Social mobility is a critical issue in a lot of countries. What should employers be doing to increase social mobility and how effective can their efforts be in terms of tangible results?
My guest this week is Lisa Scales, Head of Resourcing, Executive and New Talent at Severn Trent, a large UK based utilities company. Severn Trent has recently moved up to 3rd place in The Social Mobility Employer Index as a result of their innovative work in this area and is seeing huge benefits as an organization from their initiatives.
In the interview, we discuss:
- The definition of social mobility and what it means to Severn Trent as an organization
- Recruiting on equal terms to show opportunities to a massive pool of untapped talent
- Schools engagement
- Work experience focused on employability.
- Thinking different about the recruitment process
- The Social Mobility Pledge
Lisa also talks about the results Severn Trent as seeing from their initiatives and the considerable benefits to the business.
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Transcript:
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Matt Alder [00:01:23]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 229 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Social mobility is a critical issue wherever you are in the world, but what should employers be doing to improve social mobility and how effective can their efforts be? My guest this week is Lisa Scales, head of resourcing, executive and new talent at Severn Trent, a large UK based utilities company. Severn Trent have recently moved up to third place in the Social Mobility Employers Index as a result of their innovative work in this area, which is also seeing huge benefits to them as an organization. Enjoy the interview. Hi Lisa and welcome to the podcast. Hi Matt, an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Lisa Scales [00:02:18]:
Yeah, sure. My name’s Lisa Scales. I head UP resourcing at Severn Trent, which is a utility business in the West Midlands.
Matt Alder [00:02:27]:
And could you sort of tell us a little bit about the kind of recruiting challenges a utilities business has?
Lisa Scales [00:02:34]:
Yeah, sure. So I suppose it might be useful just to give some context in terms of where my role starts and ends so that I can talk to you about some of the challenges across those areas. So I look after new talent, which encompasses our apprentices, our young people and our graduates. I look after experienced hires, I look after executive hiring as well as talent. So it’s quite a broad remit and across all those different disciplines there are different challenges. We run an operation which supplies water and waste services to 8 million people across the Midlands, stretching from sort of Scunthorpe, right in the north of our territory, right down to Gloucestershire. So in terms of square mileage and Severn2,000 kilometers of water pipes. It’s quite a big region. And within that region, our customers are generally also our employees, where we have 98% of our employees are our customers. And we have such a diverse mix of skills across the business, from your normal head office functions that you would see in any business through to our engineering, water technicians, waste water technicians, and even to the point where we have drone pilots in the business, which we use for leakage detection as well as surveying. So it’s a hugely diverse mix of skills required. And, you know, we have all those challenges that anybody sort of in the Midlands does have in terms of skills. And we’ve got a lot of competition in the. In the area, especially in engineering. And similarly, we are also in the country, in one of the lowest social mobility areas across, across the UK and Wales. So it’s got its challenges in terms of skills. It’s also got its challenges in terms of skills migration out of the area, down to the southeast. And so we’re up against it. What we do have in our favour, we are a FTSE 100 business, which actually can be very attractive from an executive hiring point point of view, that you don’t need to go into London to work for a business which is, you know, got a high turnover listed on the stock exchange and has some attraction from that point of view. So it’s hugely diverse across, across the business in terms of skills, but similarly, they have some challenges as well.
Matt Alder [00:05:18]:
So you mentioned social mobility there, and that’s what I kind of really want to focus on in this interview, because I know that it’s. It’s a really big topic for you to start off with. Could you sort of give us your definition? What is it? What is it? What does social mobility to you and the organization?
Lisa Scales [00:05:33]:
Yeah, so it’s really interesting question because we’re really focusing on this because we can see a real opportunity for it. But, you know, social mobility as a. I suppose I’ll talk holistically. First of all, you know, we want to create a stronger, fairer society in which, you know, people from all backgrounds can realize their potential. And it isn’t just the elite that have opportunity and are able to enter the workforce and progress within that workforce, dependent on, you know, the class they’ve been brought up in or even the education that they have found themselves in. So, you know, being able to sort of identify people that come from areas of low social mobility gives us a real opportunity to recruit people on equal terms so that, you know, we’ve got the opportunity to give individuals the ability to, you know, realize their potential, thrive and progress.
Matt Alder [00:06:35]:
So tell us a bit more about the sort of strategy there. How are you sort of looking to achieve this? What have you. What have you been doing?
