Vodafone 2015 Annual Report Download - page 31

During the year we trained around 18,000
people in our Technology Academy, around
13,000 people in our Retail Academy and
over 8,000 in our Enterprise Sales Academy.
Next year we will introduce a Customer
Experience Academy to help transform our
customer service.
Developing future leaders
We conduct regular talent reviews to identify
high-potential future leaders and accelerate
the progress of high-potential managers
through our “Inspire” programme, which offers
development and executive coaching and may
include an assignment to another Vodafone
market or function.
Our “Discover” programme for graduates
accelerates the careers of high performing
graduates, with over 600 people recruited
onto this programme during the year. We also
have an international assignment programme,
“Columbus” which gives recent “Discover”
graduates an international assignment.
Recognising performance
We maintained our approach of rewarding
people based on their performance,
potential and contribution to our success.
We benchmark roles regularly to ensure
competitive, fair remuneration in every
country in which we operate. We also offer
competitive retirement and other benet
provisions which vary depending on conditions
and practices in local markets.
Global short-term incentive plans are offered
to a large percentage of employees and global
long-term incentive plans are offered to our
senior managers. Our incentive arrangements
are subject to company performance
measures, comprising both nancial and
strategic metrics, and individual performance
measures. This ensures that variable pay
is demonstrably linked to both company
and individual performance, and that poor
performance is not rewarded.
Integrating our acquisitions
As we develop our business towards unified
communications we need to combine with the
companies we acquire and ensure that all of our
employees have the new skills that we increasingly need,
such as cable engineering and door-to-door selling.
During the year we integrated around 5,000 Kabel
Deutschland employees in Germany and around
2,500 Ono employees in Spain as well as employees
from our acquisitions of Cobra Automotive in Italy,
Hellas Online in Greece and our purchase of over
130 stores from Phones 4u in the UK.
When we acquire a company we look to include all
new employees within Vodafone as soon as possible.
Just two months after the acquisition of Ono, all
their employees had the same tools as Vodafone
employees and within six months we had moved all
of Ono’s headquarter employees into Vodafone’s main
offices in Spain so we all sit under one roof. Within eight
months we had combined the management structure
so we are now truly one organisation.
Around 7,500 employees integrated in Germany
and Spain this year
An ownership mentality is also a cornerstone
of our reward programme and senior executives
are expected to build up and maintain
a signicant holding of Vodafone shares.
Simplifying and improving
our business
We continue to move transactional and back
ofce activities to our shared service centres
in Egypt, India, Hungary and Romania, with
16,800 employees and contractors in these
centres, compared with 13,300 a year ago.
These centres allow us to standardise many
of our support functions and deliver a more
consistent and improved experience to our
customers. These centres also support our
cost reduction goal as we benet from lower
labour costs.
Doing what’s right
We have a “Code of Conduct” that sets out our
business principles and what we expect from
employees to ensure they protect themselves
as well as the Company’s reputation and
assets. We communicate these through our
“Doing What’s Right” campaign which covers
topics including health and safety, anti-
bribery, privacy, security and competition law
to ensure that people know what’s expected
of them and managers know what is expected
of their teams.
Creating a safe place to work
We know from experience that failing
to follow basic health and safety standards
can lead to our employees, the people
we work with and the people exposed to our
activities being seriously injured or killed.
We believe that accidents and injuries are
preventable and we do our utmost to prevent
them by promoting a culture where safety
is an integral part of every business decision
across the Group.
Our “Absolute Rules” help employees follow
best practice for safety and we focus on our top
ve risks: road safety, working with electricity,
working at height, working with underground
cables and working with contractors (where
we have less control over safety). The safety
culture in Vodafone continues to improve with
the results of our latest people survey showing
that 91% of employees believe that our
“Absolute Rules” are taken seriously compared
with 89% last year.
Despite these measures, we greatly
regret to report that ten people died while
undertaking work on behalf of Vodafone
last year. Vehicle-related incidents involving
subcontractors in emerging markets remain
our main cause of fatalities and we continue
to implement safe driving programmes in all
of our markets.
Note:
1 Employee numbers are shown on a full time employee
basis. A statutory view is provided on page 157.
Overview Strategy review Performance Governance Financials Additional information Vodafone Group Plc
Annual Report 2015
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