Our people

Our aim is to create a team of high-performing, engaged and motivated people who can make a difference for customers, shareholders, the company and themselves.

Building a global team
Our people strategy continued to support the transformation of BT in our drive to become ‘number one for customer service’. As we increasingly operate globally, so our workforce outside the UK continues to grow. At 31 March 2008, BT employed 111,858 people worldwide – 102,544 in the UK and the rest of Europe, the Middle East and Africa; 4,714 in the Americas; and 4,600 in the Asia Pacific region. Significant acquisition activity during the financial year meant that 8,455 new employees were integrated within the BT family. The acquisition, for example, of Frontline involved the transfer of 3,264 people to BT (Acquisitions and disposals).
     Our success as a business depends on recruiting, retaining, developing and rewarding skilled and talented people who live by the BT values.

Nurturing leadership capabilities
The quality of leadership is also vital to the successful transformation of BT. We are focused on ensuring that leaders at all levels understand what is expected of them, have access to appropriate development opportunities and are able to benchmark their performance against that of their peers.

Encouraging learning and development
We offer employees a wide range of learning and re-skilling opportunities. A variety of online and instructor-led courses are available through Route2Learn, our group-wide web-based learning portal.
     We have created and operate a learning governance model to ensure that learning and development within BT really do align with our key strategic objectives. Our successful company-wide re-accreditation to Investors in People (first achieved in 1998) is a vital measure of our success in achieving this alignment.
     Key to being ‘number one for customer service’ is developing a passionately customer-centric culture in BT and ensuring that our people have the skills and the tools necessary to ensure that every customer experience is an excellent one. A number of development initiatives designed to improve our ‘right first time’ performance were launched in 2008. For example, by the end of May 2008, BT Design and BT Operate will have taken about 21,000 people from around the world through a one-day event focused on a number of practical ways to improve the customer experience and to drive innovation and cross-organisation problem solving.

Rewarding and recognising achievement
Around 40,000 managers are eligible for variable, performance-related bonuses and the remuneration of our most senior managers is linked to BT’s total shareholder return performance measured over a period of three years or, in the case of Openreach senior managers, Openreach’s performance over a three-year period.
     From 2009, remuneration will also be linked to the manner in which objectives are met as well as to the fact that they are met. This ‘how’ factor will take into account the behaviours managers exemplify – customer-centric leadership abilities – in meeting their objectives.
     We are also developing ways of recognising and rewarding not just individual performance but also teamwork between individuals and between different parts of the business, in order to promote new ways of serving our customers’ best interests.
     We operate a flexible benefits programme in many parts of BT, which gives employees the freedom to choose between different types of benefits, exchanging salary for healthcare or bonus payments for enhanced pension contributions.
     We continued to provide our employees with opportunities to share in the company’s success. Employees outside the UK receive an award of free BT shares or a cash equivalent depending on local legal and/or regulatory requirements (from 2008, all BT employees in the UK were entitled to receive free broadband instead of an award of free shares). Employees in more than 25 countries also have the opportunity to save to buy BT shares at a discount to the price at the start of the savings period. And under the BT Employee Share Investment Plan (ESIP), UK employees can buy BT shares from their pre-tax and pre-NI salaries. 95% of eligible employees participate in one or more of these plans.
     Most of our employees are members of the BT Pension Scheme (a defined benefit scheme) or the BT Retirement Plan (a money purchase scheme), both of which are controlled by independent trustees. The BT Pension Scheme was closed to new members on 31 March 2001. The majority of new employees are eligible to join the BT Retirement Plan (Pensions in the Financial review).

Connecting with our people
Our annual employee attitude survey was conducted most recently in February 2008 and attracted a 72% response rate (over 74,000 responses). The survey generates around 5,000 feedback reports for managers and their teams across the business, helping to promote effective team working.
     Employees are kept informed about our business through a wide range of communications channels, including our online news service, bi-monthly newspaper, regular email bulletins and senior management webchats and webcast briefings.
     We have a record of stable industrial relations and enjoy generally constructive relationships with recognised unions in the UK and works councils elsewhere in Europe. In the UK, we recognise two main trade unions – the Communication Workers Union and Connect. We also operate a pan-European works council (the BTECC).

Embedding flexibility and promoting diversity
We continue to create an inclusive working environment in which employees can thrive regardless of their race, sex, religion/beliefs, disability, marital or civil partnership status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or caring responsibilities.
     22% of our workforce is female, women hold 19 of our top 81 leadership roles and make up 29% of the people in our leadership team succession plans. 10% of our most highly rewarded people in the UK are from an ethnic minority background and 16.5% are female.
     Diversity and inclusion at BT are led by our Global Equality and Diversity Forum. Each diversity group – e.g. gender, race, disability – is championed by a senior manager who is a member of the forum. In addition, each line of business has a senior manager champion for equality and diversity, who is responsible for the promotion, development and implementation of local diversity and inclusion strategies. For example, in 2008 Openreach developed a recruitment campaign to attract more women and people from ethnic minority backgrounds into the engineering workforce. The campaign received a Chairman’s Award from Race for Opportunity and the Investor of the Year award from Women into Science, Engineering and Construction (WISE).
     We benchmark our policies and practices against the standards set by a number of organisations including Race for Opportunity (BT ranking: 3rd), the Employers Forum on Disability (BT ranking: 3rd), Opportunity Now (gender) (BT ranking: 6th), Stonewall (sexual orientation) (BT ranking: 11th) and the Schneider Ross Global Diversity and Inclusion benchmark (BT ranking: 2nd).
     Outside the UK, we are working to ensure that our policies and practices are tailored to address legislation country by country, as well as respecting cultural differences.
     Flexible working – for example, hot-desking, office sharing and working from home – enables people with disabilities, caring responsibilities and those returning from maternity leave to work where once it would have been difficult. All BT employees have the right to request flexible working and it is already well established in our UK operations where more than 11,000 employees work from home. This practice is increasingly important in our global operations where, during 2008, we ran flexible working initiatives in Spain, France, the Netherlands and the US.

Health and safety
The health and safety of our people are of paramount importance and we continue to seek improvements by focusing on behavioural/lifestyle change. In 2008, we concentrated our health promotion activities on mental well-being – impaired mental health is our single greatest cause of lost time and productivity. Our sickness absence rate amounted to 2.43% of calendar days being lost – 20% lower than five years ago. During 2008, we reduced our accident rate by more than 20% to 1.9 lost time incidents per million working hours at 31 March 2008.

	111,900 number of employees worldwide

	+28% Americas		+1% UK, Europe, the Middle East and Africa		+464% Asia Pacific