Five ways Good Energy is working to be more inclusive
Inclusion is at the heart of Good Energy. It’s long been one of our four values — fair, determined, straightforward and inclusive. It is also a hot topic that we are happy to be hearing more and more about.
With an issue so important to our people’s happiness, we like to regularly take a step back and think, what more can we do to support inclusion?
Here are some of the ways we’re supporting and developing our inclusive culture.
1) Learning how to better attract female tech talent with Bath Spa University
We’ve been working with students from Bath Spa University on a project to understand how we can encourage and attract more female talent into IT and digital. The students have completed deep dive investigations, analysis and research to provide some helpful suggestions that we can implement to help grow our female talent in tech.
These include revising our careers page to better reflect our culture such as demonstrating how we’ve increased flexibility in the way we work and how we’re living out our purpose with our range of amazing benefits.
The project gave us a lot of food for thought and highlighted the importance of sharing as much of our culture and ways of working as possible, to really show off our inclusivity. It was a fantastic opportunity for us and was an honor to work with the next generation. This gave the students experience to work on a real-life project that they can add to their portfolio to help them pursue a career.
2) Benefits that work for everyone
We’re passionate about rewarding our people. That’s why we regularly review our benefits to make sure they are fit for purpose and provide the best offering for everyone.
These include enhanced maternity, paternity, and shared parental leave as well as coaching to help support returning parents. We also provide flexible working, a £500 annual hybrid-working allowance, supporting with the cost of working from home and travel to the office. That is in addition to a £250 green allowance rewarding employees who travel to work in a green way, are a customer, or generate energy themselves.
Access to a team of Mental Health First Aiders means our people should always have someone they can talk to, and our Employee Assistance Programme provides coaching sessions to all employees. We’re always looking to introduce inclusive benefits that can support all, whilst also providing choice.
3) Developing our people
Development is key to growth, change and new opportunities, all of which is important for any inclusive business. So how do we support the development of our people?
We have introduced a Signature Skills programme for everyone, which gives employees the skills and confidence they need to succeed in having straight talking and coaching conversations.
Our internal Good Learning site offers access to a variety of resources for formal and informal learning, developing skills and knowledge for our people’s roles and beyond. And we run frequent Good Learning live sessions with internal and external speakers on a wide range of topics to inspire and develop a wider understanding of our industry and of ourselves.
This year we introduced our £500 annual development allowance, which employees have the choice to spend it on training that will support their growth and development.
With an active learning community, we also offer a range of different development options based on including leadership coaching and our new Good Career programme which supports people to build their career with us by building self-awareness, career direction and understanding of our business and the opportunities within it.
Development is personal. That’s why to make sure everyone feels included it’s not about giving everyone the same but tailoring to their needs to create a culture where everyone feels valued and included.
Read about Araba’s journey from Clean Energy Specialist to Business Account Manager.
4) Introducing Inclusion Champions
In late 2020 we refreshed our Diversity and Inclusion plan. As part of this we asked people across the business to volunteer to be part of a working group. Our Inclusion Champions are responsible for helping us drive our plan and for engaging our people along the way. This includes a range of initiatives across education and development, engagement, representation, selection and monitoring, all designed to improve the inclusiveness of our culture and customer propositions, and to increase the diversity of our workforce.
With a clear plan to improving our diversity and inclusion, the champions discuss ideas and experiences that will help to strengthen our strategy.
5) Using our data
As the great poet Maya Angelou said, “you can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.” And for us, that means looking at the data.
Through using data from candidates at recruitment stage, we’re better positioned to prevent any bias in our process from advertising, through to offering. Candidate data has also highlighted the areas we need to improve. For instance, low numbers of diversity in applications could suggest that we’re not reaching as many candidates as possible, whereas themes could suggest a potential issue in the recruitment process.
By using data, we can put in place tangible steps to ensure that we’re moving forward, being as inclusive as possible in our advertising, recruitment and ways of working.
If you want a job to believe in, with a company committed to inclusion, check out our careers page to see if there’s a role to suit you.
