Here, Martyn Fisher, our CEO of Northern Europe & Vice President of Solutions Europe for Veolia Water Technologies, offers insight into VWT UK’s culture of collaboration, and how it has helped the organisation to add value for its customers.
“At VWT UK, our day-to-day business is centred around supplying cutting edge technology, products and services to a vast array of complex facilities, from water and wastewater treatment to resource recovery and energy generation. Crucially, we also have the engineering expertise so that we can tailor our technologies to customer needs. Of course, whether that includes a desire to reduce, re-use or recycle resources more effectively – we can support them.
To do this, and to do this well, requires excellent communication and a fundamental commitment by us, to listen and learn from our customers. Every site and every set-up is different, as are the challenges or pressures they might face. I truly believe that whilst at our heart we are a technology and services company, how we take that technology to market is very much through the quality of our people, the application of their knowledge, experience and the quality of the relationship they have built with the customer.
As such, it’s all about creating a positive and collaborative environment that can bring the best out of our people and our partnerships. The day to day working environment at VWT UK is definitely one that supports collaborative behaviours and working practices. Our remits and capabilities are simply so wide that no one single person within VWT has all the answers or can hold all that knowledge. This means we have to rely on our colleagues here, and around the world, to support individual team members with operational experiences or technical insight.
I’m constantly encouraged by our culture of open communication and staff are really engaged when it comes to sharing ideas and best practices. We wanted to extend this ethos and culture to our customers, and it was one of the reasons why we launched our Challenge the Experts series, where we gather some of our global experts, customers and supply chain representatives.
The aim is to share innovation and best practice from around the world – giving customers the valuable opportunity to step out of the day to day and see how the technologies and services being discussed could potentially assist them in their own project, now or in the future.
It also provides an open floor for us all to debate and discuss – something that I hope is valued on both sides. We were delighted with the take up of our session on phosphorous removal back in 2020 and as such, we are planning to run an online Challenge the Experts event in the coming months – watch this space.
For those within supply chains who are responsible for delivering projects, large or small, straightforward or complex – there are clear benefits of having a strong and collaborative relationship.
But above all, we need to have trust. Projects are not always smooth sailing and collaboration requires a willingness to trust someone enough to work through what can at times be challenging, frustrating and given the events of 2020 - sometimes seemingly impossible circumstances. I’m proud to say that in all my time here, we have never walked away from a problem or a project challenge. As a result, we remain the UK’s leading, long-established solutions provider when it comes to water treatment solutions and services. For me personally – our people and our culture of collaboration has had a huge and positive part to play in that achievement.
