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At TECHNAL, when it comes to Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIB) our long-term goal is to be a mirror of our society.
To achieve our ambition of creating an inclusive work environment, we have a strong action-plan organised around a dedicated DIB Working Group to screen our practices, increase internal awareness and train our HR team and Leaders.
We also have two gender-based goals. We aim to have 50% of our new hires as female by 2025 and to reach 27% female employees during the same year.
Our focus is on our Operations and Sales Team where gender diversity is weakest in the Building & Construction Industry.
To facilitate this, an internal Women's Network is led by local representatives with the wider network involving the wider Hydro Building Systems markets. This aims to take direct feedback from female employees across the business and to ensure that all women have an understanding environment to speak up about the concerns they may have when working within the company.
So far, we have implemented a number of initiatives following feedback from these sessions. These include free period products available to visitors and employees in female bathrooms, female fit clothing for the Operations Team, flexible working policy to enable those who require support with work-life balance to maintain their career and improvements to our parental leave to ensure equality and support is provided to secondary caregivers.
This year, members of our Social Commitee organised a Bake Sale on International Women's Day. Our goal was to enable discussions on topics that affect mostly women, but to also raise money for worthy charities.
In total, over £600 was raised over a 3-day period for Women's Aid. This included donations from employees as well as a donation matched by the company.
Diversity is also about ethnicity, national origins, gender and sexuality.
At TECHNAL globally as of 2021, our employees represent 61 different nationalities. As for us, being a workplace fostering collaboration between all nationalities and generations is a priority. It's why we put a high focus on integrating more young people as apprentices and trainees, passing our knowledge and skills on to future generations.
We have many of our employees who have relocated to the UK in order to develop in their careers. We ensure that opportunities are available to not only welcome those from other countries, but also that those based in the UK also have the same option, should they wish, to relocate to other markets within the Hydro Group.
We have a diverse workforce, and want to ensure that everyone feels like they belong. We celebrate Pride annually to not only recognise the LGBTQA+ community that we have in our workforce but to also recognise the struggles that are faced by so many globally.
TECHNAL UK employs over 100 people with most based at our Tewkesbury and Wakefield sites. Although most of our employees live locally, we employ a truly global and diverse workforce with employees who have relocated to the UK to further their careers.
Our people are the core of our business with many people choosing to stay with TECHNAL for much of their working life. Our aim is always to develop and promote from within wherever we can, with progression from a responsibility, supervisory, technical and educational perspective formally reviewed as part of a goal setting, review, evaluation and calibration cycle annually.
In the last year alone, we have delivered over 430 hours of training via our internal system. We have also delivered many further hours of "on the job" training and internally and externally delivered course based training for specific roles. This has included CIPD, Building Safety, Accountancy (AAT), Facade Engineering, Instructional Techniques, First Aid, Fire Marshal, IPAF and more.
All employees joining the business are given an induction focused on Health & Safety, Sustainability, Human Rights, Corporate Responsibility, and Business Ethics. On joining, all employees sign a company-wide handbook, ensuring they will be bound by our Business Ethics Policies and Code of Conduct. Further role specific training and formal qualifications continue an employee's development.
All new starters since 2020 have been assigned a group wide Sustainability course, focusing on Hydro's commitment to a sustainable future. Over 50% of our employees have now completed this course, as well as training on Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging and our Code of Conduct.
Norsk Hydro aims to be a leader in our industry for occupational health and safety. This will be achieved through consistent improvement of the management process, committed and viable leadership and through full engagement of our employees.
Our entire business is active in identifying safety risks, and our risk KPI remains an important leading indicator enabling us to manage and monitor processes and tasks with high inherent risks.
In 2018, New Chapter was established and aims to create a common platform and identity for our 36,000 employees across the world. Hydro's value platform, The Hydro Way and visual profile including our logo have been renewed, along with strategic directive Bigger, Better, Greener and stakeholder positioning strategy.
Our Fit4Future initiative aims at step-change focus areas, including strategic fit, differentiation and simplification. Our common process for people performance and development, My Way, and our learning and development platform, Hydro Academy, have been implemented across the entire business.
Our global organisation represents diversity in education, experience, gender, age, and cultural background. This encourages our innovation, learning and improves our customer understanding. Through inclusion and diversity, we let all employees know they're valued for who they are, and that everyone contributes to the success of our business strategy.
As a global company with mining interests, ensuring we conduct ourselves responsibility is important to us across our value chain. We consider our impact on society, spanning from construction to divestment, as well as the potential to exposure to corruption and human rights violations, within our own operations and in the supply chain.
Our compliance system ensures all persons acting on Hydro’s behalf comply with applicable laws and regulations, as well as within the requirements adopted by Hydro.
Our corporate social responsibility (CSR) is built on the aim of making a difference by strengthening our business partners and local communities where we operate. To do this, we target the fundamental drivers of long-term development. In line with our stakeholder expectations and through strong partnerships we aim to:
Our commitment to internationally recognising human rights provides a platform for our approach and initiatives. All people are entitled to basic rights and freedoms. This provides a solid framework to assess opportunities and risks in developed and developing countries.
We achieve our ambitions through partnering with people and communities. Through transparent dialogue, collaboration and by building, we can make a positive impact for all communities we work in and promote social change.
We’re committed to contributing to quality education and capacity building for 500,000 people in our communities and for our business partners from 2018 to 2030.
Our teams regularly take part in charity and awareness events. In the past 12 months, these have included:
To support the local community where our head office is based in Tewkesbury, we are undertaking a number of initiatives.
These include:
Our employees are the life blood of the business. We provide support and run various initiatives for all employees including:
