Social

As we evolve Babcock, we will create an organisation that is more integrated and collaborative, putting our people at the core of what we do. We will seek to develop and motivate a workforce that is built on trust and empowerment. Our new people strategy will offer a consistent and common solution for Babcock, providing the foundation to evolve the Babcock we want for the future.

We have significantly increased and improved employee communications to enhance and improve employee engagement. These include a weekly CEO vlog and the ‘Ask David’ initiative, where employees can email the CEO and get a direct response from him, as well as the launch of a Babcock app allowing more employees to access communication content.

Agile working will support our new business model and culture, providing an environment where employees are trusted to make decisions about how they work, balancing personal preferences with company and customer needs.

Maintaining and developing the capability and skills of our workforce is important to Babcock to ensure we deliver on our contractual and operational commitments.

We run extensive apprenticeship and graduate development programmes across the business. We recruited over 200 apprentices onto our apprenticeship programmes during the year. The majority of these were new starters on level two and three programmes, which create entry level opportunities to join the workforce.

We recruited over 250 graduates onto our graduate development programme this year, our largest intake to date. We have implemented a new behavioural programme for all graduates across the Group.

Our Gender Pay Gap results support that we have made progress in re-balancing the representation of our female staff across our business. In spite of this, the engineering sector, as well as other STEM disciplines in which we operate, continue to be male dominated and we therefore remain committed to driving down this gap.

We are pleased to see our gender pay gap has reduced year on year since first reporting in 2017. The mean gender pay gap has narrowed year on year from 16.2% in 2017 to 12.5% in 2020. Similarly, the median gender pay gap has narrowed year on year from 16.5% in 2017 to 12.3% in FY2020/21.

For further information please see our Gender Pay Gap Report.

The mission of the Group is that everyone goes “Home Safe Every Day”. Our vision is that Health and Safety is at the heart of all that we do. We have a high performing, open and just safety culture, with strong leadership at all levels, where our people are empowered to speak up, intervene, are heard, invested in and trusted.

Safety leadership is the primary driver for a positive safety culture. When we have a positive safety culture, we create an environment where we listen and take notice, we don’t walk by and we take time to stop and think. We collectively learn from our mistakes and successes to achieve our goals safely.

At Babcock we recognise the value for our people of working in an inclusive environment where differences are valued, where everyone can thrive, give their best and fulfil their potential.

We are committed to being a workforce that reflects the rich diversity of wider society and to be a business that inspires and shapes the communities in which we operate.

Volunteering is a rewarding and meaningful experience that supports employee development and their wellbeing.

We are proud that two of our employees have been awarded the prestigious British Empire Medal (BEM) for the important role that they played during the COVID19 pandemic.

In Australia many of our employees acted as volunteers in the bush fire rescue services. In Canada employees volunteered to support local homeless shelters and in South Africa we supported “adopt a school“, donated computers and provided maintenance.

Babcock encourage our employees to become STEM Ambassadors so they can support our schools engagement programme. In the UK this year we have trained over 200 STEM Ambassadors, bringing our total across the business to over 700 active Ambassadors. In Australia we are focused on female STEM programmes and Submarine in school programmes.

As the main employer in many of the communities we supported a range of different initiatives such as the Mayflower 400 celebrations in Plymouth, military open days (e.g. HMS Raleigh/HMS Collingwood) and The Trussell Trust (a foodbank charity). Our Chair was a founder member of the Covid Recovery Commission and we recognise the critical role that businesses have to play in supporting the needs of individual communities.

In Canada, we are in year two of the Progressive Aboriginal Relations Certification through the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business. We are focused on expanding the supply chain and have recently invested C$1m in an indigenous owned business based in Victoria, British Columbia. While in Australia, we are engaging with organisations targeted towards indigenous peoples and we are focusing on expanding our indigenous supply chain.

We are proud to be a major employer of service leavers, veterans and reserves and have in excess of 5,000 veterans in the UK workforce. In 2020 we enhanced our focus on Service Leaver and Veterans hires and recruited 164 declared service leavers and 380 veterans (total 544) representing circa 20% of our total UK hire for 2020.

We understand that Armed Forces spouses need flexibility when their service partner is posted to a new location, and we do our best to find alternative employment within the business if our employees need to move to accompany their partner to a new posting.

Babcock International’s Armed Forces Commitment

We are collaborating with and have built outstanding relationships with a broad range of academic establishments both local to our facilities and where subject matter expertise exists that complements our business. We support learning development opportunities by mentoring and helping to refine the teaching of courses as well as providing industrially related projects for students. In addition we fund and collaborate on a number of excellent research programmes developing impactful, sustainable solutions for implementation across all our sectors.

During FY21, we supported communities by sponsoring local events or providing donations to local causes. In FY22 we will be developing a Group-wide sponsorship and donations policy which will be aligned to our corporate purpose and this will be supported by locally led programmes.