At Chemring our people are at the heart of everything we do. We invest in our people at all levels, across every location and function. This focus ensures we have the right talent enabled to perform, whatever the challenge.
Our overall people approach is focused on five key areas:
- Having the right talent ready to perform
- An understanding of our talent pipelines
- Clear leadership and capability development programmes
- A focus on the engagement and retention of our people
- An underpinning of diversity, equity & inclusion in everything we do through our culture at Chemring
Culture at Chemring
Everything we do is underpinned by our culture at Chemring. As a group of companies, we embrace what ties us together and respect what differentiates us. Out principle of Global Voice, Local Accent defines the approach to investing in our people to bring the best of our corporate programmes in areas such as talent, development and a focus on engagement whilst ensuring our businesses bring their local unique customs and practices to empower their workforce.
We have a values-based culture of Safety, Excellence and Innovation and 2023 saw an even greater focus on our safety culture through the launch of our Fundamental Safety Principles supporting our goal of zero harm.
Our Population
Each and every business unit has a focus on the skills it needs from its workforce to meet our customer commitments. Additionally, their focus continues to be on the diversity of the talent coming into our organisation to ensure we have a healthy and vibrant mix of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives to bring innovative ideas and support a mindset of continuous improvement. Chemring strives for diversity on a broad basis including gender, age, background, education, disability, neurodiversity and nationality (within the constraints of our regulatory requirements) and this diversity brings a more agile, engaged and higher-performing workforce.
Gender diversity is one measure that we monitor throughout our population and programmes. Our total global population in 2023 was:
We benchmark both to our external local talent markets and to relevant peers and will continue to consider how we can improve the diversity within our organisation.
Our population has grown significantly in the past year and this change in volume has driven a focus on maturing our people activities to ensure they create a best in class employee experience for all colleagues, whether they be recent joiners or those with longer service. One area of strategic focus is our use of technology and data to drive people decisions. Where appropriate, we are investing in HR systems at a business unit or regional level to streamline activity, reduce waste and improve data quality. This approach also extends to offering a modern “digital” employee experience where possible through access to communications, employee information and even access to roles available across the Group. Access and transparency are key to our approach to creating a more digital employee experience.
Our talent pipelines
To create the diverse and broad employee population we need, we look at a number of pipelines both internally and externally. Our external talent pipelines cover a broad range of sources, from direct hires into specific key segments in our organisation, to early careers professionals who are yet to discover their passions and find their home within the organisation. Additionally, we take innovative approaches to creating pipelines where they traditionally have not existed, such as the Roke Academy where those with a diverse and varied work career are given the chance to retrain in the skills we need for the future.
Our Early Careers Programme in the UK goes from strength to strength with a record 145 early careers professionals going through our two-year programme across our UK businesses. Bringing in a strong cohort of apprentices and graduates each year helps us to grow our talent and constantly challenges us to grow and listen to the next generation of Chemring leaders.
Our focus on talent also extends to supporting the pipelines of talent to move through our organisation. Our talent assessment activities are centred around the need to plan and develop to solve today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities. We actively seek how to create opportunities for those experiences to be gained by our talent before they are needed.
One such programme is Aspire@Chemring which launched in May 2022 and ran for 11 months. Aspire@Chemring was designed to connect a global cohort of future senior leaders to develop some of the experiences required at the highest levels of our leadership.
Where possible we also work in alignment with wider industry and government organisations to increase the skills and mobility of talent into our organisations. In the UK we have partnered with the Institute of Engineering and Technology (“IET”) for the last five years to sponsor bursary students from disadvantaged backgrounds to create opportunities for education which may previously not have been open to them. This diversity of background brings a different perspective, which is brought into Chemring through our IET bursary students taking summer internships and permanent positions.
Leadership and capability development
Along with a focus on finding the best talent to join our organisation, we put equal measures on developing from within to ensure we have the right skills in the right place at the right time. Over the last few years, Chemring has been able to create a series of programmes designed to support the needs of leadership at each level.
As well as our focus on leadership, it is equally important to invest in the technical, operational and functional skills to deliver first-class products and services. Our Countermeasures and Energetics businesses have been focussing on maintaining operator competence in 2023 as a priority area whilst Roke has been developing their professional & consultancy capabilities, as a key enabler of their growth ambitions.
