People

People

Overview

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.

EMPLOYMENT POLICY MODERN SLAVERY ACT ANTI SLAVERY POLICY

Objectives

  • We will respect the principles of equality and diversity in our employment practices.
  • We will look to encourage contractors to use local labour on construction and refurbishment projects where feasible.
  • We will seek to ensure that modern slavery is not taking place anywhere in our own business or in any of our supply chains.
  • We will, where possible, endeavour to comply with the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) throughout our managed portfolio.
  • We will review the needs of the local communities within which we operate and in conjunction with our Managing Agents support initiatives that are relevant to our business.

Progress

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 6.3% (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:

  Total number of staff as at 31 March 2019 Average length of service (years)
Executive Directors 3 24.8
Executives 17 6.8
All employees 32 8.7

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:

  Male Female
Board 90% 10%
Executives 59% 41%
All employees 44% 56%

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.

Charitable, Community & Social Activities Policies & reports