Great People

We’re proud to give careers to 3,500 people in Edrington, 70% of whom are based outside Scotland. Our aim is to provide a fully inclusive and engaging place to work where every colleague can contribute to Edrington’s success. In order to achieve this, we have introduced progressive initiatives and policies focusing on engagement, wellbeing, diversity and inclusion as well as rewarding our great people fairly and encouraging them to develop and grow their careers.

Wellbeing
In early 2019/20 we launched Edrington’s Wellbeing Framework to all employees. Our new framework focusing on three key areas: Mind, Body and Lifestyle, was developed to connect and co-ordinate existing activities across Edrington, and to help us introduce new initiatives globally and regionally. We delivered a number of activities under each of these headings over the course of the past year.

Employee Engagement
We were pleased with an employee engagement score of 73% earlier this year which is a significant increase from 68% in 2018. While this is just below 76%, which is deemed top quartile, it is an excellent result and evidence that our continued action plans are having a positive impact. The areas we particularly focused on after the last survey were around leadership and communication, both of which have improved significantly. In addition, our China team was awarded the prestigious “Best Employer” certification by our survey provider Kincentric as they scored top quartile in engagement, agility, and talent focus.

With a participation rate of 87% we are confident that we have received feedback from the vast majority of employees, and we remain committed to working with all teams to further analyse the results and put actionable plans in place.

Diversity & Inclusion

As with many organisations, we have work to do to ensure we foster a diverse and inclusive culture that enables diversity of thought.

In recent years we have focused on gender diversity and on our commitment of narrowing the gender pay gap. We have made further progress last year in terms of our gender pay gap in the UK. Our mean gender pay gap of 15.3% represents a decrease of 12.8% (2018: 28.1%) and the median pay gap of 10.4% represents a decrease of 4.1% (2018: 14.5%). We are not yet where we want to be, but we are confident we have the right measures and actions in place to continue to narrow our gender pay gap. For example, in February this year, we announced our new Modern Family Leave policy that will provide 26 weeks’ fully paid family leave to all new parents. All permanent Edrington employees, both women and men, with more than one year of service whose child is born, adopted or fostered will be entitled to this new benefit. This is a greatly enhanced offering for many of our locations.

We also put targets in place measuring our male to female ratio at first-round interviews for every recruitment with an aim to have at least 50% of candidates being female. While some areas achieve this, our overall number is around 35% and we will continue to focus on improving this. We also committed to having 33% female leaders (defined as pay grade 19+) by 2022 and we are confident that we have the right plan to help us achieve this.

We continue to encourage our employee diversity and inclusion network, the Balance group, which is sponsored by our CEO, to drive our D&I agenda and it has made great progress in driving up engagement across the business. The business has also started to broaden the agenda to include ethnicity and age in the wider efforts.