We see development as a strategic enabler for meeting our business and customer commitments. We also see it as a key way in which we engage our employees. All leadership proactively talk with their teams about their aspirations, goals and development needs through processes such as Performance Conversations - which reinforces how important each colleague’s contribution is. Open conversations about performance help us focus on what individuals need to be successful and allow development to be seen as a positive investment of time and prioritised accordingly. This is a win-win for both our workforce and our organisation.
Established Chemring programmes include our two-year Early Careers Programme in the UK, and our supervisor-focused Leading Our People Programme through to our Aspire@Chemring Programme which will launch with our second cohort in early 2024.
Additionally, we are fully engaged in the UK with the Apprenticeship Levy, and maximise our levy fund to create apprentice level positions (48 active apprenticeships in 2023) as well as to fund apprentice programmes for more established colleagues in functional and leadership positions looking to further develop their education.
Engagement and retention
Our workforce is one of our key assets, and we work to ensure it thrives. The external talent market is highly buoyant with industry turnover rates at record levels. We are aware of the risk this presents and we never take our workforce for granted. Employee experience and day-to-day engagement are of the highest priority.
Listening to our colleagues is a fundamental leadership principle, both as individuals and as an organisation. Our company-wide approach to continuously listening to our colleagues is called Employee Voice. Through regular sentiment surveys, our leadership teams are able to review how our employees feel about working at Chemring. Our positivity score across the globe stands at 76% for 2023, compared to 75% for 2022. We will continue to review trends at an organisational level to support our data-driven decision making, and equally important, at the individual level.
There are many ways in which our colleagues are engaged with individually, from one-to-one performance conversations to works councils and Employee Resource Groups (“ERGs”). In many of our businesses, leadership make themselves available through all-hands “town hall” meetings in which any employee can raise questions.
Our Board is actively involved in understanding the needs and engagement of the workforce. Laurie Bowen, Chair of the Remuneration Committee and the non-executive director responsible for employee engagement on behalf of the Board, meets with colleagues from different business areas and levels in the organisation to hear their views on working at Chemring. In 2023, Laurie visited three of our businesses that are focused on investment and growth: Roke, Chemring Energetics UK and Chemring Nobel. This year, common themes emerged, including the appreciation of leadership for communicating how individual products and services support the organisation’s purpose of building engagement; that safety is now an integral part of the culture of how things are done; and that growth and investment are building pride across our workforce. The groups identified specific opportunities to improve, which were openly and constructively communicated; and summarised to the leadership team for action.
Thanks to this feedback, our local leadership teams at these locations can ensure that employee feedback informs and supports their growth agendas. Employee feedback remains a key channel for insights into how we can shape Chemring’s employee engagement priorities both at a local level and Group-wide level.
Our local business ERGs, in particular, are helping us to understand “what good looks like” in many areas of the inclusion agenda; one size does not fit all.
This approach is how we focus on developing our culture so that it serves our employees and our customers. We work to the principle of embracing what ties us together and respecting what differentiates us. Our values driven culture is based on our values of Safety, Excellence and Innovation and is the foundation all our businesses work to.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (“DE&I”)
We have worked hard over the past 12 months to evolve our focus on DE&I from an initiative to business as usual. DE&I underpins every process, action and decision made in Chemring.
In FY23 we went back to basics to define what was important to focus on in our drive to improve our gender balance in senior management positions. We defined that it was important to capture all members of senior management who influence the day to day employee experience and lead our culture. We therefore tightened the definition of the population we monitor to ensure that all these senior leadership positions continue to be developed towards a more gender balanced and inclusive population.
Senior management positions are now defined as Executive/Senior Leadership, Direct Reports to Executive/Senior Leadership (if in a leadership role) and Key Positions holding a senior position or role of influence in the organisation. This revised our baseline to 30% female and 70% male at the start of FY23, on our way to our 2027 target of at least 33% female and 67% male.
Through this increased focus we saw our gender split in Senior Management Positions increase across the year through a combination of active development and promotion, turnover and hiring changes, growth of our positions of influence in line with organisational growth and structural reorganisation efficiencies. This resulted in a change in our gender balance to 32% female and 68% male in this important population. We are therefore in an excellent position to revisit the ambition of our gender targets in FY24 in line with our business growth plans.
Furthermore, in 2023 we added the requirement for DE&I to be considered within our five-year planning activities. Gender is not the only focus of our efforts. Chemring strives for diversity on a broad basis including gender, age, background, education, disability, neurodiversity and ethnicity (within the constraints of our regulatory requirements). This is an area where we continue to develop both globally and locally and which will be central to our success in the coming years.