Lisa Scales [00:06:42]:
Yeah, so I suppose the work we’ve been doing and, you know, it is. The Midlands is ranked the worst region for social progress from people from disadvantaged backgrounds. So, you know, we have, I think, an obligation as a regional employer and one of the biggest, biggest regional employers to really get under the skin of that. And as a regional employer, we also have a real opportunity to engage with a younger generation from a school’s perspective and open up those opportunities for people that maybe don’t even know about them or have that, I suppose, that conversation at home with regards to careers and progression. So we’re quite fortunate, in terms of the setup of our business, that we have education teams that go out and educate the general public on water and the shortage of water and how we can use water more efficiently. So it really does start with the schools engagement piece. And some of the initiatives that we’re running are around our work experience programs, as well as our internships as well as our undergraduate programs, and also how we’re bringing people into the business on a more permanent basis in terms of our apprentices and graduate programmes. So we are doing a huge amount of work around that and specifically focusing on some of the social mobility cold spots, which, you know, obviously our region is awash with. And the interesting thing is, obviously we’ve got a conurbation like Birmingham within our region, and everybody would think ordinarily that that would be, you know, our target area, given the denseness of the population and maybe some of the inherent problems that, you know, a large city has. But some of the stuff we’re seeing is actually some of the cold spots are, you know, around the more rural areas, where actually not only have you got some opportunity challenges, you’ve also got logistics. You know, you live out in the sticks, you can’t get to somewhere. So there’s some rural cold spots as well as those inner city targets. So the great thing is we have done a lot of work with the Social Mobility Pledge, and our CEO, Liv, she sits on the steering group of the Social Mobility Pledge, which is a pledge that you can sign up to, and there’s about 400 companies that have signed up to it to try and create a better opportunity for people across the country. So it’s about, you know, making sure that employers understand what social mobility is and how we can Improve our young people’s opportunities through partnering with them. You know, making sure that people have as much access to work experience and apprenticeship opportunities as everyone else as well as how we play our part in how we recruit people. It’s a fantastic initiative and I would urge anybody listening to this if they want to have a look, it’s socialmobilitypledge.org.
Matt Alder [00:09:56]:
So you mentioned the recruitment process there. What kind of changes or different ways of thinking have you had to sort of do with your recruitment process to be successful at this?
Lisa Scales [00:10:07]:
Yeah, so basically I suppose in terms of what we’re doing we take quite a neutral view in terms of how we consider applications. So we do some name blind approaches as well as adopting some sort of contextual recruitment practices. So including we always find out where people are obviously coming from in terms of academics, but also location of where they live by their socioeconomic mapping. We also look at that individual’s academic performance relative to the average, you know, at their place of study. So it’s not about not knowing the names of candidates, it means that we are, you know, when we’re sifting it’s based on non objective criteria. So it’s about identifying where we’re going to target and then not excluding people just based on certain things. So I mean the, the most obvious being is companies announcing that they’ll only take people from Russell Group universities which just basically takes out a large proportion of anybody attending a university, for example. But I mean some of the stats around the problem that we’re trying to get at, for example, if you’ve got a, a child with maybe less ability but lives in a high income family, they’re 35% more likely to be a higher earner than somebody with a high ability that comes from a low income family. So I mean that’s just an amazing stat in terms of what’s the talent we’re missing out on. So it’s not only the right thing to do, but it’s about that untapped talent that we’re not even showing opportunities, opportunity to. And you know, we had a work experience program in over the summer and we had 12 young people from social mobility cold spots and they were, they were a fantastic bunch and we bring them in and our work experience programs are more sort of employability versus go and sit and shadow somebody at a desk which I don’t think actually is that useful. You know, a work experience person going to do and stand by a photocopier for a week doing 800 photocopies to me isn’t a working experience. We actually give them a whole programme of events over the week in terms of how they write their CVs, what are the opportunities both inside Severn Trent as well as outside Severn Trent, and what is the access to that? And I mean, some of them were just. I mean, I started talking to them about, you know, about not going to university and going down the apprenticeship route and doing a higher level apprenticeship and doing their degree through, through seven Trent. And, you know, some of their eyes were wide open because I think they were sat there thinking, I’m not sure how I could get to university given the financial constraints. So I’m sorry, I’ve rabbited on. But you can see that I’m quite passionate about it and being able to give people that opportunity. You know, we’ve got two apprentices in our legal department, you know, they’re on a journey to become lawyers and it will take them some time, there’s no doubt, but it’ll take them, you know, up to seven years. But they’ll be with us for seven years earning a salary and longer, I hope, earning a salary, but gaining work experience whilst they’re doing it. So it’s such an opportunity. And obviously the flip side to that is they don’t walk out of university in a whole heap of debt as well. So, yes, there’s so many interventions that people can make to help this massive opportunity that, you know, we’ll never stop trying to get better at it.
