Event: Utility Week HR Forum

Roundtable: Utility Week HR Forum; Birmingham; 13 September 2016 Utilities need to provide a balanced and diverse working environ­ment to attract, retain and make the most of their employee base.

HR is a profession that struggles with a woolly image. Often it is not seen as a strategic function, but rather an administrative one that processes payroll and issues employment contracts.

If it was ever deserved, this image is now obsolete. HR professionals in utilities must enable their organisations, and the sector as a whole, to respond to the enormous challenges of changing business models, transforming technology, escalating demand for infrastructure investment and ever increasing requirements for organisations to prove they offer ethical, inclusive employment environments.

This means developing structured, data-led approaches to skills and resource planning for increasingly complex roles. It means having the ability to ramp up resources at times of high demand, and have a plan for what happens to that resource when big projects are over. It means tackling difficult-to-grasp problems around inclusiveness and attractiveness to women and other workforce minority groups.

With these challenges in mind, it was fitting that Utility Week’s HR Forum opened with a scene-setting presentation from Energy & Utility Skills Group chief executive Nick Ellins, who outlined the imperative for a collective sector approach to strategic workforce renewal.

The well-worn issues around skills gaps and sparse engineering talent pools were central to Ellins’ presentation, but they were framed in a new light. With 57 per cent of the government’s multibillion-pound national infrastructure plan expected to be delivered by the energy and utilities sector, Ellins pointed out that there was no accompanying big picture strategy for delivering the “right people with the right skills in the right place at the right time at a sustainable price”. Without such a plan, Ellins said, the realisation of national social and economic aspirations are “unachievable and unaffordable”.

Acknowledging the ongoing work within individual organisations to promote careers and fill an increasing number of skills-related vacancies (these are higher in utilities than any other sector in the UK), Ellins argued that only through collective action can utilities hope to redress the imbalance between the current sector workforce profile and the demands of tomorrow.

Stepping into the breach to facilitate collective action, Energy & Utility Skills is creating the sector’s first strategic workforce renewal document. Not just a skills strategy, it will be aimed at stakeholders in the sector’s regulators, Treasury, Cabinet Office and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority.

The document is expected to be published by Christmas and Ellins urged the HR leaders gathered before him to take ownership of it and help transfer it from policy to practice in as short a time as possible, taking up their rightful role in strategic planning for their organisations and the sector.

Delegates were responsive to this call and showed keen interest in other projects being supported by Energy & Utility Skills to neutralise the “war on talent” and share skills resources. One approach has been to establish a Talent Resource Network, which carries details – accessible to all employers – of thousands of individuals who have expressed interest in entering the energy and utilities sector but may not yet be fully qualified to do so.

Almost a thousand of these individuals are ex-military personnel with plenty of core competencies that chime closely with the Stem (science, engineering, technology and maths) capabilities utilities so sorely need.

The scope for capitalising on ex-military skills seeking civilian reinvention was made clear in a later presentation delivered by Lt Col Richard Jones.

Not only do military recruits often have hard-to-secure technical training, but military approaches to teamwork, strategic thinking and leadership could be usefully applied to companies. New corporate development days from the Reserves service aim to prove this point.

Jones’ presentation offered an unusual twist on the usual tack of school engagement and vocational training, which most companies follow in order to boost Stem capabilities. However, it’s not just the skills of current and future employees that is challenging HR professionals. It’s also their make-up.

The difficulties faced by companies struggling to increase the diversity of their employee base was a key theme of many presentations and was the overriding talking point at the VIP dinner, held for speakers and select guests the evening before the Forum.

Speaker focus

Rosie MacRae, head of diversity, SSE

SSE has led the utilities sector in publishing information about its workforce gender ratios and pay gaps. Rosie MacRae’s presentation at the HR Forum sharing how the company is trying to move forward with its performance in both areas was one of the highest rated by delegates in their feedback.

MacRae highlighted that diversity and equal pay statistics can be misleading. SSE knew that 31 per cent of its workforce were female, but digging deeper into the numbers if found that less than 10 per cent of them earned more than £40,000.

MacRae said there was a realisation that progression to positions of influence was a problem for female employees. In response, it published an ambition to see 25 per cent of its women earning more than £40,000 by 2025.
Having committed itself to increasing “difference” within its workforce, MacRae said SSE conducted a review of how it was spending money projecting its corporate image to the public.

This revealed that a large emphasis had been placed on sports sponsorship in the past but that the sporting events were all male – for instance, large rugby and golf tournaments. Rather than moving away from its sports sponsorship approach, SSE decided to echo its challenging diversity ambitions in its external messaging. It struck a four-year sponsorship deal with the women’s FA. SSE’s support for this competition not only funds major events but also a grass roots scheme to encourage young girls to take up football.

“People in other parts of the organisation – sales, marketing, finance – have stopped looking at what happened last month and are using data to create a forward-looking view of what is likely to happen in the next six or nine months. In HR we have always tended to look backwards – looking at what turnover and absence rates have been rather than what data is telling us they will be. Predictive analytics could change this.” 

Andy Campbell, HCM strategy director, Oracle

“If you can’t keep up to date with these very significant [whistleblowing] issues, are you encouraging a speak-up culture? Are you encouraging transparency? Or are you really saying: ‘I don’t really want you to worry too much about this.’”

Wendy Addison, International whistleblowing research unit advisory board and lecturer

Five key points to take away

1. The challenge of workforce renewal is increasing because we are not looking to replace skills like for like. Job roles and skills for tomorrow will be different.

2. A proactive approach to whistleblowing can help develop a “listen up” culture and reinforce the development of desired employee behaviours.

3. The “shadow of the leader” is important. People interpret their organisation through their leaders, and line managers have a particularly important leadership role.

4. The role of the manager will continue to change in a technologically advanced world. A decline in “deference” and a trend for “immediacy” will drive towards analytics-based management delivering “on-demand” employee support.

5. Whatever approach is taken to increasing diversity, avoid putting it in the corporate social responsibility “box”. It is a real business activity with real benefits.