Social

Employee inclusion and diversity

We see inclusion as an enabler and the key to creating the right foundations to attract and retain the best, diverse talent. We have appointed our first Global Head of Inclusion and Diversity (I&D) to develop our approach to I&D and to review, design and implement activities that enable Babcock to become a more inclusive business that values difference.

We remain firmly committed to embedding this approach and monitoring our progress.

Our gender targets are:

1. 30% women within senior leadership teams by 2025
2. 30% female representation at all levels by 2030
3. 80% disclosure of diversity data by 2025

Creating gender balance and closing the gender pay gap

Our intention is to create an environment which attracts and retains more women into the business and delivers a better gender balance. To make this a reality, we will continue to work with internal and external stakeholders, including our gender networks and organisations and review our policies and activities that inspire and support women – such as offering access to new ways of working.

We remain committed to closing the gender pay gap, growing our talent pipeline for the long term, developing our processes to attract female talent, and enabling employees to flourish and shape their own future within Babcock. Work to reduce our gender pay gap has seen year-on-year progress. Whilst we are pleased to see the median pay gap decreasing from 12.5% to 11.8%, we know we still have a way to go.

For further information please see our Gender Pay Gap Report.

Group-wide sponsorship

During the latter part of the year we developed our internal charity and sponsorship guidelines. The criteria were broadened and clarified to align to our corporate Purpose – to create a safe and secure world, together.

We are committed to the communities in which we operate and the broader interests of the customers we serve. As good corporate citizens, we want to make a genuine difference by supporting our communities and helping them rebuild following COVID-19. Our new criteria are based on supporting military charities and events and also protecting communities around the world by focusing on local charities where we have our sites or attract our employees from.

Volunteering approach

Volunteering is a rewarding and meaningful experience that supports communities and brings personal reward for our employees, enabling them to develop new skills and personal wellbeing.

We want to make a genuine difference to our communities and help them to thrive and are currently developing a group-wide volunteering approach, supporting one of our key Principles, ‘be kind’, to facilitate every employee to volunteer one day per year.

Support for Armed Forces, veterans and reserves

Babcock is committed to honouring and supporting the Armed Forces Covenant and the Armed Forces community. We recognise the value serving personnel, both regular and reservists, veterans and military families contribute to our business and country.  We also support the employment of service leavers, veterans, and members of the Volunteer Forces by providing a guaranteed job interview where applicants meet the minimum requirements of a role.  Members of the Armed Forces community and their families can rely on our support.

We are proud to currently employ 186 service leavers and 322 veterans in the business. We support the UK’s Armed Forces and Reservists and continue to actively back our reservist employees. We have approximately 43 volunteer and 12 regular reserves and around 14 uniformed cadet instructors in the business. We provide a minimum of 10 days’ special paid leave per year.

Our armed forces commitment.

Partnership with academia

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.  Last year we announced our strategic partnership with the University of Strathclyde, one of the leading international technology universities. Babcock and Strathclyde have been working together for more than 30 years, and formalising the partnership will strengthen existing educational programmes for degree apprenticeships and industry placements and build on existing innovative research projects in nuclear, advanced manufacturing, space, and security-related technologies.

Our recently opened state-of-the-art Additive Manufacturing Centre is part of an innovative partnership with Plymouth Science Park. The partnership builds on our strong relationship with the academic and technology community across the south west and the local community around our Devonport dockyard. Last year we also launched an exciting new project management degree apprenticeship programme at our Devonport facility in partnership with the University of Plymouth.

Early careers

Last year saw the implementation and introduction of a dedicated one Babcock Early Careers Team responsible for the development of our early-career’s talent nationally as well as globally. We recruited 263 apprentices globally during FY22, bringing the total number of apprentices to 954 across the business.  Emphasis has been on expanding the apprenticeship offering with the intent to offer programmes starting from level two all the way to level seven.

