We understand that attracting, retaining and motivating appropriately skilled people is essential to our success.

 

Valuing diversity

We currently operate in 15 countries, encompassing a wide range of languages and cultures. We value diversity in our workforce and have a group-wide human resources and employee policy prohibiting discrimination against employees or potential employees on any grounds. It is also our policy not to discriminate against disabled persons, particularly regarding recruitment and selection, training, career development and promotion.

 

We continue to operate in a challenging marketplace. We employ a significant number of migrant workers, although recent self-repatriation has caused us to look at alternative labour sources. Dedicated staff are difficult to recruit and retain, so it is important to our business success that we continue to meet our employees' needs and expectations, since they are key in meeting those of our customers.

 

Our employees come from a wide range of social and educational backgrounds, with varying age profiles. We believe that through recognising and valuing the differences in our staff, we are better positioned to attract and retain those that we need.

 

The nature of our operations requires flexible working arrangements and shift patterns, through which we can often accommodate different individuals' lifestyle needs. This can range from fluctuating seasonal volumes in our hotel operations, to a steadier trend in our garment divisions. Given our many years of experience in this industry we are able to readily predict demand fluctuations and so are well positioned to provide opportunities for flexible working arrangements that may better suit individual circumstances, for example, for parents with young children and for those studying.

 

We are geared towards the diverse nature of our workforce. For example, the group has a ‘whistleblowing' system by which staff may, in confidence, raise concerns about possible wrongdoing in financial reporting or other matters including breaches of our CR policies.

 

This system operates throughout the group in a number of languages. In the UK for instance, this system is at present available in 14 different languages. During 2009, four issues were raised by employees, all of which related to personnel or employee welfare concerns. All of these concerns were promptly reviewed by management and appropriate action was taken where required.