Our 2020 goal: Nurture an engaged workforce that represents the diversity of our customers and communities.
Diversity of thought, background and experience is essential to drive business performance. While the business case to create an engaged and diverse workforce is widely understood and accepted, there are many indicators that there’s a lot more work to do. The findings of the gender pay gap, the low representation of women in senior positions, the low uptake of women entering science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) roles, and the disability employment gap are a few of the examples showing a lot more progress is required.
At Virgin Media, we know building an inclusive environment is essential to our growth. We’re working on building a fully inclusive culture, celebrating everybody’s individuality and differences. We also believe we have a pivotal role within our industry to drive improved gender balance and help those with disabilities to thrive at work.
When we set our 5 in 5 goals we initially intended to tackle inclusion in the broadest sense and wanted to be able to show, in a measured way, how we are representing the customers and communities we serve. However, one year into our 2020 strategy it became clear we needed to concentrate our efforts to drive real impact. So we focused on creating a more gender balanced workforce where we employ and retain more women who can thrive at all levels of the business. In line with our strategic partnership with Scope, we’ve also made disability inclusion our big focus.
This focus was informed by 4 key factors;
We have underpinning gender and disability action plans. Our gender plan includes the actions outlined in our Gender Pay Gap report.
These are our performance highlights for 2019, the final year of our 2020 More Inclusive goal. If you are looking for information on our 2019 activity, take a look at the full report.
We've just launched our new Belonging strategy which has three core pillars; building a diverse workforce, creating a safe working environment where voices are heard and valued and creating belonging across our people, products and society.
This is our Belonging vision:
At Virgin Media, were building connections that really matter. We're building a place where everyone belongs. A place where everyone is empowered to bring and be their whole selves at work. Its the only way we can truly work as one team, creating a high-performing culture that'll bring business results like we've never seen.
We really want to understand our people and customers to see them as the diverse and unique individuals that they are, with varied backgrounds, experiences, races, gender identities, sexualities, ages, religions and abilities.
This is our moment our chance to make a permanent change, at scale, to improve our impact on the world and make sure no one is left behind on our journey to build meaningful connections.