Deborah Graham-Wilson, Head of Communications and ESG at Eland Cables, explains how their ESG priorities have boosted employee recruitment and retention.
It’s obvious really – that the key to achieving our ESG goals lies firstly in looking after our people. You can teach the skillsets for each position, but you can’t fake the buy-in to a company’s culture. Without that buy-in, any ESG actions are just superficial box-ticking rather than positive action towards sustainable operations.
ESG commitments have increasingly become key differentiators in tenders for large-scale projects – whether it’s your Ecovadis rating (Gold, in our case), a science-based commitment to carbon emissions reductions, recycling and circular economy methods, or ethical practices and strong governance to eradicate Modern Slavery from a supply chain. Customers want to see this in action – in annual reporting, in terms of how it benefits their projects, and also in person should they visit your sites.
Eland Cables operates sites 24 hours a day, across three shifts. Our main site just outside Doncaster competes with the likes of Amazon to fill open warehouse positions: we’re proudly a registered Living Wage employer (one part of the ‘S’ in our ESG strategy) which helps attract people initially, but what’s different is our ability to retain that talent. Our staff retention rate sits at just under 90% year-on-year, with more than 270 employees. It’s not as simple to say that better pay leads to better engagement with our ESG journey… it helps, but there is so much more.
ESG as a recruitment ‘carrot’ in Talent Acquisition
You need to find the right people before you can retain them. Talent acquisition can be challenging for industries not seen as sexy and exciting (and no one wakes up thinking ‘I want to work in cables’!). Increasingly, job seekers want to see their (prospective) employer as a positive force – in their local community and in making steps towards being more sustainable. Having a clear ESG strategy has undoubtedly helped us engage people at recruitment stage, showing them that our business can be the right fit for them.
Then it’s about keeping them. The emphasis when someone joins a new company is usually on training and competency; if there’s constant staff churn, all you’re doing is delivering the onboarding training and not building on that understanding. There’s no time to teach them new skills to develop and enhance their roles.
Tapping into talent
Teams benefit from experience – from people who can lead by example, and who have bought into the culture of the business. Everyone goes through the repeated cycles of steep learning curves followed by temporary plateaus as learnings are embedded, but having confidence in the way we work, and exposure to the bigger picture of why we do it, also opens doors to other departments. We promote from within rather than hiring externally, wherever possible – but many companies will say that. Delivering the training to upskill is straightforward when it’s colleagues who already share our commitment to our customers, to quality & compliance, and know how we work. Yes, sometimes you still have to recruit talent from outside into specialist roles where you need a new set of skills, but it’s the exception not the norm.
There are numerous examples of current staff who have grown with the business: the office cleaner who as a busy mum fits work around parenting commitments, but who when they were more self-sufficient joined in a junior sales role and now manages a small team – she’s been with us for over 20 years now. The warehouse operative who worked his way up to shift manager, before retraining (through our in-house driving training school) to be an HGV driver delivering cables to our customers across Europe. There’s also extended families who work with us – husbands and wives on split shifts to balance childcare; adult children and their parents working together. We’ve become well-known in our local communities as being a ‘good’ employer who cares about our colleagues – it means our recruitment costs are significantly reduced when we do need to grow as many new employees come from staff referrals. The ‘Social’ in ESG brings tangible returns to the business.
So what sparks internal ESG engagement?
Internal communications channels, screens in communal spaces, and training in areas outside but complimentary to a person’s role – in our case, about a cable’s materials and applications, or explaining embodied carbon emissions – can give a broader understanding. Seeing solar panels installed, electric vans in the yard, HGV drivers talking about the use of HVO biofuels, and cable recycling equipment in use onsite will pique interest – if only in what is involved in other people’s daily roles to start with. It’s not a one-off but a series of works; people may not immediately see them as ESG actions, but it’s easy to help them join the dots. Yes, there’s some internal promotion and drum-banging, but we’re rightly proud of what’s happening so want to share that information.
Delivering success in ESG – your team are your champions
So how do you go from joining the dots to turning it into a successful ESG communications strategy that resonates with your customers?
