Our people
Developing, rewarding and retaining our colleagues, ensuring they are fully engaged to drive our long-term sustainable growth ambitions
Key Facts
624
colleagues graduated to management roles
UK National Call Centre
Awards finalists
A Great Place to Work
Colleague engagement is vital to our success as a business. As such, it is a measure in our Executive bonus scheme and we set targets for improved engagement right across the organisation. We run an annual colleague engagement survey, administered and analysed by a third party, which provides us with reports at team level.
We create an environment which encourages colleagues to feed back to us about how we can make Halfords an even better place to work, and this is clearly successful as last year we had a survey response rate of 93%. Our engagement index of 79% demonstrates that the vast majority of our colleagues enjoy working at Halfords. Following the distribution of reports across the business, every team produces an engagement action plan which includes actions that they can take locally to improve colleague engagement.
Key themes are also pulled out at a Company level in order to inform improvements for the year ahead. This could include changes to reward, learning and development, tools and equipment, leadership development right through to physical changes to buildings or our IT provisions. Managers who achieve significant improvements to colleague engagement receive recognition and for those managers who receive poor engagement results a development plan is put in place to support them to improve this. Our Retail business enters The Sunday Times Best Big Companies survey and in 2020 we placed in Best 25 Big Companies to Work For Category.
As in previous years, our commitment to providing best-in-class training and ensuring the health and well-being of our colleagues is demonstrated by a range of achievements and awards. Furthermore, our efforts to drive improvements to our gender pay gap have continued to deliver tangible results.
- Our in-house training and development academies clocked up 1,409 days of upskilling to 6,175 colleagues.
- Our gender pay gap is well below the national average, with our mean hourly rate for women being 2.29% less than men.
- Silver Level employer in the MOD's Employer Recognition Scheme, and also nominated for The Sun's Military Awards.
Finding, Supporting and Developing Great People throughout their Halfords Journey
Our aim is to be an inclusive employer of choice, and we strive to give all of our colleagues an equal opportunity to build a rewarding career as a 'super-specialist' within an inspiring and diverse team.
The key to achieving this is training, and we continue to make substantial investments in this area. Our technical and leadership development programmes are central to our success in this area, and we have a range of initiatives in place in order to promote and increase the diversity of our employee base.
Equal Opportunities for All
We are committed to providing equality of opportunity to colleagues and potential colleagues.
This applies to recruitment, training, career development and promotion, regardless of physical ability, gender, sexual orientation or gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, race, religious beliefs, age, nationality or ethnic origin. Full and fair consideration is given to employment applications by people with disabilities wherever suitable opportunities exist, having regard to their particular aptitudes and abilities. Our Group Diversity Policy is reviewed annually by the Board and training and career development support is provided where appropriate, further details can be found in the Nomination Committee Report.
Should a colleague become disabled, efforts are made to ensure their continued employment with the Group, with retraining provided if necessary.
Always Talking
Excellent colleague communication continues to be a key area of focus.
We have an established framework of internal communication channels which seek to inform, engage and inspire – both on matters of concern to colleagues, plus wider business performance.
We seek to encourage the engagement of every colleague to ensure the delivery of the Board's commitment to high standards of customer care and service provision. This includes a programme of regular conferences to share progress, strategy and direction; a monthly magazine for all Group colleagues; team meetings known as 'huddles'; a weekly blog from the Chief Executive Officer, as well as Intranet and interactive Yammer channels to share operational information and drive positive culture.