Valuing our workforce

Our people and culture

In an ultra-competitive world, success does not just depend on employees’ expertise and effort. It emerges from their personal engagement with their company. With this in mind, we are developing leadership and working practices to involve and engage all of our employees.

As part of the integration process with Tata Steel, a group of senior managers reviewed our current culture and redefined the culture we need to create to become a world-class benchmark steel company.

Leadership: is the key to delivering our objectives. A joint Tata Steel and Corus leadership programme for the top 500 managers will develop the capabilities needed to create this cultural shift. Appraisals and individual performance reviews will also be aligned with the new requirements, to provide a better tool to support our change effort.

Organisational responsibilities

Irrespective of the takeover, Corus remains a distinct business entity in which the responsibilities of Divisions, Business Units and functions are clear. In summary, Divisions and Business Units are responsible for profit and loss; lead Divisions co-ordinate our approach to key markets; while some aspects of our commercial operations are co-ordinated from the centre. Some functional activities are managed centrally in order to capture the benefits of scale, expertise and efficiencies for the whole of Corus.

Common rules are set through Group Policy Documents (GPDs) and Group Standards. GPDs address major corporate matters, risk areas and processes, while Group Standards set out what is expected from Business Units. In addition, a number of functions have been created that have a remit across the Tata Steel Group, including technology and integration, finance, strategy, corporate relations and communications, and global minerals. Individuals from the two entities will also take lead roles within Tata Steel Group in health and safety, purchasing and information technology.

Staffing and succession

We employed some 41,900 people at the end of March 2008, compared to 41,200 at the end of 2006. Within Corus, 4% of our employees are based outside the European Union and 86% are in the UK and the Netherlands.

Recruitment of people with relevant skills and expertise continues to be challenging, but we are increasing our efforts in key areas and, for the third year running, we are listed in the Times Top 100 best graduate employers in the UK. This is in the face of stiff competition from global companies in all business sectors, including banks and consulting companies.

Internally, we will increase our efforts to foster and develop our technical and managerial talent into future leaders. More focus and visibility for our talent platforms, more involvement of our most senior executives in defining and driving development plans for potential successors, dual career ladders, and open job advertising are key initiatives that will be developed in the coming months.

Training, development and learning

We are continuing to invest in the training and development of our employees. Most training and learning is focused locally, supporting our Business Unit strategies. Business initiatives include apprentice schemes, induction programmes, graduate development, use of further education, and external and tailor-made internal training courses. These may lead to qualifications such as foundation degrees, Certificates from the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH), ONCs and HNCs, or graduate and post-graduate degrees.

Centrally, we continue to train continuous improvement (CI) coaches due to the demand from the businesses. In 2007, we supported our CI philosophy by developing our senior managers’ capabilities in strategy deployment and engagement. Divisional and Business Unit workshops focus on strategic business priorities and how they will be deployed and translated into priorities at all levels of the organisation. In addition, we piloted and started to roll out a development programme for our Group Senior Managers which uses structured feedback from their direct reports to help them assess and develop their capability to engage and motivate their teams. This programme has been completed in two of the three Divisions, and some businesses have started rolling it out to the next level of managers. We also started auditing the effectiveness of our strategy deployment.

In the second half of 2008 we will establish “Development Gateways” for technical and managerial staff at key career stages to ensure they have the capability we need to face the challenges of the future. Continuous improvement skills will feature prominently in their development.

Employee relations and communication

Our consultation processes continue to follow our well established practices. We meet regularly with our European Works Council, and we have consultative structures and processes at country and Business Unit levels.

In the UK, an information and consultation agreement with national unions provides a framework for consultation on strategic issues and for regular updates on business performance. In addition to day-to-day business communication, we make efforts to increase formal, two-way communication. Extending the good practices with employee surveys in some of our Business Units, we have established Company-wide guidelines. These require each Business Unit to conduct employee surveys at least every other year and to include in their survey some 20 core questions to enable a comparison of responses across businesses.

For 2008/09, we will use the Gallup Q12 survey which enables us to benchmark our survey results externally.