Interview: Mott MacDonald chief executive on engaging all employees in the business’ success

The company operates in over 100 countries worldwide, offering engineering and technical expertise to projects across civil engineering sectors. Notable megaprojects in development that it has its fingerprints on include HS2, the expansion of JFK Airport and the Melbourne Metro (pictured), but it is involved in works on all kinds of scales, which have seen it record profit increases year on year for almost a decade.

Part of Mott MacDonald’s success is because, despite being spread across the globe and having a headcount of over 20,000 staff, it has made it a central tenet of the business that everyone should feel included. It was already one of the largest wholly employee-owned companies in the world, but in 2025 the global engineering consultancy moved to ensure that every single one of its employees has a stake and voice in it.

Mott MacDonald chair and chief executive James Harris has been instrumental in the development of this model. Employee ownership is something that he feels passionate about, as he has been with the business since graduating in 1990 – although with some secondments, including a 10-year stint at JN Bentley, which is now part of Mott MacDonald that turned over £700M last year.

He admits, though, that during the first 10 years of his time at Mott MacDonald he wasn’t as connected to the business.

“I was based in Cambridge at the time, and the senior directors would occasionally come up to talk to us about employee ownership and, if I’m honest, it didn’t mean that much to me,” he told NCE. “I found I struggled to relate to it, and I wondered who they were talking to, because I didn’t have a stake in Mott MacDonald. There were many reasons I stayed in the company those first 10 years – I was getting great training, it was a nice bunch of people and I was enjoying myself. But the employee ownership piece fell a bit short for me in that part of my career.”

However, that changed when he reached his decade with the business and was offered shares in it. “When that letter arrived offering me the opportunity to buy 100 or 200 shares – I can’t remember, but it was a really small amount – it really meant something,” he recalled. “It sort of welcomed me into the common purpose of the company; its future success.”

He thought to himself that if he ever got to a position of authority that he would try to ensure that Mott MacDonald employees felt that inclusivity from the very start of their tenure. And he has been leading the charge for that change over the last few years, starting when he was the Group’s managing director under previous chief executive Mike Haigh.

“Mike and I would talk about this a lot,” Harris said. “I took over from him in 2022 at a relatively young age – in my mid-50s – so I had a decent amount of time; and it does take a decent amount of time to actually do this properly. Mike and I had started to do a few things in the business to get us ready for this and I was able to take it all the way through to broadening our ownership model to all our 21,000 employees.”

Hybrid model

Harris said if he had to pick one “fundamental reason” why the business has made this move it is to ensure all employees are engaged, not just the top 20% most senior, as it was previously.

“We’re a good business; we perform really well, we’re growing in all the right places, we’re winning interesting projects,” he said. “It’s therefore really difficult to find the thing that will fundamentally change and create a great business – and we do believe this is one of those things.

“Engaging every single member of Mott MacDonald in the common purpose of the future success of the business – that can only change us for the better.”

He explained that the change has seen the creation of a “hybrid model” that sees junior staff receive virtual shares while the direct share model remains in place for senior members.

“The returns are exactly the same between a virtual share and a directly owned share,” Harris said. “Obviously, those who hold shares are putting their money into the business, so they get an additional dividend, but the share bonus – which is the main element and the largest bit of the reward – is exactly the same.”

Under this model, somebody who joins Mott MacDonald will be a beneficiary straight away. They will start to accrue more virtual shares with each year spent in the business and with each promotion, entitling them to more of a share of the company’s profits. If that person reaches a certain level of seniority – typically in the 20% – those can be swapped for direct shares by purchasing them and buying into the business.

“We looked at direct ownership for everyone, but one of the things we did to get ready for this is we built the balance sheet from about £100M to half a billion, so it’s a lot of cash on the balance sheet – we don’t need cash from staff who are younger,” Harris said. “Staff are already battling with ridiculous rents, they’re starting families – the financial pressure on young people is much harder than it was in my day and that’s why we ended up going for this hybrid model. It didn’t seem right to ask junior members of the team to put into a business that doesn’t actually need the cash on the balance sheet, whereas for the senior staff that sense of investing your hard-earned savings means something and we wanted to preserve that. So, we settled on a hybrid model in the end.”

