2. Diversity
Virgin is a diverse group of businesses with a huge range of products and services and a customer base from all walks of life. We recognise that to be the best we need to attract and retain the best people, and to ensure that our employees are as diverse as our customers.
We aim to reflect the diverse nature of society and to foster an environment which values people’s contribution irrespective of their age, sex, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion, marital status, ethnic origin or shoe-size. To support this, each Virgin company has policies in place which lay out the core principles of respect and fair treatment and we regularly train managers to ensure they’re confident in their role of managing others .
Virgin employs a high proportion of ‘younger’ workers - 58% of our employees are under the age of 35. We believe this is reflective of the youth associations of our brand, but we also know that it makes commercial sense to tap into a wider talent pool of older workers which, as well as giving us access to some great experience, may in turn have a positive impact on our retention figures.
We are proud of our well balanced female to male gender split within the group. In 2008 women accounted for 48.6% of our workforce. However some of our companies have skewed gender ratios attributable to their industry. For example, cabin crew are largely female and train drivers are mostly male. These companies need to do further benchmarking to compare themselves relative to industry norms and to address imbalances. Around 32% of our management population and 33% of our professional population are female which is about average compared to the companies that we benchmark against. In the future, we will continue to profile women working in senior roles within the group in order to provide role models for women in other Virgin companies.
As a group, our ethnicity mix appears to compare strongly against other companies (the median in Saratoga’s European database is approximately 88% white whereas only 70% of Virgin employees with a recorded ethnicity are white). However, this data is consolidated across all our territories and we recognise that the greater ethnic diversity of some of our regions including India and South Africa has an impact on the overall statistics.
3. Looking after our People
Our people’s wellness is of paramount importance to us. This includes every aspect of health – physical, mental and spiritual.
We strive to create sensitive working environments that are conducive to wellbeing; using ergonomic work- stations, natural light, plants, colour and music and visual entertainment where possible. Where uniforms are required, our remit goes beyond safety, comfort and identity – we want them to be attractive and nice to wear too.
Virgin companies around the world seek to protect the wellness of their people by educating them about illnesses or conditions which may affect them, including HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB, heart disease, cancer or health issues related to stress. In regions of the world with high HIV/AIDS prevalence, we provide access to counselling and testing on company premises to ensure that our employees are aware of how to protect themselves and can access the necessary advice and treatment. We strive to enable a climate of non-discrimination and harassment by ensuring that a programme of awareness and education exists for all our staff and by providing guidelines and training for managers in how to manage the issues of HIV/AIDS within the workplace.
With bases in different locations all across the UK, Virgin Trains has recently introduced an approach of local forums to work on local agendas. Since the needs of the people in Holyhead are very different from the needs of the people in Euston using a nation-wide approach to address diversity was nonsensical. Examples of initiatives prompted by feedback from the local Euston forum are:
• A fund which can be drawn on by employees needing to fly back to remote parts of the world for family emergencies
• English language e-learning available through the learning centre
• Employment materials translated into some of the 15+ languages spoken by employees working at Virgin Trains in Euston
• A decision not to use verbal and numerical reasoning as part of assessment procedures where a more straight forward job-based assessment would suffice and wouldn’t discriminate against those less proficient in written English or numerical skills.
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Lunch with Stephen Murphy (group CEO). Stephen in the middle surrounded by employees from Virgin Active, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Media, Virgin Money and Virgin Trains.
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