Furthermore, in 2023 we added the requirement for DE&I to be considered within our five-year planning activities. Gender is not the only focus of our efforts. Chemring strives for diversity on a broad basis including gender, age, background, education, disability, neurodiversity and ethnicity (within the constraints of our regulatory requirements). This is an area where we continue to develop both globally and locally and which will be central to our success in the coming years.
We continue to focus on ethnicity at the various levels within our organisation, as a way of ensuring our workforce is reflective of the communities we are situated in and operate within. Our reporting on ethnic diversity at Chemring is set out in the table below.
* Including Hispanic, NHOPI, Native American.
Our communities
In many of our locations, our employees are from the local community and provide a valuable link to ensure we support those communities. This can be through the form of open days where family and other community members can gain insight into what we do at Chemring. It is also through our employees volunteering their time both to community initiatives at to raising much needed donations through charity events and challenges. Chemring fully supports and celebrates all employees who go the extra mile to contribute to our communities.
The education sector is another area of focus with the opportunity to provide STEM sponsorship and support in local schools and colleges.
Investing in this community helps us to build a broader and more diverse pool of talent to join the engineering and defence sector in years to come.
In addition, we partner with charities that directly support those who are end users of our products and services. We honour the service that they have given through the support to events such as “Ride with a Veteran” and “The Big Sleep”.
Gender pay gap reports archive
Chemring Energetics UK gender pay gap report 2021
Chemring Countermeasures UK gender pay gap report 2021
Roke gender pay gap report 2021
Chemring Energetics UK gender pay gap report 2020
Chemring Countermeasures UK gender pay gap report 2020
Roke gender pay gap report 2020
Chemring Group Staff Pension Scheme
Statement of Investment Principles
Chemring Implementation Statement
Across the
business, our people are involved with a number of educational initiatives and
as a business we have relationships with several universities, whereby funding
is provided for students’ research activities.
Our relationship with IET now spans 4 years with support provided
directly to undergraduates studying for engineering and science related degrees
in the UK who have faced some level of hardship in achieving a place to study
their chosen programme. These high calibre
students are provided with financial support via a Chemring funded bursary and
the opportunity for work experience and career support from the Chemring
businesses in the UK.
We are aware
that on occasion our manufacturing activities can impact on the local
community. This impact may be due to product proofing or testing, for
example. In these instances, the businesses seek to actively liaise with
local residents and community groups to minimise any
impact. The Group is also cognisant of the potential impact of its operations
on the local environment, and is addressing this through its environmental
strategy.
Finally we
appreciate that the CV-19 pandemic has affected different groups in different
ways. One key challenge was for parents of school age children who have had to
support homeschooling often alongside working from home themselves, or
balancing being able to come to work.
One issue many colleagues shared was access to appropriate technology to
support their children with homeschooling.
At Chemring we have been able to provide laptops and tablets which were
no longer required within the business to colleagues who had a clear need to
support their children. We now have an
ongoing programme in the UK of providing surplus hardware to colleagues whose
families will benefit from using it.
Across the business, our people are involved with a number of educational initiatives and as a business we have relationships with several universities, whereby funding is provided for students’ research activities. Our relationship with IET now spans 4 years with support provided directly to undergraduates studying for engineering and science related degrees in the UK who have faced some level of hardship in achieving a place to study their chosen programme. These high calibre students are provided with financial support via a Chemring funded bursary and the opportunity for work experience and career support from the Chemring businesses in the UK.
We are aware that on occasion our manufacturing activities can impact on the local community. This impact may be due to product proofing or testing, for example. In these instances, the businesses seek to actively liaise with local residents and community groups to minimise any impact. The Group is also cognisant of the potential impact of its operations on the local environment, and is addressing this through its environmental strategy.
Finally we appreciate that the CV-19 pandemic has affected different groups in different ways. One key challenge was for parents of school age children who have had to support homeschooling often alongside working from home themselves, or balancing being able to come to work. One issue many colleagues shared was access to appropriate technology to support their children with homeschooling. At Chemring we have been able to provide laptops and tablets which were no longer required within the business to colleagues who had a clear need to support their children. We now have an ongoing programme in the UK of providing surplus hardware to colleagues whose families will benefit from using it.