Page 12 - DWF Annual Report 2017

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Chairman’s

Report Alan Benzie

The post-Brexit landscape

It has undoubtedly been another tough year
economically, with the impact of Brexit taking

its toll on businesses.

Like others, we have felt the pressure Engaging people and clients
of the referendum, which has led to a
slowdown in our commercial services Our strategy of innovation and doing
business, particularly in real estate and, things differently is paying dividends,
to some extent, corporate transactions. as we have continued our lateral hire
Above all, Brexit has brought uncertainty, programme and secured some
and that continued uncertainty has excellent client wins both within the
arrested growth in a lot of areas. UK and internationally.

We coped well with the challenges We’ve also made some great steps
presented by the uncertainty in the towards further embedding people
economy during the early months of engagement and values and have
the financial year indeed, our ability to introduced temperature-checking for the
adapt to these challenges lead us to first time. This has been championed by
a marked improvement in the second our Engaging People Executive and
half of the year. follows the delivery of our first People
Engagement Survey last year, the results
of which were shared with all our people.
This year we have continued to check in
with our people and ensured that the
action plans we created for each part of
our business to address areas of concern
were being implemented.