Recruiting and retaining excellent people

We employ around 46,000 people across our operations in the UK, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Canada and the Caribbean.

As part of our effort to retain talented people, we filled 31% of UK positions with internal employee moves in 2010. This was the result of a commitment to advertise all positions internally for a minimum of two weeks, sending weekly vacancy emails and offering support sessions to those who were in the process of being redeployed.

In 2010, 901 positions were made redundant as a result of rescaling our operations. The redeployment programme helped to lessen the number of redundancies due to business restructuring. The Group’s people turnover was 9.1% against a target of 10%.

As some of our business projects are short term, when a contract ends we strive to find further work for our people within Carillion. This is one way in which we let our people know how much we value them. In cases where this is not possible, we provide at least 30 days’ notice.

In Canada and the Caribbean, the minimum notice periods are stipulated in collective agreements. We manage approximately 50 collective agreements, which stipulate notice periods between two to 20 weeks specific to layoff notices. In MENA, notice periods range between two weeks and three months depending on job grade.

Graduate Internship Scheme

In 2010, we launched a Graduate Internship Scheme, replacing our traditional graduate scheme, and focusing more on local recruitment. We recruited 83 graduates that were employed through a mixture of traditional graduate recruitment and internships. Each intern is recruited on a 13-week contract with a view to being taken on permanently.

The scheme enables both managers and graduates to trial the working arrangements before committing to permanent employment. It benefits the graduates who receive real job experience and are able to develop specific skills. It is also a more efficient way to ensure we recruit the best graduates into the business.

Equality and diversity

Carillion fosters a working environment in which all our people are treated with courtesy, dignity and respect. For us, equality and diversity should not only be valued, but embraced and actively managed.

In 2010, we increased the number of people trained in equal opportunities and diversity using e-learning. In addition, managers and supervisors discussed these issues in Team Talk sessions organised across the Group.

Our Equal Opportunities and Diversity Policy (44.6 Kb) sets out our principles indicating that we want our company to reflect the diverse society we live in. One example of enacting the policy is our focus on training and employing people who are jobless, homeless or ex-offenders.

We look to ensure our workforce is inclusive. By monitoring the diversity statistics of our leadership development programme, we make sure that women and minority groups are not discriminated against in their career development.

Also, for our businesses which have a population of migrant workers who do not speak English as a first language, we provide documentation in their own language. In Carillion MENA, we have published key safety information in a variety of languages including Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu.

As part of our efforts to ensure equality, Carillion continually strives to eliminate all bias and unlawful discrimination in relation to job applicants, employees, business partners and members of the public. In 2010, our UK employees made three claims of discrimination (compared to 29 in 2009), of which two resulted in disciplinary proceedings. All claims were addressed in accordance with agreed internal procedures.

We also train our people on our policies concerning human rights, and during 2010, we spent 5,443 hours training our people in the UK, and 168 hours in the Caribbean. We will be rolling out similar training in Canada and MENA in 2011.