Motivating and supporting our people
Aim: to attract, develop and retain a talented, ambitious workforce with the right skills and capacity to meet the needs of our business as it grows.
Progress: Our 36,800 employees are primarily based in the UK, Ireland, the Channel Islands and India. We have created a workplace that is supportive, rewarding, diverse, safe and inspiring and have therefore become an employer of choice and well positioned to attract the best talent.
Leadership development
Our company culture is one of strong leadership. Investing in skills and developing our people is critical to our future prosperity. In 2009, we enhanced our approach to training and introduced the Capita Academy, which provides all employees with training opportunities, and the Capita Managers Academy, providing specific courses to ensure that managers are well equipped to help deliver our business strategy, respond to clients’ needs and direct and support our people effectively. In order to promote knowledge sharing across the Group and provide career progression and variety, we actively reassign managers to new business areas.
We rely on our people to drive forward the business and therefore effective engagement with our employees is vital. As 70% of our employees transfer to Capita from other organisations, maintaining a positive Group-wide culture is important to us. Our relatively flat management structure allows fast decision making, team-working and support across the Group. We use a range of communication tools and encourage open, two-way communication. An annual employee survey helps us to identify and track where our policies and initiatives are working well and similarly which areas need improvement.
Successfully managing large scale employee integration is one of Capita’s greatest strengths, giving our clients confidence when making the decision to transfer their employees to us. The key to this is robust transfer procedures coupled with good communication. We consult with the potential transferees throughout the whole process, providing support and information and explaining the benefits of the transfer, as well as introducing them to our company culture and values.
Training is firmly embedded in all our businesses. This encourages and supports personal and career development, which in turn helps our employees achieve greater job satisfaction.
Our managers develop individually tailored career paths for our employees. We focus on 3 main types of training – specific job related skills, personal development and vocational and professional qualifications. In 2009, we invested £11.9m in employee training, providing 4,100 training days for our employees. Our Vocational Learning programme, introduced in 2007, has helped over 1,000 employees gain vocational qualifications.
We recognise and reward the individual performance of our employees, both financially and through our People Awards programme. Remuneration packages across the Group are set at levels that keep us competitive in each part of the business. For our senior people, responsible for the overall direction and performance of the Group or its component parts, a significant element of their financial reward is linked to the financial success of the Group.
We also offer our employees the opportunity to benefit from Capita’s success through our sharesave and ownership schemes. In 2009, the scheme had 11,042 participants, with 32% of our eligible employees taking part.
As a large employer operating in a number of countries, we believe that our success is a direct result of the experience and quality of our employees. We believe this is best achieved by developing our employees’ talents, whilst recognising their differences and benefiting from their unique skills. Where possible we ensure that our workforce reflects the composition of the local community.
Our equality and diversity policy sets out the behaviour we expect from our employees – to provide a workplace where people are treated fairly and equally, and are free from all forms of discrimination. We encourage all our employees to complete an online diversity training course. Compulsory completion of this training is required in all our businesses regulated by the Financial Services Authority.
Our HR policies meet UK, European and Indian employment law as well as international human rights legislation, including International Labour Organisation standards.
We encourage our employees to have a good work-life balance and offer them the flexibility to allow this. Where possible we support part-time working, job sharing and flexible working hours. We are committed to the health, safety and wellbeing of our employees and contractors. More than 3,500 managers and Health and Safety advisers have attended the Group’s Health and Safety management courses over the last 3 years, and specific training has been provided for any employees facing safety risks.