Matt Alder [00:13:59]:
You mentioned untapped pools of talent there. What, what sort of, you know, other than doing the doing the right thing, what kind of benefits are you seeing as an organization by taking this kind of approach?
Lisa Scales [00:14:11]:
Yeah, so I think, I think there’s so, so many benefits to doing this other than just doing the right thing, having. There’s plenty of data out there these days on, you know, diversity of workforce and that’s not necessarily just about ethnic diversity, gender diversity. There’s all sorts of, you know, different diversity that we’re looking at these days. And we are seeing that as an organization, the having a more diverse workforce is making us a better business in terms of how we are performing and how we are innovating. And, you know, the water industry is under quite a big spotlight politically and being a regulated business, our regulator off what is constantly challenging us to be better for our customers. So, again, that’s the right thing to do. But similarly, there is a challenge out there of how we can be a better business. And we’re seeing that by having a fairer, more equitable Workforce that, that will only ever help us. And we are a long term business. We base our business on five year financial cycles and that’s how our funding happens. So we’re in it for the long term and it has to start at the grassroots of where we can engage with schools and work experience so that we know in five to 10 years that we are training people with the skills that we require for the future. And those skills are literally changing by the minute as we get more innovative, as technology starts encroaching on the world of water, which has historically been quite a traditional function. And so we can only see the massive opportunity to be able to shape a workforce for the future.
Matt Alder [00:16:05]:
How are you sort of measuring the success of your various initiatives? You know, what kind of results are you getting? Is the organization being successful in terms of social mobility?
Lisa Scales [00:16:16]:
Yes. And you know, as I said, we’ll never stop trying to get better because there’s always more we can do. And you know, I think it’s a difficult one to sort of almost, you can’t boil the ocean on this. You have to start and try and chip away at it and get some momentum with the business. But yes, we are seeing that we are bringing in a far more diverse quota of people and these, you know, we make sure that we track the data really, really carefully in the sense of we have a look at the data from, you know, people with social mobility cold spots and look at their progression through the organization and you know, ensuring that we are very aware of where people go and what their progression is and the speed at which their progression is. Some of the interesting things that come out of that is that, you know, some of our graduates as well as our undergraduates, summer placements, etc. Actually outperform some of the people that maybe haven’t come from a social mobility cold spot. And I imagine there’s some people probably listening that are thinking, surely there needs to be some balance here. And so what we’re not saying, we’re not saying that this is the only way that we will attract and bring in talent into the business, but it has to be one of the subsets of how you attract talent and how you bring them into the business. So there’s no exclusion here. This is, this is definite inclusion of all people. So yeah, we are seeing that there is a performance piece. We’re also looking at obviously promotion as well in terms of how people are promoted into roles.
Matt Alder [00:18:13]:
So final question, you mentioned that you’re a long term business. What’s next in this area how are you sort of seeking to develop the, you know, the initiatives and the things that you’re doing?
Lisa Scales [00:18:25]:
Yeah, so I think, I think there’s. I think there’s so much more we can do in terms of how we are targeting our cold spots across the region. And, you know, we’re talking about. I think there’s. I think there’s around 700 schools that we could access now. That’s quite hard to do at scale. So what we’re trying to do is almost used technology to ensure that our message, as in our doors are open. Come and talk to us about opportunities. And it may not be an opportunity with us, but we can definitely educate you on how you can progress with another business as well as us. So there’s a scale thing here in terms of how we get out to more people in these areas. So that, you know, and we’ve very much integrated this into our larger diversity and inclusion agenda. And we’ve also got more work to do in terms of our, you know, BAME groups. And we’ve certainly got more work to do, I think, in the neurodiverse space in terms of how we can. How we can tap into that sort of talent as well. So, as I say, it’s a journey. There’s no destination. We are ranked annually on the Social Mobility Index. Through the work we’ve done, we’ve gone from sort of a 38th place. I think they look at the top 75. And this is an index which requires a huge amount of data collected in terms of submission. And we achieved third place this year, which we’re really proud of. And you know what it’s like when you’re in the top echelons. There’s always the want and need to stay up there just from a. You know, it’s a right thing to do, but we’ve got a lot of work to do in terms of ensuring that we’re keeping pace, but also that we are ensuring that we’re doing the right thing. Not because of an index, we’re doing it because we can see the opportunity, but also it’s fantastic and is definitely one of the most rewarding parts of our role.
Matt Alder [00:20:47]:
Lisa, thank you very much for talking to me.
Lisa Scales [00:20:48]:
Thank you very much.
Matt Alder [00:20:50]:
My thanks to Lisa Scales. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram where you can find the show by searching for recruiting future. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also listen to the show there you can find all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about Working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
