Paula Larson, executive vice-president, human resources at Invensys, likens her arrival at the company back in 2005 to “running into a burning building when many others were running out”.

The one-time industrial technology giant was still in turmoil after incurring crippling debts during the recession of the early 2000s. In 1999, when the London-based company was created by a merger, it was ranked in the top 30 UK-listed companies, with revenues of £9 billion and more than 120,000 staff worldwide. By 2005, much of the business had been sold to repay some of the debt, leaving Invensys as a FTSE-250 engineering company with a global workforce of only 40,000, a figure that has since reduced further.