Diversity & Inclusion

We recognise that our customer base is diverse and strive to create a workforce that reflects this to increase customer responsiveness, empathy and satisfaction.

We are an equal opportunities employer, committed to increasing the diversity of our workforce. However, some groups are less well represented than others, in particular women in our UK operations and in the Board room.

Through our succession planning programme, we aim to improve the diversity of representation in our senior management positions. We are also working with Women 1st and the 'Step Up' course, a skills sector programme to support female junior managers develop essential skills required to become future senior managers and board members.

We have also been looking at our recruitment processes to ensure they do not discriminate against female candidates. Evidence to date suggests that our new online recruitment processes are encouraging more women to seek work with us. We monitor the number of women who apply to us and their success rate. The current figure lies between 13% and 14%, although early indications for 2012 suggest this may be improving. The success rate of female applicants is currently higher than their male counterparts. This year one third of our graduate intake was female.

To address some of the other barriers that might discourage women from joining the driving workforce, we are consulting with the trade unions on the role played by shift patterns and working hours in deterring women from entering the driving profession and how these barriers can be overcome.

New diversity and equality training for supervisors and management has been developed and is available across the Group to raise awareness and the importance of diversity within the workplace.

We also participate actively in diversity discussions with our industry peers. We are represented on the Railway Stakeholder LGBT forum and Glasgow Employer Diversity Forum, and regularly attend Stonewall events.

We are also working to improve our diversity data. For the first time this year we have obtained initial data on the percentage of females within the global management population (currently 17%).

Further diversity data can be found here.