People

It has been a year of fantastic progress for the Edrington People agenda – twelve months in which we accelerated the development and learning opportunities on offer to every employee around the world.

Much of this learning has been shared through the Edrington Academy. This online platform now hosts all our learning content and more than 70% of our employees have used the Academy to access 85,000 pieces of content since its relaunch in September.

In the coming year we will need to be more agile than ever. To advance that process we launched Project Accelerate, a dedicated project led by a team from across our international business. During last year, the Accelerate team took data and input from every function of the business and worked with the senior leaders and our board to prioritise the knowledge and skills that will drive our business in the future. We will continue to invest behind our people and our capabilities.

Our culture is adapting too. We know that the best results are achieved by great people from diverse backgrounds and by realising the benefits of a truly inclusive culture. Our gender pay gap report shows that we made further progress in our diversity and inclusion agenda last year. Three years into our pay gap reporting we are seeing progressive improvement and we are confident that we have the right actions in place to meet our targets – to have at least 50% of female candidates at first-round interviews, and to have 33% representation of women at our senior management grades by 2022. We are also working alongside the Scotch Whisky Association to develop its Diversity and Inclusion Charter, of which we are a signatory.

Flexibility at work is key to retaining talent, and in 2020 Edrington enhanced this further with its Modern Family Leave policy, giving every Edrington employee the right to 26 weeks’ fully paid leave when they become a parent.

In 2019 we delivered Total Reward Statements to every employee in Edrington, which gave detailed and personalised information on the value of their total reward offering.

Total reward goes further than salary to include the other reward elements that employees receive such as benefits and access to training programmes. The total reward offering can sometimes be obscured by a focus on base salary. That’s why it is so important to communicate to every employee, in a transparent and accessible way, the value of their total reward offering and the investment that Edrington makes in them individually. The reaction to these statements from our people has been very positive and we will continue to evolve our approach to total reward and our commitment to communicate reward in a transparent and consistent manner.

Our employee engagement survey had its highest ever participation rate last year, with 87% of employees sharing their views in a confidential survey. Edrington’s engagement score rose to 73% which is a fantastic result and a considerable increase from 68% in 2018. We were proud that Edrington China was awarded ‘Best Employer’ certification by Kincentric for its top quartile results in a number of areas.

The wellbeing of our people is our number one priority and in 2019 we launched Edrington’s Wellbeing framework, which coordinates activities across Edrington and creates a structure to run local and global initiatives. Our HR team worked to create a global Employee Assistance Programme, which was launched in April 2020. This global support service is confidential and provides our employees and their immediate families with practical information, counselling and support on a wide range of issues.

The aim of our global HR team is to provide an inclusive and engaging place to work where every person can contribute towards Edrington’s success. I am pleased with the progress we have made in the past year and I look forward to making Edrington an even better employer in the coming year.