8Sage CSR Report 08 - Workplace We aim to be the most admired employer We'll do this by: • Connecting with our people and asking them what they think • Finding out how they want to be rewarded and recognised, and changing what we do using their feedback • Getting everyone to understand and live by our Guiding Principles using communications and fun initiatives Engage: Your say, your Sage We're a firm believer that if we don't know what needs fixing, we can't fix it. ' Engage: Your say, your Sage' is our annual survey inviting everyone to let us know how they feel about working for us. In 2008, 80% of our people responded, which at 10% higher than the industry average, tells us they really do care about working at Sage. This was our second year of Engage: Your say, your Sage, and our scores improved across all sections, with Communication, Working for Sage and Performance Management seeing the most improvement. We've still got work to do but we're moving forwards and we're going in the right direction. Involving our people doesn't end with the survey data. We publish all our results and afterwards invite everyone to optional focus groups. This gives us more specific feedback which is used alongside the data to write improvement action plans. Progress against plans is driven by our people too, as anyone can volunteer to complete actions and help make Sage an even better place to work. Voicing opinion As a responsible employer we encourage our people to challenge and shape the way we work, making it better for them and our customers. A real example of this is our network of People Insight Forum Representatives. They're a trusted voice of the people and a two- way sounding board. If we're proposing business wide change, we ask them first. If our people have a suggestion or a question when it comes to working at Sage, they speak to their Representatives. The Representatives then work with others to make things happen to improve working at Sage for everyone. Anyone can be voted in as a representative and taking on the role is an opportunity to contribute to the way we work. Through continued coaching and development, relationship building and regular communication, the value and credibility of our People Insight Forum is going from strength to strength. Engaging our people As it's our people who are the stars of our show, we feel that our responsibility starts at home, right here with our people, as an admired employer. If our people are happy and looked after, they'll deliver a great experience for our customers, who'll then want to talk to everyone about us! It's not just about making Sage successful though, we engage with our people because it's the right thing to do. If we want our people to deliver a great customer experience, they deserve an extraordinary experience working at Sage. So caring for and connecting with our people it at the top of the list. We do heaps of things to engage our people, from communications to celebrating success to people forums to surveys to how we reward, develop and pay our people. Here you'll find just a little snapshot from our big list of things we do to engage everyone, some of the initiatives are even award- winning!

All Sage, no onions Our people told us they wanted to know more about what was going on in and around Sage. They suggested an internal newsletter and so we launched " All Sage no onions". We can't take credit for the name that came from one of our creative competition winners. ' All Sage, no onions' is an e- zine ( keeping it green), which brings together articles about our people, their latest news, social events, information about our activity clubs and other interesting snippets. As our leaders are our people too we feature informal interviews with them and also provide short business updates. Published quarterly, it's compiled by volunteers from across Sage and edited by our Internal Communications team. We feel this approach keeps the content relevant to our people and gives them a more unusual development opportunity, to work with others and bring out the reporter, writer or photographer in them. Let's Talk, our no- holds- barred online forum, started life this year with just two folders ' Sage stuff' and ' Fun stuff'. The driving forces behind it were results from our Engage: Your say, your Sage survey, which highlighted a need to openly communicate with others across the business. Within a few months there've been over 2,000 posts on 100 threads. Let's Talk is actively creating communities of people with common interests across Sage, which is great for improving collaboration between our many departments and divisions. Let's Talk has even been used to gain feedback for " Engage" actions proving that feedback from our people has truly come full circle. Sage CSR Report 08 - Workplace9 83% Even before we kicked off Let's Talk, 83% of our people said they felt free to communicate with people across Sage