Simon Blair

Said the following about Louis Szymanski:

““Since joining D2 Rail in August 2020, Louis has made a significant contribution to the D2 Rail business and to the wider industry.

Louis has proven in a short space of time that he is an extremely competent and adaptable professional with incredible people skills and emotional intelligence.

He joined the team at an extremely challenging period of time during Covid, but he has integrated with the team and the project seamlessly, and he has taken everything in his stride and shown great courage throughout. Louis has exemplar behaviours and work ethic that have been demonstrated on a number of Project and D2 Rail workstreams with positive feedback received from key stakeholders.

Louis is always willing to support the wider team, whether in a caring capacity as a mental Health first aider or in a work capacity where he regularly goes above and beyond to support his peers.

Louis is keen to learn from his experience and consider how he can apply lessons to himself and others within the business. A good example of where this has been applied is in the D2 graduate recruitment process, where Louis supported the 2021 process and applied some effective improvements to the recruitment and onboarding process.

Louis regularly engages with senior leaders within the D2 Business. As well as making some great contributions to business strategy discussions and decisions, Louis is willing to challenge senior leaders within the D2 business with informed and insightful feedback. Louis has volunteered to lead and support various business critical workstreams alongside his project commitments. In all cases, Louis has provided dedication and significant effort and contribution in maintaining and building on the initiatives that he is involved in.

Louis has led the implementation of the Equality, Diversion and Inclusion workstream, which included setting a staff ED&I survey so that we could understand our company’s diversity metrics and company culture; Louis is now supporting a number of improvement initiatives based on the feedback. This workstream is fully supported and sponsored by senior leaders within the business, but with Louis leading the collective workstream, it has gained exceptional momentum in the last 12 months.

Louis instigated a periodic challenge statement initiative within D2 that sought areas of improvement within the business through staff consultation. The challenge statements were collated, prioritised and then sponsored and delivered through collaboration between functions within the business. The resultant improvements have delivered significant value within the business, some of which have also realised benefits on live projects.

Louis has a strong awareness of, and an interest in social value and what it means to each of us as individuals and the business as a whole. To strengthen the D2 business and ensure that we are meeting our social objectives, Louis led the development of the Social Value Strategy. The strategy explains how and why the business will make a conscious effort to contribute to the long term wellbeing and resilience of individuals, communities, and society in general. It includes D2 Rail’s commitment to reaching Net Zero by 2050.““