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Talent

 

We aim to maximise the contribution of our employees by motivating them to strive for continued improvement, developing their skills and talents and promoting a culture that recognises and respects inclusion and diversity. In addition to obtaining the views of employees on an ongoing basis, we now carry out employee surveys on an annual basis to identify areas where we can improve.

• Talent and skills

  Identifying, recruiting and developing talented people is critical to our future success. We aim to support all our employees so that they can operate to the best of their abilities by creating an environment that allows them to realise their full potential.

 

We have strengthened our talent management processes in 2007/08, creating talent management plans for senior management and for business critical roles. In addition, for the first time, we conducted cross-business talent planning sessions using consistent processes to support senior management in developing employees within each business area and to address succession issues.

Our focus on developing the talent of our current and future business leaders has intensified, with continued growth in the number of participants in our leadership and management development programmes. The main areas of focus have been on our performance for growth programme, change management, leadership development and developing future leaders programmes, including the expansion of our change agent networks.

We continue to invest in the recruitment and development of skilled employees for the future, recruiting 157 trainees on to our apprentice, foundation engineer, graduate and student programmes in the UK in the past year. Our UK Foundation Engineering Programme, launched in early 2006, is designed to facilitate the entrance, training and progression of talented people into key engineering roles. In conjunction with Aston University and our industry sector skills council in the UK, Energy Utility Skills, we have also designed an industry specific foundation degree. We are pleased with the results so far.

Our US university programme, used for engineering recruitment, brought in 29 new engineers in 2007. With the completion of the KeySpan acquisition, we are working with our university partners with the aim of implementing best practice and ensuring consistency across National Grid.

Through our e-futures strategy, we continue to organise actively and sponsor a number of educational initiatives in the UK. These initiatives are designed to increase the number and diversity of young people interested in engineering careers and, ultimately, to create and sustain a greater pool of skilled talent from which we can recruit. Over the last year, over 4,900 young people have participated in these initiatives. Key to this success has been the dedicated involvement of our employees.

The employee engagement survey completed during the first quarter of 2008 will help frame the human resource initiatives we will put in place to enhance how employees are supporting the delivery of our vision.

• Engagement and performance

  To succeed, we need to engage our employees to strive for continued improvement. For that purpose our aim is to implement a world-class performance management process.

 

Our approach involves adopting National Grid wide integrated common performance processes and a single set of performance criteria, with pay linked to leadership qualities (how we deliver) as well as operational and financial performance (what we deliver), providing for clearer differentiation between levels of performance.

Employee engagement

With the implementation of National Grid’s new operating model the structure of our internal communications function has been reviewed and a new global internal communications team has been formed. Its role is to ensure that all our employees feel engaged and connected with our vision, strategy and objectives and live our core values. A survey was carried out to gather feedback on the communication routes that employees prefer and a suite of communication channels is now being rolled out across the whole of National Grid. The first edition of the new National Grid wide magazine, One, was produced in January 2008 and in March 2008, the second edition was accompanied by printed inserts for employees within each of our lines of business.

In February 2008, we conducted a comprehensive employee engagement survey, the first since completion of the KeySpan acquisition. Over 23,000 employees – 83.6% of our work force – took part in what will now be an annual exercise. This response rate was over 28% higher than that achieved in our last survey in 2006. The survey demonstrated that our employees see our safety focused and supportive work environment as real strengths. Where they think that we can make progress is in the areas of providing more open and honest communications, greater clarity about our vision and direction, and a stronger link between performance and reward. Action plans are being developed and built into managers’ objectives for the coming year.

Performance management

During the year we successfully launched our Performance for Growth programme involving over 200 senior managers across National Grid in both the UK and the US, led by our Executive Directors.

Following on from raising the bar on the performance of our leadership groups, through the Performance for Growth programme, we continue to expand and embed our performance management process. This includes an integrated common performance approach across the Company, including a single set of performance criteria, pay linked to leadership qualities, as well as operational and financial performance and a clearer differentiation between levels of performance. During 2007/08, significant effort was put into the calibration of performance across the levels and businesses with the objective of creating a fairer, more transparent and consistent process for evaluating and rewarding the performance of our employees.

• Inclusion and diversity

  In order to develop, recruit and retain talented people, we aim to achieve a more inclusive and diverse workforce, reflecting the composition of the communities in which we operate, and to be seen as an employer of choice across diverse communities.

Performance measures we use to monitor our objective of promoting inclusion and diversity include the percentage of female employees and the percentage of black and minority ethnic employees.

We are fortunate to have vibrant employee networks, focusing on gender, ethnicity and faith, disability, sexual orientation and new starters. They are helping us to understand better the different communities represented within our workforce and to provide support and information to our employees. Our field force pilot programme in the UK is developing an inclusion and diversity best practice toolkit that can be replicated across our operational sites.

In addition to the inclusion and diversity steering group that advises the Executive Committee on overall strategy and policy, we have created action councils in the UK and the US to help to coordinate initiatives in each of our locations, to identify new initiatives and to ensure consistency across lines of business. Progress in achieving our goals is monitored as part of our regular performance review process.

At 31 March 2008, 22.5% of our employees were female and 12.3% were from black and minority ethnic groups. This reflects the acquisition of KeySpan and so is not directly comparable with prior years. Excluding KeySpan, the proportions were 23.4% and 7.4% respectively, compared with 23.7% and 7.3% respectively at 31 March 2007 and with 23.4% and 6.7% respectively at 31 March 2006.

Inclusion and diversity
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Our progress has already received external recognition. We were in The Times newspaper Top 50 UK ‘Where Women Want To Work’ list for the second year running and we were shortlisted for a gender and ethnicity award. Both National Grid and KeySpan, prior to its acquisition, scored 100% in the US Human Rights Campaign’s 2007 Corporate Equality Index. We have also had positive media coverage of our work programme for people with disabilities.

In our 2008 employee engagement survey, 61% (2006: 83%) of respondents considered they were treated fairly by the Company, while 76% of respondents considered that their colleagues treated them with respect and dignity.