Throughout this year, we have made significant progress in establishing strong foundations to set us up for success. This has included establishing programmes of work that are aligned globally and focused on improving our proposition in careers, development and enhancing our employer brand. Alongside this, we’ve been executing our Future of Work programme, giving our people more flexibility to choose where and how they want to work.
Our People agenda has five clear strategic focus areas:
- Creating a culture that puts people first
- Preparing our organisation for growth
- Growing world-beating tech-company leaders
- Making tech skills our advantage
- Supercharging employability
Creating a culture that puts people first
Our ambition is to be a market-leading talent destination, underpinned by a culture where our people feel valued and able to do their best work. Fundamental to this is the development of our refreshed and aligned global employee value proposition (EVP) under the strapline Discover the Unexpected. The EVP is underpinned by four key pillars – People First, Together We Win, Force for Good and Innovate. The final concept was inspired by the input of over 500 employee representatives across different regions, as well as 200 prospective external candidates in key skill areas and critical markets.
Our core philosophy at Experian is that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is essential to our purpose of creating a better tomorrow by making positive change in the world, and actively supporting efforts to close the financial wealth gap of underserved communities. We actively support the potential of all expressions of diversity, including but not limited to thought, style, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, disability, culture, and experience.
To achieve this philosophy we will:
- Evolve and develop processes and programmes that will increase the diversity of our people at all levels
- Develop products for customers and consumers which set a standard of equity and financial inclusion in all the communities in which we operate
- Prioritise actions that support our culture of belonging that ultimately support a culture that enables our people to speak their truth, feel valued, and bring their whole selves to work.
In FY22, we developed a three-year DEI strategy and published our second global DEI Report. This has allowed us to showcase our culture and DEI work, and is also an opportunity to hold ourselves accountable to the five DEI commitments we have made: active sponsorship, better understand our opportunities and challenges, measure progress against specific goals, ensure accountability, and support our people.
Our global commitment to establishing this philosophy starts with Group Operating Committee (OpCo) sponsorship of gender, LGBTQ+, ethnicity, disability and mental health. Additionally, we are holding ourselves accountable at the most senior level, which includes our executive leadership hosting a regular diversity review integrated within quarterly business reviews. The diversity review and progress toward our shared goals is an expectation of each OpCo member. We now have 40 Employee Resource Groups that not only provide a safe space for anyone who needs it, but also promote change and build awareness across Experian. These groups include Women in Experian, Black at Experian, and PRIDE. To further shine a light on the diversity of our people, we have released our fourth series of videos, entitled the Humans of Experian, which showcase the unique life stories of many of our employees.
We strongly believe in celebrating difference with regular events, including International Women’s Day, as well as the International Day of Persons with Disabilities and Black History Month, where we supported black entrepreneurs across the UK. We have celebrated World Mental Health Month for the first time and continue to emphasise the well-being of our people. Activities have included the launch of the WeWorkWell@Experian Asia Pacific well-being programme, which aims to offer support across all dimensions of well-being, as well as our Mental Health First Aider programme that has seen over 400 people registered for training across the business; this exceeds our target of including 1% of employees. The UK and Ireland region has employed its first Well-being Manager to promote our well-being initiatives.
We are proud of the fact that our endeavours have led to us receiving several prestigious external awards, including being recognised within the Fortune 100 Best Places to Work in 2021 in the USA, and as a Top Employer in the UK, Germany, Brazil, Singapore and Australia. Serasa Experian was recognised as one of LinkedIn’s Top 25 Companies in 2022 and the North America region also achieved the top score on the Disability Equality Index.
Awards
Glassdoor trend 2017-2022
The global COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented set of circumstances that mean staying connected with people has been more important than ever. With this in mind, we have consolidated our listening strategy, with regular pulse check-ins alongside a new global partnership with Great Place to Work (GPTW). Almost 11,000 of our people took part in our first enterprise-wide GPTW survey with results including an engagement score1 of 78%; it was 76% in our last annual survey in 2019. Our survey scores and workplace practices also mean we are now certified as a Great Place to Work in 20 countries (out of 28 eligible).
Despite the challenging backdrop presented by COVID-19, we are delighted that our February 2022 pulse survey showed us that 81% of our people feel that management has a clear view of where the organisation is going and how to get there, 87% feel they are able to be productive in their current work set-up, and 88% feel that Experian is dedicated to creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive culture. We are further encouraged that our people are recognising the work that has taken place, which has resulted in an improved Glassdoor rating for a sixth year in a row to 4.3 out of 5 (3.1 in late 2016). We continue to celebrate our Experian Way behaviours, resulting in over 23,000 employee-nominated recognition awards being handed out in FY22.
The Experian Way represents our values, and the behaviours we expect from all our employees in their everyday activities. This year, our people have continued to find new ways to demonstrate these behaviours while adjusting to different ways of working.
