Our colleagues

Our people are what makes our business successful and developing an outstanding team is at the forefront of our refreshed business strategy. We are focused on creating a great place to work, recognising the contribution individuals make and creating opportunities for progression and development. Creating a long-term sustainable business relies on attracting and retaining colleagues with the required skills and behaviours which are aligned with our RIGHT values.

Training and development

During FY22 we saw our first cohort of ‘moving up’ colleagues complete their year-long training programme and will now go on to progress to Business Manager positions within our retail stores. This programme is an important investment as we work to strengthen our succession pipeline in retail.

To set our colleagues up for success, we are working towards defining our leadership and behaviours framework. During FY22 we held a number of ‘winning team’ colleague focus groups and utilising the feedback we have formalised a training plan with the aim of training our leaders the ‘ScS way’. This plan will underpin our leadership development, succession planning and talent spotting.

Working with a new apprenticeship provider, Lifetime, we have launched two new apprenticeship programmes for team leaders and operations supervisors in distribution and within our people team where colleagues are working towards their Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) qualification. These programmes run alongside our existing apprenticeship programmes and we hope to increase participation and offer a wider breadth of programmes across the business.

Engaging with our colleagues

To help shape our decisions towards making ScS a great place to work it is key that we actively take on board feedback we receive from colleagues.

Colleagues have taken part in our ‘winning team’ focus groups to help us shape our behaviours, define how we lead and review our current RIGHT values.

As part of our continued focus on improving the colleague journey we carried out our annual engagement survey giving us greater insight into our colleagues thoughts and opinions.

Colleague discussion forums were held with members of the Board to raise any concerns or issues directly. There was also three retail and distribution conferences which gave the Executive Board and members of our senior management team an opportunity to discuss key focus areas with our colleagues.

Health, safety and wellbeing

The health, safety and wellbeing of our colleagues is a top priority for us. Our established health and safety team, which forms part of our wider audit, risk and compliance team, have continued to promote safe working to prevent work-related injuries and reviewed and maintained risk assessments across the business. We have a number of mandatory training modules for all colleagues including office health and safety and manual handling. We also run ‘Institution of Occupational Safety and Health’ (IOSH) training for members of the distribution and internal audit teams and each distribution centre has at least two qualified trainers in manual handling techniques.

We have a number of mental health first aiders across the business and our colleagues also have access to further support through a free, confidential employee assistance programme which is available 24/7.

Gender diversity

We monitor gender diversity across the business. In financial year 2022, 30% of our workforce were female. A full gender pay gap report is available in the corporate governance section.