Our Diverse and Inclusive Culture
We use ‘diversity’ to describe our commitment to recognising and respecting differences between people while valuing the contribution everyone can make to our business.
‘Inclusion’ means creating safe and welcoming workplaces with fair cultures that encourage innovative and fresh ways of thinking, and allow people to speak up, especially to suggest where things could be done better.
“Our ambitions for the next five years are clear. We want to be on the side of the passengers and demonstrate our leadership across the rail industry. We will be an organisation that is easy to do business with, and one where our people are proud to work. To achieve these ambitions, we will work to increase the diversity of our workforce so that we represent the passengers that we serve up and down the country – because everyone matters.”
Andrew Haines . Chief Executive Network Rail
Diversity is about getting a mix and inclusion is about making sure that mix works well.
Network Rail seek to lead by example in this area and are working hard to ensure our workforce better represents our customers and society as a whole. Women now represent nearly 25 per cent of both our Board and executive leadership committee. We’re also growing gender and ethnicity diversity in our early entrant programmes, especially our graduate programme.
Our Diversity and Inclusion Values are implicit in our four values and by living these we demonstrate that everyone matters :
We fully support our supply chain to optimise the social and economic benefits that can be achieved through strong diversity and inclusion policies and further reading on our approach is available in our Everyone Matters Strategy:
In North West and Central our Performance Measures contain metrics which seek to ensure that our supply chain share this commitment to diversity and inclusion to ensure that we not just meet the minimum expectations required of us as a client but that we look to exceed the baseline set by the DfT. The metrics would look for evidence of :
- Legislative Compliance and Training of workforce
- Binary Data to evidence sustained progression against the minimum expectations set in the contract
- Sharing of best practice and support of regional initiatives
More diversity will facilitate more innovation and we will listen more and make sure that everyone is involved and respected, which will encourage an inclusive working environment that values everyone.