Our culture
Our people are fundamental to the Group’s success – our growth strategy is predicated on a strong focus on employee retention, development and engagement.
Our operating companies have clear values, aligned with the individual brands of Pepco and Poundland, which guide how we do business and interact with our customers and colleagues. These include a fundamental focus on our customers, with emphasis also placed on respect, simplicity, teamwork, growth and success.
We have many talented and committed colleagues across our workforce and where possible we seek to promote internally. In FY22, we promoted over 4,000 people within our businesses.
In Poundland our “Retail Career Pathway” helps colleagues to plan their development within our retail stores and distribution centres and is a key enabler in helping us to achieve our internal promotion targets and ensure a pipeline of talent. In FY22 this programme was extended including introducing a career pathway programme for colleagues in central functions. The “Retail Emerging Leader” senior leadership programme continues and in FY22 achieved an 86% success rate of colleagues achieving internal progression. We also continue to invest in apprenticeship programmes and at the end of FY22 174 apprenticeship learners represented just over 1% of the Poundland workforce.
In Pepco we have increased our focus on people strategy, leadership development and personal and professional development for all our colleagues in the year. This includes our Pepco leadership programme which began in 2021 with the launch of a new leadership framework and training delivered to the leadership team. This year we have extended the programme to senior managers in Pepco, providing leadership training, supporting talent and creating development opportunities. The programme will be cascaded to head office, distribution and store managers across the Pepco business in the coming years. In addition, the Pepco company-wide performance and development process has also recently been refreshed, ensuring all employees have personal goals aligned to company strategy and opportunity for development, training and feedback.