People are our key asset, and we are committed to deliver Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) to our colleagues, who represent our communities. This means we take every opportunity to promote equity, embrace diversity and challenge discrimination, striving to make sure our company is a place where we ‘Do the right thing’, people feel they belong and can be their true self. Our approach focuses on five areas:
Promote equity, embrace diversity and challenge discrimination.
Ensure our company is an inclusive place where people feel they belong.
Ensuring our recruitment practices are free of discrimination and bias, while promoting inclusion through strong governance, process and marketing.
Maintaining and enhancing an inclusive working environment where people feel valued and appreciated and are treated fairly and equally, positively impacting on employee wellbeing
Driving a change in the mind set of people with regard to EDI while providing them with the tools to impact positively in this area.
Focused employee engagement initiatives linked to the retention strategy that foster belonging and an appreciation of work colleagues’ differences.
A communication strategy that drives the first 4 pillars supporting both internal and external changes in perception.
Each of these focus areas is broken down into key performance indicators, with actions, measurement, timescales and ownership assigned and we recognise that the continuous improvement of our policies, practices and initiatives is vital to pursuing our goal of a more equitable, diverse and inclusive culture.
Our Senior Leadership Team and Senior Management Team have completed Diversity and Inclusion training, including Unconscious Bias, with a roll out of further training to all team members underway. One of the key learnings from the Pandemic was the need to provide mental awareness training and support for our people. In 2021 we undertook a pilot which delivered mental health first aider training to 40 staff, whilst mindfulness training was carried out with all People Managers. These were the drivers for the implementation and delivery of our Mental Health Awareness Training and Support programme. In March 2022 we rolled out initial Mental Health awareness training to 29 key stakeholders within the UK and Ireland, which will be cascaded to key site based stakeholders.