Centrica offers its workforce multiple share scheme options to ensure they can choose one that best fits their needs.
The engineering firm and gas and electricity supplier has 21,000 UK-based employees and 1,000 employees across Ireland, Denmark and the US.
For its UK and Ireland staff, it offers a three-year sharesave scheme, which it relaunched in 2025. Employees can save up to £500 per month and can buy shares up to 20% lower than the market value. Since its relaunch, it has achieved a 42% participation rate.
The firm also operates a profit share scheme, where a percentage of its profits every year is given back to all of its employees in shares. In the UK, this is run through the free share part of its share incentive plan (Sip). Its latest award is worth £800 per employee, and since 2022, it has awarded more than £8,000 worth of shares.
Jane Evans, reward and executive compensation manager, explains that the firm’s employees have seen the value of the profit share award and that performance impacts the outcome of it.
“Additionally, we run share schemes outside of the UK through a restricted stock unit (RSU) plan,” she says. ”This covers all countries, with separate awards for countries where we only have a few employees, so they are still getting the benefit. Our sharesave schemes and Sips sit alongside each other to make sure employees can make the right choice for their time of life, whether they want to make a long-term saving or something on an ad-hoc or monthly basis.”
Centrica decided to introduce its profit share scheme because it wanted to celebrate its success as an organisation, while also giving something back to all of its employees through a meaningful reward which will continue to grow as the firm’s share price grows.
Its sharesave scheme was reintroduced to offer staff a long-term saving vehicle and to help their financial wellbeing over a longer period of time. Both schemes are spoken about regularly by senior leadership across the year through town halls.
Evans explains that the organisation tried to look more holistically at its schemes to make sure they were right for staff and provide them with choices.
“It’s been about enabling them to decide what the right scheme for them is and supporting that choice with financial education and support as well,” she says. ”We wanted to offer products to help them at any point in their working life with us that can be suited and adapted to their requirements as and when they might need it.”
Centrica partnered with financial wellbeing provider Wealth at Work last year when it reintroduced its sharesave scheme, enabling staff to request a follow-up one-to-one conversation about how it would impact them and help them in the future. This had a positive effect, because scheme participation was previously only at around 20%.
It also ensured it provided education about the schemes to employees to help them make an informed decision about whether to join.
The organisation wanted to be clear in describing what the schemes were about, but also how they could help staff and what the schemes would look like in the future, says Evans.
“If employees are going to be offered something, they should understand what it is. We also wanted to stop topics such as capital gains tax sounding complicated and heavy and take away myths surrounding risks. This proved valuable and contributed to participation going up,” she adds.
