. The culture here is fantastic.’
HR does much to support this positive culture through good, well thought through policies that it regularly updates. ‘Not driven by legal requirements,’ says Jenette Sargent, HR Manager. ‘It’s wanting to be the best, and we look at other companies to see what we can introduce. The organisation is unionised, but we encourage people to talk to HR first and we’ve been successful in achieving that.’ Communication is key and there’s lots of it. Surveys, team briefings, Intranet, awaydays and group seminars proliferate. External assessments like Beacon Council and Investors in People is pursued to demonstrate to employees they have an organisation to be proud of.
Metro is exceptional in looking after women with children, new fathers and people with caring responsibilities. There is no fixed scheme, although Metro pays more that statutory maternity and paternity pay. Instead, Metro prefers to listen to people individually and do what it can to help employees manage their lives.
Innovation
Metro far exceeds its brief of making public transport work and innovation comes as second nature. Its guided buses project – a narrow, segregated strip of road that only buses can use - has been a great success, and Metro has been invited to lead this initiative nationally. In bus station design, its aim is to make them more like airports.
Metro’s real time passenger information project is the most comprehensive scheme with the most complicated execution. Using GPS, a central computer, route identifiers and on-board receivers, ‘real’ real time information might not be far away – the ‘Big Thing’ that customers say they want. Information could even be sent to mobile phones and via the Internet, as well as on display screens at bus stops.
Four years ago, Metro set out its vision to transform school transport. Its resulting Yellow School Bus project delivers a highly visible bus (it’s yellow), a dedicated, known driver, passenger registration, on-board entertainment and a hotline for parents to call if children are not attending that day. From the pilot scheme in 2002, Metro has proved that it can get children out of cars (and four-wheel drives) with staggering results. Some 91% of children on ‘My Bus,’ as its young passengers have dubbed it, used to travel to school by car. Attendance levels have improved by 5%. One girl used to attend just two days a week; now it’s five and her academic performance is rising. After demonstrating this success, Metro has received funding of £18.7m to provide 150 Yellow Buses over the next three years.
Diversity and social responsibility
‘We believe hugely in equality as an organisation,’ says Preston. ‘We don’t need kitemarks to prove that – we’ve gone well beyond that.’ Metro is committed to the development of positive policies (not positive discrimination) to promote equal opportunities for everyone in all areas of employment.
For age/gender/colour blind organisations, real diversity perhaps comes in the type of people working there. Metro has encouraged people of different backgrounds, people who challenge the status quo, who take risks and are ‘a little bit different.’
In the traditionally male-dominated transport industry, Metro is striving to change attitudes. It has tackled and removed any negative attitudes within its own organisation, and now aims beyond. At a recent ‘Journey of a Lifetime’ conference in Leeds, Metro hired actors to play the parts of drivers on buses transporting delegates, and they gave them ‘pieces of their minds’. A blunt, first-hand experience of what the customer sometimes encounters on the buses, the stunt was aimed at focusing delegates’ minds and improving the industry’s overall image. ‘We were priming them for the themes of the conference in an entertaining but slightly challenging way,’ says Pickersgill.
Corporate Governance
With many different stakeholders, and needing to account for its funding, corporate governance is ingrained at Metro. It works on behalf of the people of West Yorkshire to make public transport reliable, easy to understand and use, accessible, attractive, affordable, efficient, safe and secure. It is also committed to the principles of best value.
‘Everyone checks what we do,’ says Preston. ‘For example, with the five district councils, we don’t have to but we show and share everything with them.’ The best type of corporate governance is to have the best people and organisations with a stake in the operation – and that effectively is how Metro works. There are also non-executive directors and a Risk Management Group. Compliance is a given, as is Data Protection and privacy of information.
Environmental record
Benefiting the environment is fundamental to everything that Metro does. In particular it aims to reduce the number of vehicle journeys, getting people to use public transport instead of cars. It has succeeded in this to the extent of saving 40 million vehicle miles each year. There are 200 million bus journeys each year and its SuperTram initiative is reckoned will take out 5 million car journeys a year. ‘It’s estimated that traffic congestion costs the NHS around £11 billion annually,’ says Preston. ‘If we can get people out of cars, we can contribute quite a lot.’
Metro must make an environmental impact report on every scheme it is involved in. Knowing this, it tries to sort problems out before they start, planning well ahead. Metro has all the recycling boxes ticked. Paper, toner and cartridges are recycled, and unwanted computer equipment and mobile phones are often given away to good causes.