Our emphasis is on investing in more personalised, technology-enabled solutions for the moments that matter in people’s lives, ensuring inclusivity and diversity are part of everything we do. To underpin this, we enable strong connections between our people, and make sure we maintain our special culture, no matter where people are based. Horizon, our market-leading employee communications platform remains popular with employees, with 97% registered and 80% regularly active on the platform. Since its launch in April 2020, we have seen 37,000 comments posted and over 2,500 employee stories shared. Alongside this, the People Portal, which is a self-service application for employees, including access to pay details and to make leave requests, had over 15,000 of our people access the platform on average each month.
Participants in ‘Pitch’, Experian’s first ever Black entrepreneurship challenge. From left to right: Anthony Odogwu (Rxtro Store), Abi Odusanwo (Yeye Mi), Fola Awoyemi (XW Media), Anita Lusardi (Afroani), Nathaniel Ihenachor (The Smart Wash LTD), Sojourner Baker (Discovered Beauty Box), Amadou Kassaraté (SCJ Clothing), Tahlia Gray (Sheer Chemistry) and Raphael Babalola (Temple Wellness).
550,000+
applications via Smart Recruiters, which has helped us to fill over 5,400 positions in FY22
Preparing our organisation for growth
We are an ambitious organisation, so we continue to prepare for global opportunities and growth. Fundamental to facilitating this growth is our Future of Work programme. The global pandemic gave us an opportunity to adopt new ways of working, which accelerated existing trends exponentially. This resulted in a set of globally aligned principles on how we work, which included a review of the role of the office, identifying what technology investments we would need, and the real-estate footprint that would allow us to maintain our strong culture in a more remote world. Our framework created roles that are categorised in one of four ways – Hub, Hybrid, Home and Roam – and all regions are now implementing the Future of Work programme outputs, taking local conditions into account.
To help facilitate this shift in our ways of working, we have:
- Published employee and manager guides that outline consistent principles and offer guidance on how to work in different ways
- Shared employee stories which highlight how Hybrid can support different individual situations
- Launched a ‘Love where you work’ campaign for candidates and new joiners, reinforcing our approach to a more flexible future
- Initiated a new cloud booking system for Hybrid office workers
- Started reconfiguring our existing office environments while enhancing our employee experience.
Innovation remains at the heart of our culture and across our products and services. To recognise and celebrate the people and projects bringing cutting-edge solutions to our clients’ and consumers’ biggest problems, we have aligned the Si Ramo Prize for innovation and the Creating a Better Tomorrow (CABT) award, with the winners announced at an Innovation Awards ceremony. This approach gives us an opportunity to highlight what’s happening across our business and how it’s helping transform lives and create a better tomorrow. We launched 104 new products in FY22, with another 151 projects already in the pipeline at the end of the financial year.
Alongside these awards, our second Global Hackathon was attended by 3,000 of our people and generated 100 entries, underpinned by our key principles of focus, learn, practise, connect and grow. Winners and runners-up were acknowledged across four categories: Incubators, Enablers, Entrepreneurs and Social Advocates. In September, more than 3,000 people attended our first EmPower month, championing Experian’s approach to Continuous Improvement. It showed how to strive for effectiveness and efficiency by using different methodologies, like Lean, Six Sigma and Design Thinking, and how to focus on productivity and bring increased value to our customers.
We have piloted and started to roll out the C3 (Customer Culture Council) programme across the organisation, to achieve high-performance outcomes – it aims to improve cross-functional collaboration and remove cultural barriers that inhibit customer-facing innovation. Beyond this, we continue with our high-performance programme, including the launch of a portal for new joiners with reference materials for existing employees, which explains, through a series of short videos, our performance philosophy at Experian. Our people continue to have access to the Elevate Performance platform for year-round performance management, including setting goals, development planning and check-ins. Our high-performance culture continues to encourage constructive feedback and use of our core tool (feedback.me) remains high – nearly 54,000 feedback requests were made in FY22.
Our second Global Hackathon was attended by 3,000 of our people and generated 100 entries, underpinned by our key principles of focus, learn, practise, connect and grow.
We continue to look to attract members of key talent groups who possess critical skills. Our focus has been on integrating workstreams including people analytics, strategic workforce planning and talent acquisition, so we can use our insights to proactively target diverse talent in critical areas. We recognise the competition for talent specifically in technology roles, so we have focused on high-demand skills in crucial markets. Besides this, we have created a global internal talent pool for critical technology skills, as well as expanding our hiring in early careers to develop young, diverse talent through the organisation. Central to our strategy was introducing Smart Recruiters as our global applicant-tracking system, which has seen 550,000+ applications, helping us to fill over 5,400 positions in FY22. We’re also seeing success from our employee advocacy programme, where employees can share approved content directly onto their LinkedIn accounts, and so play a role in helping strengthen our brand and reputation. Since its launch in late 2020, this has generated over 5 million impressions on LinkedIn.
Growing world-beating tech-company leaders
With our Future of Work programme continuing to run globally, we know we can no longer simply rely on physical workspaces to be our biggest cultural anchors. We continue to reinforce the more intangible elements of our culture, like values, behaviour, employee experience and ways of working, to create a strong connection between our people and Experian. This is a high priority in the way our leaders communicate and engage with their teams, and as we continue making our Employee Value Proposition part of the full employee lifecycle.
