Corporate Responsibility
Workplace
Our employees are core to the success of our business. We aim to achieve a working environment where our employees are respected, treated fairly, listened to and involved. We want all WHSmith employees to feel proud of the Company and responsible for its success.
Embedding our values
In 2004/05 we adopted four key business values: Customer Focus, Drive for Results, Value Our People and Accountability.
The values form a key part of every employee’s personal objectives and appraisals, as well as being incorporated into staff training and development programmes. This year, we have gone further in embedding the values within the business. In October we distributed Values postcards to managers to use with their teams. This enables them to send an immediate message to recognise staff demonstrating our values.
Communicating with and engaging our staff
As we work to deliver our turnaround plan, it is more important than ever that all employees are updated and informed on current business performance and progress in delivering key priorities throughout the year.The Executive Directors carry out regular briefings to ensure that staff are informed about business strategy and performance and also have an opportunity to ask questions or raise any concerns they may have. We do not carry out formal employee surveys; instead we provide staff with frequent opportunities to ask questions of directors and to express their views.
Valuing diversity
In February 2006 we established a diversity working group to develop initiatives and policies concerning gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and disability. The working group carried out a review of WHSmith’s current diversity policies and benchmarked our policies and performance against our peers. This review helped us to identify areas requiring improvement, which will form the basis of our diversity action plan. Developments already made this year include updating our suite of diversity policies to ensure they reflect new legislation, and the development of diversity awareness briefing sessions, due to be rolled out to all staff next year.
This year, Kate Swann, Group Chief Executive, was invited to become a member of the National Employment Panel Business Commission on Race Equality in the Workplace. The Commission’s overall objective is to advise the Chancellor on policies and practical measures to increase the recruitment, retention and progression of ethnic minorities in the private sector. A member of the Commission's Executive Committee, Kate has taken responsibility for providing the strategic lead on the national levers for driving change in the private sector.
Disability Discrimination
The business is continuing to work to improve the services that it provides to disabled customers. During the year, we have continued a rolling programme of capital improvements across our estate, including fitting hearing loops and installing automatic doors and lifts in some stores for those who are less mobile. We continue to provide training to staff so that they can better understand the needs of our disabled customers.Training and developing our staff
We have continued to strengthen our training and development support to ensure that all employees, whether in head office, stores or distribution centres, can access the appropriate development tools. For head office staff, we offer a variety of additional training programmes tailored to meet the needs of specific groups within the head office population. These include: - Coaching and mentoring programme for the senior management team to develop their skills in this area. 40 senior managers took part in workshops last year.- Fast-track Academy designed to prepare high potential employees for future senior management roles. Training and development for our store teams focuses on providing solutions which create a pipeline of talent to fulfil key roles within stores and retain talent within the business. At the core of this approach are development programmes designed to help staff in a specific role move on to the next level of seniority. These development programmes offer succession development for potential supervisors, potential store managers and potential area or district managers. 117 delegates attended the store manager development programme this year, with a running promotion rate upon completion of 69%.
Health and Safety
The Board is committed to maintaining high standards of health and safety in the business. The Management team, supported by professional safety advisers, monitor key safety performance indicators and an annual report detailing trends, performance and recommendations is presented to the Board. The business also has a properly constituted Health and Safety Committee that comprises employee representatives, management, trade union representatives and officials. This year the total number of reportable accidents reduced by a further 11% although the number of major injuries remained stable. Whilst we are pleased with the overall reduction in the coming year we will be focusing on making further improvements.
As the graph (below) shows, slips, trips and falls and manual handling account for 70% of our accidents. During the year we trained over 1,000 managers so that they can cascade safety training to their staff, with a particular emphasis on these two areas. Specific Health and Safety training has also been incorporated into our Management Development Programme for new store managers.