“Wellbeing is misunderstood: it’s about the health of our people and their sense of belonging”

Train operating companies get plenty of column inches in the tabloids, usually for negative reasons.

Happily, Southeastern is worthy of praise for having made The Sun for something positive.

It achieved Top 8 billing in the newspaper’s menopause-friendly employers of 2022. It also earned the National Equality Standard by Ernst Young accreditation and gained recognition in the Financial Times’ Diversity Leaders ranking, among 850 companies from across Europe.

So perhaps it was no surprise that Southeastern added to its list of achievements by scooping the Great Place to Work accolade at RAIL’s 2023 National Rail Awards.

Steve Foster has served as People Director at Southeastern, and emphasises that “most importantly” the award is “for the people that have done the work on it, that have made the difference to their colleagues - people who’ve worked in our network groups, who work day in and day out supporting one another”.

Southeastern’s ‘Menopause in the Workplace’ programme was launched in 2019, followed three years later by a ‘Menopause Awareness’ e-learning course for managers.

It became the first transport company to gain accreditation for being a menopause-friendly employer.

“We have to be quite honest about this - it’s still a male-dominated industry and at Southeastern we’re no different, and it’s not always been seen or felt to be easy for men to have these conversations or be aware of it,” says Foster.

“It’s about allowing people to understand the impact of the menopause, how it may be making people feel, and making them confident in the knowledge that it’s OK to have a conversation.

“We want people to feel comfortable to ask questions.

"It’s OK not knowing - that’s all part of the work we’re doing on diversity and inclusion. Ask the questions and we’ll help educate you, help raise awareness. And if we can talk about these topics, then that makes it more inclusive.”

Foster outlines that such schemes are far from being ‘box-ticking’ exercises.

“In many ways, wellbeing is misunderstood as ‘Oh, that’s an HR job, tea and tissues’ and all that. But when we really look at it, this is about the health of our people, both physical and mental, but also their sense of belonging - how can people feel valued at work?

“If something goes wrong with them or their family, their organisation has the moral compass and does the right thing by them.”

One of the ways Southeastern can measure the success of its initiatives is through its staff engagement survey, known as the Pulse programme. 

Foster explains: “Over the last 18 months or so, our engagement scores have actually gone down, which is perhaps understandable given that a lot of colleagues hadn’t had a pay increase until the recent RMT deal, and the industrial action.

“But within that we have an inclusion index, which has been increasing.

"We measure people’s sense of belonging at the company, which has also gone up. Our scores for Women at Work and in particular among black colleagues, the sense of belonging is higher than the overall average.”

Employment statistics, the other key indicator of Diversity & Inclusion performance, shows that almost 30% of new Southeastern hires are women. And in the last quarter of 2022, people from ethnic minority backgrounds represented 39% of new recruits.

The fact that Southeastern’s initiatives and visible progress was recognised at last September’s National Rail Awards gives Steve and his team “the determination to do more of it”.

“Let’s accelerate what we’re doing,” he says.

“This isn’t ‘job done, box ticked’.

This is ‘right, we want to do it again, we want to win again next year’.

We want to carry on and recognise the great things our people do as part of their jobs.

“I want to make this an even better place to work. The only limiting factors can be your level of aspiration and creativity. We have loads of that left, so we can keep doing more.”

There’s still time to enter the 2024 National Rail Awards: details here