Iain Conn and Jorge Pikunic recognised as OUTstanding LGBT+ role models.
Today, both our Group Chief Executive, Iain Conn, and our Managing Director for Distributed Energy & Power, Jorge Pikunic, have been named in the OUTstanding LGBT+ Role Models lists published by the Financial Times.
The lists celebrate inspiring LGBT+ Executives, and Ally Executives, who are driving inclusion in business.
Glenn Hicks, Co-Chair of Centrica’s LGBT+ Network, Spectrum, explains what this means to our company, and reflects on how far we’ve come since the network was founded two years ago.
Spectrum was launched in October 2016 with the aim of making Centrica a place where everyone can bring their whole-selves to work, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity – and seeing two of our top executives named in today’s OUTstanding list, serves as an important reminder of the amazing progress we’ve made over the past two years.
In the network's first year, we climbed 111 places in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index and we're hoping to build on this result when the rankings are announced again early next year.
We’ve developed a global presence across the UK, Ireland and the US. Our network now has over 400 people on its distribution list and over 2,000 active members on yammer, including both LGBT+ employees and straight allies.
This year we've reached even more employees across our many sites in the UK, with events held in London, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, Uddingston, Edinburgh, Oxford and Stockport – as well as our Head Offices in Staines and Windsor. Along with focusing on LGBT+ specific events, we've worked closely with other employee networks to open up discussions on mental health, what it means to be HIV positive in 2018, and intersectionality.
Beyond events and employee engagement, we've produced the Spectrum Guide to LGBT+ Inclusion – an introduction to why inclusion is important and how everyone at Centrica can get involved
We've worked with HR to make our Parental Leave and Bullying and Harassment Policies more inclusive, and we've added diversity questions as part of our recruitment process and employee surveys. This allows us to track whether we're attracting, promoting and retaining the best talent, and flags instances where LGBT+ employees might be at a disadvantage so we can fix this.
But best of all we've built a passionate, diverse team of internal change-makers from all parts of the business – from finance directors to engineers to customer service agents – all working together to make Centrica a place where everyone can bring their whole-selves to work.
Over the next year, we'll be focusing on improving our presence across our Field Operation teams, working with Learning & Development to roll out increased diversity and unconscious bias training and continuing to support our senior leaders – like Iain and Jorge – to make sure they have all the right tools they need to be effective allies and role models.