People
Our colleagues are at the heart of our business success. We invest in our people to enable them to reach their full potential, as well as providing them with a positive, non-discriminatory and safe working environment.
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Colleague engagement
and recognitionWe want our colleagues to be fully engaged with our business strategy and objectives. We have a regular programme of briefings, huddles, employee conferences and news updates via our enterprise social network, SSP Connections. In addition, we encourage our colleagues to raise any issues and concerns they might have so that we can address them and improve the colleague experience at SSP.
We have operated a European Work Council for several years. This forum is for SSP to provide timely and meaningful information and consultation to enhance the social dialogue with our European colleagues. The forum addresses transnational issues, which may affect employment, working conditions and the interests of its employees.
In some countries, we survey our colleagues to monitor levels of employee engagement. One example is SSP America, where we have been pleased to see improved results year-on-year, and we have used the feedback given as part of the survey to focus our efforts to improve the workplace.
Your Shout
In the UK we run regular listening groups called ‘Your Shout’, which take place at a local level every month. Feedback is escalated to the operations management and ultimately to our UK Chief Operating Officer. Based on this feedback, we made a number of commitments, which we have been putting in place throughout the past year, such as improvements to our Team Member bonus scheme.
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Learning
and DevelopmentSSP’s strategy continues to be to grow talent from within through a range of Learning & Development opportunities. Our global online learning platform, the SSP Academy, continues to grow supporting the development of our colleagues at all levels and enables us to deliver corporate and high risk training content in all markets. During 2019, we are planning to expand the SSP Academy platform in the USA and India. Within the UK, we have moved all of our key induction training online, giving new colleagues easy access to the training they need to do their job, and also opportunities to broaden their knowledge beyond the required basics. We will be working with our local teams in each country to support them with a similar model over the year ahead. Our global roll out of the SSP Academy will give us greater visibility and more accurate reporting for high risk and corporate training requirements.
Apprenticeship qualifications form a key part of our learning and development strategy, giving our team members the opportunity to develop their careers into junior managerial roles. We offer apprenticeship qualifications in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, France and the UK. During 2018, more than 200 colleagues commenced an apprenticeship. Qualifications includeTeam Member colleagues achieving a food & beverage apprenticeship, Team Leaders achieving a supervisory apprenticeship and front-line managers completing a management skill qualification. All these programmes support individuals to develop their personal skills and support career progression.
Across our operations, we have many partnerships at a local level to offer career opportunities to people from deprived communities. SSP Hong Kong is developing a partnership with the local NGO to help the recruitment of more minority groups to help grow diversity amongst our unit employees. In Sweden’s Arlanda Airport, we are working with Samhall, an NGO providing job opportunities for people with disabilities. In Spain, we partner with a number of organisations to bring the long-term unemployed back into the workplace.
In North America, SSP partners with Job-Corp, a no-cost education and career technical centre training programme that helps young people aged 16-24 to improve their lives through career technical and academic training. SSP provides mock interviews, and it also hosts job fairs and offers employment to qualified individuals. SSP America is also an employment partner with SARRC working to increase employment opportunities for adults with autism spectrum disorder. As well as providing employment opportunities in our culinary and unit teams, we have also held training courses for employees and managers to advocate, communicate and educate our staff on autism.
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Equal opportunities
and diversityOur Equality Policy outlines our expectation that all our employees should be treated with respect and be able to work in an environment in which they can realise their potential, free of harassment and discrimination in any form. We provide training and guidance to all our colleagues to ensure they understand and comply with this policy. One of the ways in which we measure the success of this approach is by monitoring the number of women in senior management roles. As of 30 June, when we collected data for the UK’s Hampton-Alexander Review, 14% of our Board of Directors and 25% of our Group Exec members were female. Since then, we have appointed Carolyn Bradley to our Board of Directors. Within our senior management population, 28% of colleagues are female.