As an organisation, we recognise that our leaders amplify our ambition, culture, and values. With this in mind, we have taken the time to consider what ‘great looks like’ globally for current and potential leaders. We have used these insights to develop a set of Characteristics of Great Leadership, which form the basis of how we will now assess and develop our leaders and plan for succession. Leadership transition for new joiners and internal movers is also an area of focus, particularly for critical moves. This has allowed us to put the appropriate support in place – including coaching and literature – to get leaders quickly established within our culture, to mitigate risk, maintain business continuity, and set them up for success in Experian.
We have reviewed our approach to talent management and succession planning, to increase agility and move from process to outcomes. The majority of our top-100 roles have ‘ready-now’ succession identified, and we have over 200 individuals highlighted as successors for this group. In 2022, two-thirds of new top-100 leaders were promoted from within, with the remainder hired externally. We are proud that two of our biggest roles (Chief Operating Officer and CEO, North America) have been filled by internal talent highlighted in our succession plans. Our value hotspots are critical to our overall strategy, so we are focusing on ensuring we have the right roles occupied by the right people. This is particularly important in critical segments such as technology. Talent conversations are now based on strategic execution, business continuity risks and succession gaps. The frequency of these discussions has shifted from an annual event to a quarterly one, with the goal of better aligning them with how our business operates.
Making tech skills our advantage
We recognise that having the right skills and capabilities in the organisation is fundamental to achieving our ambitions. To facilitate this, we have evolved our approach to skills forecasting, prediction and planning through a new Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) programme aiming to create tools and a framework that enables us to fill our critical skills gaps effectively, globally. During FY22, we have run a pilot in the UK and Ireland, which has generated a demand and supply analysis of the roles and skills we require over the coming five-year period, as well as rigorous plans to inform our build/buy/borrow/bot strategies to bridge the gaps identified. We have created a playbook to support the global expansion of this work across the enterprise to give us a consistent approach, and more precision to support decision-making on how we attain the talent we need. This includes thinking more holistically and flexibly about our workforce, to incorporate rising numbers of contingent workers and third-party suppliers in the available market.
To underpin our SWP approach, we have developed a global skills framework for defining, assessing, growing and evaluating our talent, focusing on tech talent as a priority. We undertook a comprehensive review of the best way to align the job family framework for our technical skills. We are using a market-leading third-party solution, and an AI-enabled talent framework that allows us to bring to life these components for people in an intuitive and meaningful way. For example, it enables people to view and compare potential roles, identify skills gaps, and take up learning opportunities to enhance their skills and capabilities, providing much greater clarity on progression and development opportunities. Product Development roles were the first-phase focus of this approach through Q4 FY22, followed by the other key skill areas including Analytics.
As we look to compete for the talent we need, we have spent time developing a new reward philosophy and strategy specifically designed to attract and retain key tech talent. This includes a structured framework built on market-competitive total-reward levels for technical job families, alongside increased flexibility to differentiate reward to recognise individual contribution within these technical roles.
We launched the first phase of the Career Hub in February 2022 alongside Be World Ready, our Experian-wide Careers Week.
Supercharging employability
We continue to invest in our career development strategies, which remain key to being a market-leading employer. Our first ever global Career Hub is an internal portal, a one-stop-shop for employee career growth and holistic development needs. It helps identify skills gaps, and provide career coaching, learning channels, gigs, academies, bootcamps and university curriculums to our people. Employees are able to view and compare potential roles and take up learning opportunities to enhance their skills and capabilities.
We launched the first phase of the Career Hub in February 2022 alongside Be World Ready, our Experian-wide Careers Week. The week was a combination of global and regional career and learning content, with the aim of engaging our people in developing their careers and proactively staying up to date with the changing market. We were delighted that over one-third of our people took the opportunity to attend one of the 70 sessions. We have started building on the work that’s taken place this year on career frameworks, and scaling these across four identified career paths – Product Development, Product Management, Analytics and Sales. For employees, this gives greater clarity on progression and development opportunities, and it supports our ability to build our talent pipeline internally.
Some elements of the Career Hub were already in existence, including Stepping Stones, which has offered internal career development experiences such as gigs, job shadowing, job rotations and knowledge transfer, since its launch in January 2020. During this time, there have been 1,484 applications for experiences, as well as 244 gigs advertised. Elevate Learning, our learning management system, continues to democratise access to development and more than 18,200 employees used the platform in FY22.
Looking ahead
We are excited by what the future holds. Our ambition is to be recognised as one of the ‘25 Greatest Places to Work’ in the world, and we are focusing on what we need to do to achieve that. We will continue to refine our approach to the way we develop and reward our people, to attract and retain a best-in-class technology population. We will share a common understanding of what great leadership looks like, to help grow the next generation of company leaders. We will create the conditions that allow our people to feel valued, fulfilled and enabled to do their best work, and in turn be our biggest advocates. We will focus on creating an instantly recognisable employer brand known for innovation and an amazing culture, so the very best people want to work for us. Our intent remains to nurture a fully diverse, inclusive, high-performing and ‘people first’ culture.