Facilities management and professional services firm Mitie employs around 77,500 people across the UK. Most of these employees work in frontline roles such as cleaning, security, engineering and waste management.
Inclusion and diversity are important to the organisation and it recently announced a five-year strategy to promote these values across the business. Central to the strategy are some ambitious targets including increasing the number of black, Asian and minority ethnic (Bame) colleagues and women in its group and executive leadership teams to 20% and 40% respectively, from base levels of 3% and 18% in the 2018/19 financial year.
Jasmine Hudson, group HR director at Mitie, says: “Having a more diverse workforce brings different skills, perspective and life experience to the business, which in turn, drives higher performance in our teams. By enabling everyone to bring their true selves to work it also helps to create a great place to work.”
Reward and recognition is a key part of its five-year strategy, with the organisation looking to create a proposition that rewards the right behaviour and celebrates inclusion. A review of employee benefits forms part of this, with Hudson adding that some of the planned work was accelerated as a result of the pandemic.
This included rolling out life assurance to all employees who didn’t already have cover; providing access to a virtual GP service for all employees and their households; and extending the employee assistance programme to everyone who joined following the acquisition of Interserve. “The extension of these benefits was already included in our five-year diversity and inclusion strategy but, in light of the pandemic, it was really important that we reacted quickly to protect our employees’ wellbeing.”
Hudson is also overseeing the development of a new career framework that will ensure a more consistent and transparent approach to how employees are managed and rewarded. “This will allow employees to see their career path more clearly and create a consistent approach to succession planning,” she adds. “Additionally it will ensure that everyone, no matter their background, can succeed.”
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