By Ian Ellison, Workplace Geeks
Listen to episode one now: How do exceptional people contribute to high-performing places?
In the first series of The Mitie Podcast, Chris and I visited the sort of places most of us know well, or can at least picture without too much effort. We explored different offices, a hospital – the kinds of buildings that support everyday life.
What seemed to resonate most with listeners though, was what we discovered when we dug a bit deeper. When we pulled back the curtain and went behind the scenes of security at London’s iconic The Shard, for example. Or inside the mechanics of Eurostar’s onboarding process at St Pancras. Places that we might know of, but never get chance to see what’s really going on.
That insight shaped how we have approached series two of The Mitie Podcast, focusing on High Performing Places. Our aim for each episode is to take listeners somewhere genuinely unusual: The UK’s deepest underground laboratory. A cutting-edge security operations centre. Europe’s busiest international airport.
And then to use each to explore different facets of what makes a place truly high performing, with the fascinating people who run them.
Which brings us to our first question of the new series: how do exceptional people contribute to high-performing places?
Not your average commute
Boulby Underground Laboratory isn’t a place you can stumble across by accident. In fact, most people don’t know it’s there at all. It sits more than a kilometre beneath the stunning North York Moors national park, within a working mine that’s been part of the local landscape and economy for generations. The mine extracts different minerals from 250-million-year-old salt formations. The laboratory hosts world-leading scientific research, at a depth where cosmic radiation can’t pass through the rocks above.
Everyone arrives at work together, with a pitch-black lift descent down into the rock salt seam, then a lamplit walk through the cavernous mine tunnels to the laboratory. Superficially the contrast between the mine and the laboratory is striking. Dust, machinery and heavy industry on the one hand. Clean rooms and precision instruments on the other.
But what makes Boulby Underground Laboratory interesting from a workplace perspective isn’t just the environment. It’s the way people with very different backgrounds, skills and professions rely on each other to make the operation function. Scientists depend on the mine. The lab depends on the facilities team. Deep underground, safety, cleanliness and trust are not buzzwords, they’re operational necessities.
Discovering purpose and passion
One of the reasons I loved making this episode is Becca Meehan’s story. Becca works for Mitie as the clean room technician at Boulby. Her job is to monitor and maintain microscopically clean conditions, so the smallest contamination doesn’t undermine months of painstaking research. It is skilled, disciplined, essential work that happens quietly in the background.
What makes Becca’s story so compelling is not just what she does and where. It’s how she got there. Becca didn’t follow a traditional educational route. She didn’t arrive with a degree in science or engineering. She joined as a part-time cleaner, straight out of school. Then over time, through experience, support, and overcoming some very personal demons that Becca talks about in the episode, she found something she didn’t even know she was looking for – a sense of purpose, belonging, and then… passion.
Reflections on learning
Listening to Becca reminds you of something the facilities management sector knows well. In fact, it’s wrestled with the conundrum for decades. Very few people leave school aspiring to work in FM. Most discover it by happy accident. Then for some, that serendipity turns into a career.
My own route into FM was different. I enjoyed school. I went on to university. I discovered facilities management (by chance!) several years later, which led to postgraduate study, becoming a senior lecturer, and then a workplace consultant. Mine was a structured, linear journey and one that education systems are largely designed to support.
But most people in our sector don’t progress that way. People like Becca, and others like Kyeisha and Sam, who you’ll also meet in this episode, learn by doing. They build confidence through experience. For them, mentoring and on-the-job learning matter far more than traditional qualifications. And as you’ll hear, apprenticeships are key to their ongoing success. That doesn’t make their expertise any less real. If anything, it makes it more grounded.
Creating the conditions to thrive
What makes this more than a collection of individual success stories is Mitie’s aspiration to scale development potential like this. At Boulby, you can see how inclusive approaches to learning and development help people grow into roles they might never have imagined for themselves. Across a business the size of Mitie, that same principle applies through initiatives like the Mitie Foundation and Plan Thrive – Mitie’s recent social value initiative aiming to help one million people and one thousand places to thrive over the next three years. The schemes are designed to open doors and benefit society more broadly.
The common thread here is opportunity: not assuming what people are capable of but creating the space for them to discover it. When that happens, the benefits can compound. Individuals find purpose and progression. Organisations gain committed, capable people who understand the work from the ground up. And communities and society ultimately benefit.
Unique workplace, common wisdom
Boulby Underground Laboratory is certainly a fascinating, extraordinary workplace. But the lesson it offers is a surprisingly everyday one. High-performing places are not built solely on technology, strategy or design. They flourish when people are trusted and given room to grow. When different professions value each other’s contribution, and when learning is not confined to classrooms.
A kilometre underground, that universal truth is simply harder to ignore.