Everyone has a voice

Aside from having a share of the company’s profits, the other key element of the enhanced employee ownership model at Mott MacDonald is ensuring everyone is heard.

“It’s giving all of our staff a voice in the business,” Harris said. “We made some structural changes to formalise that voice and bring it to the top of the business.”

Harris explained how this plays out.

“We report our performance and the progress we’re making against our strategy to all staff quarterly; it’s hybrid with a load of people in the room and then a couple of thousand people online,” he said. “The tone of the conversation has really matured. The board would tell you that they feel really challenged by questions from the staff – but in a respectful way; it’s a very appropriate conversation. It’s not a place to whinge about your computer not working, it’s about performance; it’s about your stake in the business, it’s about voicing your opinion about the direction we should be going in and making sure you are heard as an employee of the business.”

Additionally, Harris has a supervisory board that is made up of senior shareholders and independent senior members that he describes as “a very formal committee that is representative of all staff”. This group seeks views on issues that are pertinent to the decision making of the business.

“We formally seek those views, we drag them from the business and take them into our decision making,” he said. “But it’s a real issue in employee ownership to get that balance of genuinely giving staff a voice in the business against the need for the business to be commercial, well run and agile.”

As an example, Harris said that Mott MacDonald “might engage more broadly about some of the areas we end up working in – some of those areas are controversial”. The company is known to be working on the Neom gigaproject in Saudi Arabia, from which there have come numerous reports about the illegal removal of indigenous tribes and extremely poor conditions for immigrant workers on site.

“I think we’re a purpose-driven organisation,” Harris said, relating to why public ownership is suited to Mott MacDonald. “The vast majority of people who join Mott MacDonald want to make some form of meaningful, tangible contribution. We have a lot of domain expertise, and we feel duty bound to deploy that for the benefit of our clients and the communities our clients serve.

“Our 21,000 staff are part of those communities, spread across the globe. Employee ownership gives that purpose real integrity. We’re not doing this for a third party. We’re not doing this to make somebody else rich. Our success and the wealth of the business is distributed to those people that create that wealth and are responsible for that ingenuity, for the outcomes.

“I think our long-term clients can certainly see the difference between an employee who has a stake in their business versus an employee who’s perhaps work for a PLC or some other form of ownership.”

Profitability and governance

Mott MacDonald had another year of growth in 2024, reaching £2.5bn revenue for the first time.

“Six or seven years ago we took quite a step change in our profitability and we’ve held that level,” Harris said. “That has coincided with us being a lot more deliberate about what we do and, importantly, deliberate about what we don’t do. We’ve been far more clinical in terms of executing our strategy.

“We’ve been very careful about what we’ve done with that improved level of performance. We’ve worked hard to build a strong balance sheet that’s allowed us to grab opportunity when we see it, but it’s also about resilience.”

With that success comes greater scrutiny and a tightening of governance. Harris believes Mott MacDonald will reach £3bn in annual revenue “fairly soon” and believes that it “will likely be designated a public interest entity in the near future”.

“I’d like to get on the front foot for that and be absolutely ready for it when it happens,” he said. “I think it’s inevitable.”

He believes this is “a good thing” though.

“We see good governance as an enabler for growth,” he said. “By good governance I don’t mean bureaucracy, I mean true independent scrutiny and challenge. So, we welcome it.

“I think it’s a particular challenge for Mott MacDonald because we’re employee-owned, because we really want to give all staff a genuine voice in shaping our future. That’s all very well, but we still have to look sensible in terms of the external scrutiny and challenge that we embrace in the business.

“I’m working on some areas to strengthen that at the moment. For example, we don’t have any non executive directors. I think in years to come you will see us welcome non exec directors into the business to make sure that we’ve got that true independent, external corporate level scrutiny and challenge.”

Summing up how he sees the chief executive and the board’s role in Mott MacDonald, Harris concluded: “We’re custodians of this business as employee owners and our job is quite simple: It’s to hand this business over to the next generation in better shape than we found it. It’s employee ownership that really forces us to look at the long term and think about the impacts of the decisions we make today.”

Like what you’ve read? To receive New Civil Engineer’s daily and weekly newsletters click here.