Utility Week

UTILITY Week 2nd October 2015

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UTILITY WEEK | 2ND - 8TH OCTOBER 2015 | 25 Operations & Assets 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. Five key themes 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." 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 require- ments. 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." 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." 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 sec- tor. If you have not had any impact, you really need to step back and think about why that is." Brought to you in association with Annamarie Petsis Jones, HR director, Opus Energy "For us it's about retention. A lot of

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