Our People
Objective
Be an employer of choice
Goals
Build an inclusive and diverse workforce
Champion social mobility through structured work and graduate and apprenticeship opportunities
Upskill all employees to provide opportunity and meet future business needs
“Attracting, developing and retaining the best talent possible – whatever their background – is our goal and we look forward to welcoming new faces to Tarmac and enabling them to grow with us.”
Peter Buckley, Senior Vice President, UK and Ireland
Our objective is to be an employer of choice and be an organisation with a truly inclusive culture. Our employees underpin the long-term success of our business and also our customers, so it is vital that we continue to build an inclusive business that attracts and retains a talented, motivated and diverse workforce.
Highlights
Early careers
Tarmac was ranked 7th on Rate My Apprenticeship, the UK’s leading job website for young people seeking apprenticeships. The Top 100 is based on the reviews and honest feedback of over 5,500 young people who completed an apprenticeship last year.
At the end of 2021 Tarmac launched its biggest recruitment drive in history to attract the leaders and workforce of tomorrow. We also launched our new early careers recruitment website that will list all early career roles, how to apply and even a section for parents and teachers, as well as detailed information on how Tarmac supports employee development.
We are proud to offer a wide range of opportunities for people starting their careers (a total of 185 roles) to earn while they learn; attracting, developing and retaining the best talent possible – whatever their background.
The early careers intake project has been launched, ensuring the campaign and process is fair and unbiased, aiming to attract a diverse set of applications.
Development opportunities for all
We have created an education community pack, with specific packs available based on local needs, to support employees with other education and employment opportunities. Operational career paths have also been created to engage prospective employees towards our industry. Throughout 2021, our employees across the business received over 280,000 guided learning hours.
This is a mixture of regulated qualifications, formal learning sessions, and e-learning and shows the commitment to developing our employees' potential at all levels of our business. We have some excellent in-house development programmes for our employees at all levels, with a mixture of on-the-job development and off-site learning. This includes our internal apprenticeship that has enrolled 150 learners into the Mineral Processing Mobile and Static operator apprenticeship programme.
Sustainability training
Sustainability is a priority for Tarmac and so throughout 2021 we completed sustainability training with all our senior leadership and area management employees to introduce sustainability and our new strategy, with a particular focus on climate change and achieving our net zero carbon target. We then followed this up with action planning sessions with each business unit and function, to develop actions they can take throughout the year in support of the Tarmac sustainability strategy.
Colleague mentoring
In 2021, we relaunched our colleague mentoring programme to all employees, as a way for employees to learn from and connect with colleagues. This is a great way for our employees to develop skills, increase confidence and help identify and achieve career goals.
The 5% club
Tarmac is proud to be a member of the 5% Club, an organisation committed to ensuring that in the next five years, 5% of its members in the UK workforce are young people on training schemes. The 5% Club is a dynamic movement of employers committed to building and developing the workforce they need as part of a socially mobile, prosperous and cohesive nation. The club exists to help its members and all employers increase the number, quality and range of ‘earn as you learn’ opportunities across the UK. We are proud to announce that we have achieved the silver award for 2021/22.
National Skills and Safety Park
We celebrated the first birthday of our National Skills and Safety Park which, despite the challenging circumstances of COVID-19, has supported nearly 978 employees through face-to-face, virtual classroom and e-learning sessions. With COVID-19 restrictions eased we aim to have over 3,000 visitors in 2022.
Our internally delivered apprenticeship has enrolled 150 learners onto the Mineral Processing Mobile and Static operator apprenticeship programme. The safety park has supported 34 individuals to graduate from our own accredited Professional Operator Development Programme (PODP) qualification. The PODP is a 13-month apprenticeship where learners will receive over 500 hours of off the job learning to help them gain the knowledge, skills and behaviours for their role.
Fostering inclusion and diversity
As a business we care about building a supportive workplace where everyone can realise their potential. Throughout 2021, Tarmac put a real focus on making our business an inclusive, diverse and fair place to work. Our inclusion and diversity vision for Tarmac is: To foster and celebrate a fair and supportive culture that promotes opportunities for all – where everyone feels proud to be themselves.
In 2021, all of our senior leadership team (around 200 people) completed inclusion and diversity training and unconscious bias training virtually. The aim of the training is to challenge perceptions and create awareness of implicit bias and eliminate any unconscious discriminatory behaviours in the business.
Our employee communities were also a result of an inclusion and diversity survey that showed employees were keen for us to establish communities, as a way to create a more inclusive culture and in turn achieve our I&D commercial and cultural ambitions.
Clear Assured Silver
To evidence the progress we are making in our inclusion and diversity journey, we sought external verification of our approach and were proud to achieve a globally recognised accreditation for our commitment to inclusion and diversity in the workplace. This year we have progressed to a Clear Assured Silver Standard, from assessment body The Clear Company. This is awarded to businesses which can demonstrate inclusivity and diversity are reflected across all policies and processes.
Employee community hubs
In February, we launched our online communities – available through our intranet, The Circle – and they have been growing organically throughout the year.
The communities we currently have available for our employees to join are:
- Female voice
- Menopause support (closed group for our female employees going through the menopause)
- Mental health and wellbeing
- LGBTQ+
- REACH (religion, ethnic and cultural heritage)
- Parents and carers
- Ability (physical and non-physical disabilities including neurodiversity)
- Inclusion and Diversity Champions
- Sustainability
- Go Digital
Our communities have been viewed an incredible 15,258 times. Each community is sponsored by a member of Tarmac’s Executive Committee, to enable the communities to make real change such as launching a women’s PPE range, pronouns available on email and intranet profiles and celebration of key awareness days.
Tarmac Communities viewed
times
(59 times per day)
Inclusive policies
Our Reasonable Adjustments Policy was launched and will support our employees and new starters who require an adjustment for their role. The purpose of this policy is to make reasonable adjustments to support our employees if they are, or become disabled. Tarmac is committed to maintaining high standards of accessibility and experience of our service and facilities for all who work with us. We therefore extend our approach to reasonable adjustments to embrace not just disability, but any special need or circumstance.
Gender pay report
We recognise that having an inclusive and diverse workforce is an important step to reducing the gender pay gap. The construction sector is traditionally male dominated, so we continue to make sustainable long-term changes in our approach in order to recruit and retain women, while ensuring we continue to provide equal opportunities to all.
Every business in the UK with 250 or more employees must produce a gender pay gap report, in line with Government requirements. Our 2021 report outlines what these figures mean and describes some of the actions we are taking and improvements we have made.
< 19
0.8
20 - 24
4.7
25 - 29
9.3
30 - 39
22.1
40 - 49
21.7
50 - 59
28.5
60 +
12.9
Looking forward
Having completed the first year of our new sustainability strategy we have made some great progress to meeting our goals. Our people will continue to be a priority for us as we strive to be an employer of choice. In 2022, we will focus on creating new menopause, gender identity and paternity policies as well as producing and providing new e-learning for inclusion and diversity.
To meet our new sustainability goals, we will also continue to provide training opportunities for all employees and encourage development across all areas of our business. To do this we will be launching our Employee Development Programme (EPD) to provide employees with the opportunity to learn more about the business, enhance skills and knowledge, and build confidence.