Utility companies need to be in the driving seat of talent development if they want to avoid rapidly approaching skills gaps. They must draw in new talent and make the personal and professional growth of employees “business as usual”. This was the conclusion of Utility Week’s HR Forum, a conference sponsored by Interaction, which took place in Birmingham last month.
Speaking at the event, Energy and Efficiency Industrial Partnership chief operating officer Kate Davies reminded delegates that 208,000 new employees will be required in the UK utilities sector within ten years. Fifty per cent of current employees will have retired by 2023. A chronic skills shortage is looming.
A job in utilities used to be seen as a job for life, but not any more. Today’s talent pool has different expectations, said Davies, and she urged delegates to ensure that some deep-rooted practices such as inflexible entry routes were not barriers to entry. Being employer of choice leaves no room for HR processes based on a logic of “we’ve always done it that way”.
The UK skills gap is not helped by the fact that those skills in demand by utilities are also in demand globally.
Davies advocates a “renewed focus on the youth”, reaching into schools to change perceptions of the sector. Severn Trent’s head of internal communication Simon Harris highlighted how utilities’ “legacy” can be used as a “hook” to draw in new talent, inspiring people to feel “proud” of the infrastructure and services they can help to maintain.
Critically, this approach must also be used to retain workers, Harris said, urging his audience not to be complacent about the need to keep people engaged once they have been recruited. New recruits demand flexibility from their career path, said speakers, the flexibility to switch between companies and the flexibility to progress.
Delegates heard about many schemes being run by companies to address this challenge, such as: the intern programme by National Grid in partnership with Interaction Learning and Development; Thames Water’s active career management scheme; and United Utilities’ in-house training centre. These programmes allow talent to be “grown”, fulfilling both employee expectations and the requirements of companies.
At the other end of the skills challenge, delegates heard the importance of using social channels within the business to “bottle” the knowledge and skills of outgoing, experienced employees before they are lost forever.
The challenges facing HR managers are sizeable, and potentially costly. Boards will need to be convinced that a focus on people makes business sense. But not all solutions need to cost the earth. Many speakers were in agreement that just listening to employees and ensuring they have basic equipment to make them comfortable while carrying out their work (such as good quality waterproofs for field workers) can impact retention rates.
What they said
Simon Harris, head of internal communication, Severn Trent:
“We talked to our people to find what the hook is, and there is a hook around legacy. There is something about being a custodian of a network that can inspire people, and that can apply to water, gas and electricity.
“We at Severn Trent are just custodians of the network, we take it, we love it, we invest in it, we fix it and we grow it. When you’ve got that around people’s heads, they feel proud of it.”
Joshua Bates – summer internship with National Grid 2014 at Grain LNG:
“A lack of career planning is highly prevalent. Neither of my parents worked in the industry, so how was I supposed to know what I wanted to do? If I hadn’t have been with National Grid I probably still wouldn’t. I would probably have sold out to banking.”
Annamarie Petsis Jones, HR director, Opus Energy:
“For us it’s about retention. A lot of what we do is really intangible and hard to measure, but one of the stats you can’t get away from is, are you actually attracting the right people? Are the right people staying? Have you impacted absence? Absence is an enormous cost, especially in this sector. If you have not had any impact, you really need to step back and think about why
that is.”
Kathryn Betts, head of internal communications, Affinity Water:
“What we want to do is be more social in our approach to communication so that teams wherever they might be located feel involved and engaged. We also want to make sure that we have the right kit and technology to allow those people to be connected so that we don’t have technology as a barrier to engaging with some of our community teams. Informed people, who understand how they fit into the direction, are more engaged people, and more engaged people satisfy customers better.”
Elaine Billington, head of HR operations, United Utilities:
“One of the reasons we moved our training in-house is to make sure we are prepared for the future. We have looked at different solutions in line with future skill requirements. Advances in technology will impact our current ways of working, and the profile of our workforce. The skills and requirements will be different from what they are today.”
Five key points
1. Grow talent. Businesses need to look within and ensure staff are continually developed to fill upcoming gaps.
2. Flexibility. Today’s upcoming talent needs easy routes into the market and the ability to move about within the sector to match their career aspirations.
3. Social business. Internal comms between those retiring and the younger workforce need to be put in place.
4. Culture. Attracting and retaining the right people requires old practices to be reviewed and the right culture to be in place.
5. Legacy. Historic image can be used as a “hook” to draw in talent and retain staff.