One hundred and thirty five graduates entered onto our graduate development programme this year and have been assigned a buddy and formal mentor to accelerate their learning throughout the programme – which in many cases lead to professional registration such as chartership.

Focus for FY23 and beyond

Our vision for the future is to be a strong, safe and unified global business that delivers year-on-year sustainable growth with better outcomes for our culture, customers and communities.

Championed by the Board and our Group Executive Committee, our leaders are encouraged and empowered to act in line with our Principles and to role-model inclusive behaviours. They will be supported by our three pillar approach to deepen inclusion and drive results.

To learn more please see our Social download.

Gender diversity

We are proud of our work on gender diversity which is a key business priority and we know there is still much to do to deliver gender balance through attraction and retention of female talent.

Our global workforce diversity has improved over the past year, moving from 19% in 2021 to 21% in 2022. This is in spite of an overall headcount reduction through 2021 that focused on business functional areas and tend to be female dominated.

View our Gender diversity tables.

Employee engagement

Our Purpose and Principles were formally launched this year. Developed with the help of hundreds of employees across the Group, we are continuing to drive engagement in our culture and bring it to life through town halls, vlogs, videos, workshops, meetings, webinars, team discussions and focused weeks.

We are now implementing a global platform to establish a baseline of engagement (through an annual survey) and consistently measure and benchmark ourselves externally and track progress. This and other insights will inform much of our people decision-making as well as our understanding of areas for improvement. They will form an important part of the conversations our Leaders and Managers have about our culture.

Health and safety

The appointment of a Global Safety, Health and Environmental Protection Director and formation of a central team has brought additional focus to the safety improvement programme. We have introduced a suite of corporate standards that form the Babcock safety framework and developed a scorecard of leading and lagging performance indicators to help monitor the business. These form part of the Babcock safety and management system and enable us to create a safe and secure world, together.

We have also moved to an internationally recognised HSE accident categorisation method in order to be able to benchmark against peers. In addition to recording all accidents, we have introduced metrics to track the level of proactive reporting.

You can view our Health and Safety performance here.

Indigenous peoples

In Australia, we partner with Supply Nation to expand our supply chain to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-owned businesses across Australia. We have an equivalent commitment to Māori and Pasifika-owned businesses in New Zealand through the Amotai initiative. Babcock also continues to actively support Indigenous students to increase their career opportunities, through sponsorship to Engineering Aid and Yalari in Australia.

Babcock Canada renewed our commitment to the Phase II stage of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business’ (CCAB) Progressive Aboriginal Relations (PAR) program.  Babcock Canada has also implemented an Indigenous Cultural Awareness training program. This program has been added as a mandatory training requirement for all employees. Babcock Canada also continued to strengthening our internal procurement policies to identify and incorporate more Indigenous businesses.

STEM

Babcock encourage our employees to become STEM Ambassadors so they can support our schools engagement programme. Commitments to STEM and the communities in which we operate translates into 160 newly trained STEM ambassadors, bringing our total to over 738 ambassadors across the business and 30,000 students engaged in our STEM activities.

The Clyde STEM Coordination Team launched its first STEM activity catalogue, which is designed to help teachers successfully deliver STEM activities with their students. We have evolved the way we conduct community outreach to encourage more take-up of STEM subjects and to help address diversity disparity and improve social mobility.

Talent and development

To enable us to take on the challenges of today and the future, it is important for us to build and maintain the capability and skills of our workforce. In FY22 work was carried out on the kind of leader required to drive the future success of the business and focused on understanding the profiles of the leaders we have today.

We measured drivers, personality traits and competencies through a self-report tool. Seventy of our most senior leaders were assessed by evaluating their technical and behavioural skills and then compared to our future leader profile as well as a FTSE100 leader benchmark.  As a result, we were able to develop our leadership capability by clarifying and resetting the expectation of what it takes to be a successful high-performing leader in Babcock and understanding what is needed to deliver our strategy.