OUR PEOPLE

We’re committed to making our working lives meaningful, inclusive and enjoyable. We aim to create a culture that champions diversity of thinking and supports the growth and development of our people. And we create opportunities for people at all levels to both start and progress their careers.

It’s also important that we improve people’s lives outside of Matalan. So we take part in activities and invest in partnerships to support people in the communities we work with.

What We’re Doing

As part of our focus under ESG, we’re working across

4 key areas:

• Playing our part in improving social mobility and tackling challenges such as youth unemployment through supporting schemes such as Kickstart, Traineeships and Apprenticeships

• Working with local communities and charities to offer opportunities for young people affected by homelessness through our partnership with ‘End Youth Homelessness’

• Connecting with the communities we work within by working with schools, colleges and universities to support early careers through work experience, placements and apprenticeships

• Investing in the development of all our future leadership talent through partnerships like Be Inspired Future Leaders Programme as well as offering targeted programmes to improve the pipeline of Women in leadership roles

• It’s really important that we have an inclusive culture across the business. And we believe the best way to shape this is to create internal communities who can give us feedback and advise us on the best ways to change things for the better. We’re growing a number of colleague-led communities to help us improve

• Matalan serves a diverse customer base, and we know it’s important for our workforce to reflect that level of diversity. We continually challenge ourselves to make sure we have measures in place to reduce the risk of bias in our recruitment processes and career progression routes, so we can provide equal opportunities for everyone to tailor make a career they love

• Our business is made up of three separate areas; Retail, Logistics and Head Office, all which have a different mix of colleagues when it comes to how diverse their teams are. We are committed to continually reviewing the data to make sure the plans we have don’t just take a blanket approach, but instead are targeted towards building talent pipelines of underrepresented groups in key areas

• Linked to this is our data which outlines gender pay position, the latest report and actions for which can be found here. Lots of our activity outlined within our ESG plan aligns to and supports our aim of improving opportunities for women across the business and doing what we can to reduce our gap

• We are also reshaping our leadership development offer to improve capability in terms of creating an inclusive culture for all colleagues

• We signed up to the BRC (British Retail Consortium) Diversity and Inclusion Charter at the start of our journey to ensure we hold ourselves accountable and play our part in improving the diversity across Retail as an industry

• Our wellbeing team has developed a programme that aims to support colleagues with their physical and mental health. Support is easy to access through all of our channels

• The Retail Trust provides our people with wellbeing support whenever they are in need. Whether it’s access to online resources, on the end of the phone or face-to-face, the expertise, care and support that the Retail Trust is able to offer is invaluable whenever and wherever they are called upon

• We also use our colleague communities to support our wellbeing agenda. Most recently, we took part in Menopause Awareness Month with our menopause community. We created platforms for colleagues to share their personal experiences and we’re working hard to support colleagues going through the menopause with masterclasses and the development of our menopause policy

• We’re continually encouraging conversations around issues that impact people’s wellbeing in their working lives, but are not often talked about. For example, we’re raising awareness through panel discussions and online forums around topics such as neurodiversity and challenges experienced by LGBTQ+ colleagues and women in the workplace

• As a responsible business, our board is actively involved in decision-making on issues such as gender pay, our ethnicity balance across our workforce and our pay strategy

• Our Your Voice community represents colleagues across the business. Meeting monthly, these groups input into business decisions and are a valuable conduit on important topics from working hours to our sustainability strategy

• Matalan’s confidential whistleblowing channel allows colleagues to speak up with confidence if they see or suspect that our values are not being met in any part of our business