People
Our people are at the heart of our business and are vital to the success of our vision and the achievement of our strategic goals.
Strategic priorities
Develop our people
Our aim is to attract and recruit the right person at every level and to keep them engaged so that we can deliver our goals and customer commitments whilst maintaining a safe, healthy and respectful working environment.
Achievements in 2023
Our injury frequency rate ('IFR') and accident frequency rate ('AFR') both continued to significantly outperform industry averages.
Our focus on increasing diversity across our leadership roles saw the appointment of Maeve Gallagher (Production Director), Nicole Baker (Divisional Commercial Director) and Michaela Lindridge (Head of ESG). Jennifer Magowan was also promoted to Divisional Finance Director.
Our colleague 'MyVoice' forum has gone from strength-to-strength providing regular insight into the feelings of our workforce. This year it has enabled us to make improvements to health and wellbeing provisions, facilities and leadership communication.
Our MyPerformance review process continued to be utilised across the Group with a pilot taking place with manufacturing colleagues and we continued to improve our learning and development offering.
We achieved the prestigious 'Gold Member' status of 'The 5% Club' recognising our commitment to providing opportunities to earn whilst learning. Twenty seven apprentices joined the Group in 2023, taking our total number of colleagues undertaking apprenticeships programmes or qualifications to 62 (a threefold increase on 2021).
We reviewed rates of pay across our manufacturing locations to create clearer pay progression and ensured that all our colleagues are paid at or above the real living wage.
Objectives for 2024
Relaunching our new behavioural safety training programme (Safer@Severfield) and continuing to focus on delivering a wide range of internally and externally facilitated training courses. This will be supported by the implementation of MyLearning, our online platform.
Promote easy access to health care through company funded private provision for all colleagues as well as the ongoing promotion of our enhanced Employees Assistance Programme ('EAP') and app (My Healthy Advantage).
Through ensuring all Leaders and Managers undertake Dignity and Respect training we will continue to promote diversity and inclusion through employment practices, that are free from discrimination and in accordance with human rights principles.
Continue to focus on early careers with the recruitment of a further 30+ apprentices.
Continue to support employee-led local community initiatives and developing strong community partnerships through the pilot of a paid volunteering programme.
Launch additional talent development programmes to retain and enhance the skills of our identified future leaders and specialists.
Maintain our focus on reducing our IFR rate to ensure we are continuing to drive the appropriate safety behaviours.