The Delt Family

Yesterday morning at a new staff induction I talked, hopefully with some passion, about how our objective of sustainable socio-economic development mattered not just to our staff but to a much wider community.

Later in the day saw our annual Delt Family Barbeque. We do family events all year but this one remains my favourite. Unusually we were gifted with torrential rain and threatened with gale force winds. In true best of British spirt this dampened only our clothes, not our spirit. Too dangerous for a bouncy castle outside? Put a bouncy ball pond in the workroom! Slippery handles make axe throwing towards the nursery high risk? Setup an indoor casino. Meeting room displays work with video games just as well as PowerPoint. Indoor Sumo wrestling in a crowded environment full of high value technology. What could possibly go wrong?

Loads of staff came. Many of them brought children. Some of them even brought their own children. I saw spouses, girlfriends, boyfriends, partners, fiance’s and in one case, an ex-wife. I saw parents, my own Dad embarrassingly turning up in shorts ‘because it’s the summer’. We had future members of staff show up, members of staff who had retired came too. There was at least one person who seemed to have no connection at all to Delt. They apparently came alone, enthusiastically played the games, ate the food, talked to everyone and then left alone.

If there was any downside to this year it was that nobody brought their dog, Normally the car park is full of assorted hounds, drooling at the smell of barbeque, stealing people’s sausages and eating unattended children. The dogs clearly had more sense than to venture out in the terrible weather. On the plus side, nobody had an excuse to poop under my desk.

Delt is much more than the people it employs and the services it provides. I love it.

Giles Letheren – Chief Executive Officer