Our people

Our objective
BAA employs around 4,000 people at Heathrow. These are people who turn our strategies into action. We aim to create conditions that will attract and retain high calibre people and equip and enable them to give of their best.

Our Strategy and performance
Following a staff survey last year,  the fairness of the internal selection process was highlighted as a key area of focus this year. Staff identified inconsistent hiring and promotion practices in BAA Heathrow. We believe this is due to poor process and perceived discrimination. It is a concern of ours and conflicts with our objective of making Heathrow a great place to work.

We aim to create a just and integrated workplace, where diversity is valued. In compliance with the law, we aim to give everyone an equal chance to work at Heathrow free from fear, discrimination, prejudice and racism.

To help us achieve our goal this year we have defined and begun implementing a new diversity strategy. Our diversity strategy is made up of five elements:
- Understand workforce demographics
- Raise awareness and educate
- Stamp out prejudice and unfairness
- Ensure equality and fairness in employment and promotional opportunities
- Manage and measure our progress ongoing

Understand workforce demographics
Last year’s employee ethnicity survey provided us with ample statistical information, and we now have a good benchmark for our progress.

One of the challenges we have identified is the female/male ratio of employees in our security teams. This needs addressing for moral and social reasons, as well as meeting business requirements.

Raise awareness and education
Diversity was added to our management training programme last year as part of ‘Licence to Lead’. We have identified another opportunity for raising awareness and are now looking to build diversity training into various existing training opportunities (i.e. annual security refresher training).

Stamp out prejudice and unfairness
Using our internal communication channels, we are working to reinforce our key policies and practices. These include:
- Equal Opportunities
- Code of Ethics
- Bullying and Harassment Policy
- Language Policy
 
Ensure equality and fairness in employment and promotional opportunities
Volunteers from across the business participated in a Quick Action Team on fair recruitment. We asked the 12-member team to recommend solutions that would make our recruitment process transparent, accessible and equitable. Management accepted all the recommendation, which have now been implemented. The recommendations included:

1. creating a policy by which all recruitment is handled centrally.
2. advertising all roles to our current employee population for two weeks before advertising externally.
3. having two people interview candidates and offering more assessment centres to encourage objective hiring decisions.
4. telling new starters where to find job opportunity listings (e.g. jobs hotline, web site) during their induction.
5. ensuring managers are trained to conduct interviews or assessments – contributing to a more successful recruitment process and developing their leadership skills.

We have rolled out new software program, Global Successor, to support the internal application process. This BAA-wide system monitors job vacancies from initial posting through to the role being filled. It also posts the advertisement onto the web site. The system automatically produces monthly reports on gender and diversity. (Note: The diversity reports are inconclusive as legislation prohibits us from requiring applicants to answer diversity questions.)

Manage and measure our progress ongoing
As part of our annual employee survey, Make Your Mark, we include a question about the fairness of promotions at BAA. This gives us an annual measure of our progress in this area.

Going Forward
Over the last 12 months, we have made significant progress meeting our sustainability targets. In particular, we have delivered an internal application monitoring process, Global Successor, and have increased our employees’ positive perception of the internal selection process. We will continue to monitor our progress through annual employee surveys.