People

At Helical we are committed to maintaining a team of skilled, dedicated and enthusiastic employees which is key to building strong, positive relationships with our partners and clients, and achieving our sustainability goals.

We provide a working environment where everyone is treated fairly and with respect. This ethos is one which we seek to ensure all our employees share. We also aim for these principles to be extended to our suppliers through our Employment and Anti Slavery Policies.

We aim to provide our people with personal and professional development opportunities beyond day to day experience, advancing their skills through seminars, training courses and mentoring. The effectiveness of our efforts can be benchmarked against our staff turnover performance and average tenure.

Helical has a small core team, working closely with trusted partners in multiple disciplines. Our success is built on the skills of our staff so finding, developing, rewarding and retaining our people is a key element of our corporate strategy.  Our performance against our key metrics is as follows:

A high level of staff retention remains a key feature of the business. Staff turnover is low at 15.2% (representing five permanent employees leaving in the year). Helical has retained a highly skilled and experienced team and the table below shows a breakdown of staff by length of service:

Helical’s staff retention levels not only reflect competitive remuneration and benefits packages but also its commitment to enhancing the professional and personal skills of its team by supporting employee training and development, by means of training courses, seminars, and mentoring.

As in previous years, Helical continues to evaluate training needs in line with business objectives. Collectively, our people spent 530 hours on training and development during the year, an average of 2 days per employee.

We continue to enforce our equal opportunities, harassment, and sexual discrimination policies. The gender diversity of the Board and the Company at 31 March 2018 was as follows:

Helical employs a small team and our aim is to develop and retain motivated and talented people. Our performance against our key metrics is as follows:

We also continue to monitor compliance with our whistle blowing policy. There have been no incidents to report against this policy to date.

As Helical operates with a small team, our ability to establish excellent long-term relationships with our advisers, agents and other suppliers is very important. As part of this, fair treatment of suppliers remains a key priority for Helical and the Group’s policy is to settle all agreed liabilities within the terms established with them.