Our people

We recognise differences and celebrate diversity within our company. We’d like the employee mix to reflect our wider communities, because that will help us to understand our customers better and give them truly brilliant service.

We have four employee interest groups related to diversity: one focused on disability, another focused on gender and two in areas of belief - a Christian group and a Muslim group. We're hoping to form new groups in the future, focused on areas including age and race

We welcome regular feedback on relevant diversity issues within the organisation and we consult these groups when we’re developing relevant policies and processes

We’re partners with a number of charity organisations who are leaders in various areas of diversity, including Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion, Business Disability Forum, Stonewall and BITC which covers Opportunity Now and Race for Opportunity. They help us keep up to date with best practice and the latest research, and help us benchmark our organisation

We monitor diversity throughout the business. This helps us design policies, rewards and benefits that will suit all employees. It also ensures non-discriminatory practices and measures our success in accommodating and retaining people with different characteristics

We train our employees to help them give better service working with a wide range of people. This includes guides from charities, disability confidence training and a quiz to test unconscious bias

We're committed to making EE a great place to work and believe having employees who feel happy about working here plays a big part in this.

Ultimately we want to have engaged employees with a sense of purpose who can contribute to the success of their team and the company.

Successful employee engagement is a two-way process: it's about what we put in to the employee experience, and in return what staff invest and share back with us

We're committed to listening to our employees' views and opinions to help us understand how we can improve. We do this through:

• Employee insights from regular feedback surveys 
• Engagement champions in each of our business areas

Our engagement champions sit together on a board to share best practice, discuss challenges and agree employee experience improvements. Each champion then holds individual forums in their own area to collect the views of individual teams

As well as engaging our people in our business we encourage our employees to get involved with their local communities, and we run a programme that supports them in doing so. More information on this can be found in the Our Communities section.

We're committed to improving progress in employee engagement and measure it using regular internal Pulse surveys. At the start of 2012, all Chief Officers committed to a twelve month plan improve employee engagement within their own teams. They also committed to specific written targets, which were included in their individual commitments, which were then signed and published internally for all employees.

Unemployment is at a 17-year high, with 8% of the UK out of work. The situation is especially bad for 16- to 24-year-olds, with 22.6% unemployed, meaning 1 million young people are out of work (Office of National Statistics, August 2012).

We're looking to support this issue as follows:

Youth apprenticeships

We've launched a paid apprenticeship scheme for 16- to 21-year-olds in our Customer team which will offer opportunities across our six contact centre sites.

We completed a pilot in 2012 which saw us take on 50 apprentices for 15 months across our four North East contact centres and we've committed to recruiting 250 in 2013.

The programme involves paid time to attend fortnightly training with the learning providers, and participants work towards the Contact Centre Operations Level 2 national qualification.

In 2013 we plan to launch an apprenticeship scheme in our Retail team which will offer 100 places across our retail stores.

Work experience and inspiration

We offer work experience placements in our Customer team aligned with the Government’s Work Experience programme. We currently have 100 apprentices in our business and hope to offer over 100 more placements in 2013.

We run career inspiration sessions in schools and colleges.

We're launching a 'Business Basics Coaches' scheme which involves employees volunteering their time to run mock interviews in local secondary schools. We hope to have 200 in place by the end of 2013.

Our employees can volunteer with the charity Working Knowledge to help run enterprise sessions in colleges.

Fair and transparent recruitment

We encourage open recruitment as per the Government’s Social Mobility Compact

We have committed to supporting Plotr, the new Government-supported careers portal, which is set to launch in January 2013. Plotr will provide advice and opportunities to help young people build a career.

In addition to this we have an internal scheme called Fast Track that gives our employees the chance to change jobs and learn how different bits of the business function. The programme lasts for two years and in this time employees complete four six-month placements. The programme is comparable to a graduate scheme but it’s specifically for our employees and requires them to have performed well in our business rather than hold a degree.

We care about the health and wellbeing of our people and have a plan in place to make sure we're promoting a healthy workplace. 

We've set the goal to reduce absence by 25% over 5 years and we're delivering lots of activity to make sure we meet it. We are constantly improving our specialist support and introducing health and wellbeing seminars and coaching in to our business. 

This year we have introduced a new occupational health supplier, a resource available to all employees, along with our employee assistance programme. We've formed a roundtable steering group for all our health providers, encouraging mutual case management to ensure fast and efficient processes for our employees.

During 2012 we updated our restaurant offering with the introduction of nutritional information for employees, removing trans-fats from our kitchens and offering lower cholesterol options. We have also hired a dedicated nutritional and wellbeing advisor to plan on site events and improve information and service in our restaurants.

We have face to face and e-learning available on topics such as resilience, nutrition and managing under pressure, and on site sessions covering topics such as diabetes awareness, cardiac risk and mental health. We even run osteopath, physio, podiatry, yoga and zumba sessions across our offices. We've created a quarterly newsletter detailing upcoming events and reminding them about the support available so that all our employees know what's going on in this space.