About Thomas International

At Thomas, they practice what they preach, they are in the business of developing people, and this is also our number one focus with employees. The people development programme, My Thomas Development, uses assessments to support the development of their employees, and ensures that managers are consistently holding 1-1 meetings and reviews. The company offer secondments with other departments or international partners, fund external training, and runt their own internal training courses, which are created in response to development needs. A whopping 25 of the 118 employees have been promoted this year alone, which is testament to the quality of the development programme.

Communication is top of the agenda at Thomas, and they have invested a lot of time and effort in ensuring it is of the highest quality. The monthly forums from the CEO and a guest speaker ensure that every employee is fully aware of what is going on across the business, and offers the opportunity for them to respond to the message. The company encourages cross-functional working as regularly as possible at Thomas. Projects usually involve employees from a variety of departments, ensuring that they are working as one team towards a collective goal, and creating an environment of collaboration. Groups such as the product lifecycle group, a committee focusing on the development of new products, bring representatives from across the business together to encourage innovation and dynamism. The company also hold monthly social events, which recently have included an evening at Windsor race course, paintballing, bowling, and a quiz night. These socials are chosen by employees, and help the company to further foster the team environment.

The company values were created through an exercise at the company-wide conference at the beginning of 2014. The company elicited from staff personal values that were common to the majority of employees and used those as a basis for re-writing their company values. Through inclusion and clear communication, our staff are now able to live the Thomas values through their work. These values formed the basis of the company awards categories, and have been introduced to all performance review templates. The company recently held a 2 day strategy meeting to plan their strategy moving forwards. They have significantly increased their ambitions for the future, changing their target from £50 million to £250 million.