Mott MacDonald employee ownership overhaul: delivery impacts for project teams
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
Mott MacDonald is overhauling its long‑standing employee ownership model so that all 18,000 staff, including site engineers and project managers, hold a direct financial stake in the consultancy’s performance. Chair and chief executive James Harris says the new structure is intended to “fundamentally change” behaviours by linking rewards more tightly to project outcomes, from major UK rail and water frameworks to international tunnelling and bridge schemes. For contractors and clients, the shift signals a push for stronger accountability on programme, cost and technical delivery across multidisciplinary design teams.
Technical Brief
- Similar ownership structures in other consultancies could reshape how design risk and delivery performance are contracted.
Our Take
Within the 366 Infrastructure stories in our database, relatively few focus on how consultancies like Mott MacDonald link employee engagement directly to project delivery outcomes, so this interview helps explain the ‘people’ side behind the contract and safety metrics that usually dominate coverage.
Across the 1006 tag-matched pieces on Projects, Contract Award and Safety, most items concentrate on specific schemes or incidents rather than organisational culture, suggesting Mott MacDonald’s approach may be a differentiator when clients assess non-price criteria such as safety leadership and workforce stability.
For practitioners, a large consultancy explicitly tying all-employee engagement to business success signals that soft factors like staff ownership of risk and quality processes are increasingly seen as hard levers for reducing safety incidents and delivery overruns on complex infrastructure projects.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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