Last year, 57 per cent of our new recruits were women and 66 per cent of our new apprentices into the company were women. Overall, we have increased the number of women at our entry grades by 12 per cent during the last two years.
Although our gender pay gap has increased by 2.8 per cent in 2022/23, this is largely down to fewer women in management positions. Given the relatively small size of our management team, small changes can disproportionately affect our gender pay gap. However, we know there is more work to do to retain and grow female managers within our business.
We had made substantial progress in reducing our gender pay gap in the previous two years and we will refocus our efforts to make up ground on this. We have however, broken new ground with a female job share for a senior environmental management role within our company. Last year we saw a six per cent increase in men joining our retail directorate, where there has traditionally been a gender imbalance and we will continue to work hard to address any imbalance, in either direction, in specific parts of our business.
Work has been progressing to produce a specific Diversity and Inclusivity policy and strategy with associated training which will launch in 2023.
We are proud to be working with Change 100, which is an award-winning programme of paid summer work placements and mentoring for disabled students and recent graduates through the Leonard Cheshire Foundation. This follows a successful trial when four interns joined us for the previous summer through the programme and one of our previous interns received a two-year fixed term contract with our strategy and regulation department.
Our wellbeing programme goes from strength to strength with monthly ‘Lunch and Learn’ sessions which have included topics such as mindfulness, money advice, domestic abuse, eating disorders and Dementia Friends information. We have a wellbeing theme for each month, such as stress awareness, diversity and inclusion, men’s health and mindfulness, and quarterly company-wide wellbeing challenges are set. For example, around 40 employees completed a Couch to 5K challenge.
We are extremely proud to have been awarded the highest Gold wellbeing award from Kent and Medway’s Healthy Workplace programme in recognition of the progress we have made to support health and wellbeing at work
Last year we launched a Domestic Abuse policy and a Menopause Policy to provide support to colleagues and to encourage open conversations.
Across the business we now have 29 Wellbeing Champions who have all undertaken level two Understanding Health Improvement training to complement our 46 Mental Health First Aiders who support employees and signpost to our other internal and external help.
We are proud to be a UK safe space employer which demonstrates we provide exceptional support for those employees and family members suffering from domestic abuse.
All managers have received mental health awareness training, and this is now a key part of our induction process with all new managers and employees undertaking mental health awareness at induction
To engage our talented workforce, work on developing customisable career development routes for all employees has progressed via our Aspire, Inspire and Lead portals. In November we launched our new Foundation for Leadership programme and pathway to engage managers and prepare them for leadership roles.
In January we launched our newly designed two-phase Leading for Change senior development programme and roadmap. Plans are also in the pipeline to launch a new Aspire to Lead programme to engage future managers and provide them with practical ways to lead, organise and motivate others.
Our apprenticeship programme continues to thrive, offering opportunities for new joiners and also existing employees to upskill. By year end we had a total of 65 apprentices on our programme, representing 6.6 per cent of our current headcount, with an ambitious target to increase this to 10 per cent by 2025. We have created a significant number of new apprenticeship roles as we seek to encourage more women to join our industry, to improve social mobility, invest in young people and future-proof our business.
As always, the health and safety of our colleagues is our number one priority. We have reinforced the message ‘no job is too urgent not to be done safely’ with internal communications throughout the year.
You can find out more about what our people get up to each day and the diverse roles we have within the business by reading our employee blogs here.
