Creating a healthy, diverse, and inclusive environment is important for our people and our business.
One of the most important factors in Computacenter’s growth as a global business is ensuring that all our people feel valued, respected, and supported to reach their full potential. High performing teams with diverse experience, skill sets, and new perspectives give us a strong competitive advantage and allow us to provide the best service to our customers.
Diversity
Good talent knows no boundaries, and neither do we. At Computacenter, we know the benefits of a diverse workforce and we celebrate our differences. A diverse workforce with different experiences and perspectives is key to our success. Through harnessing the power and experiences of our diversity we can better understand our customers and drive innovation, giving us a strong competitive advantage and helping us to provide the best service to our customers.
We work to actively attract and recruit diverse talent to Computacenter with a workforce of over 20,000 and a customer base across over 70 countries allowing us to tap into a plethora of diverse talent. We’re committed to making lasting changes to not only our business, but to the sector as a whole. We continue to work across our local communities by providing work experience opportunities, career talks and interview training at schools and colleges with the goal of encouraging more young people to consider a career in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths).
Inclusion
It’s not always enough to just be present, we want everyone to feel a true sense of belonging at Computacenter and know they are valued for who they are and what they bring. We have a zero-tolerance approach to discrimination and harassment and want to make sure our working culture is one where everyone can be themselves, feel valued, respected, and supported to reach their full potential.
We work hard to actively provide opportunities for our people to talk, share, and learn more about diversity, inclusion, and wellbeing.
Activities like our Inclusion Series webinars give our people a platform to share their own insights and experiences on topics such as Age and Culture, these help encourage more people to talk more openly about their own intersectionality and feel comfortable to be themselves.
We’ve launched new Employee Impact Groups (EIGs) to enable our people to influence and create sustainable change within Computacenter. All our EIG’s have a specific focus aligned to one of the 6 D&I pillars e.g., Gender or Culture and have a senior business sponsor aligned to them. The EIGs include representation from all business areas and work closely with our Diversity & Inclusion Manager to design and reach their objectives.
Wellbeing
Creating a sustainable workforce means looking after the wellbeing of our people. At Computacenter, our goal is to embed healthy behaviours into our working culture. We are proud to have a number of programmes supporting our employees’ health and wellbeing including:
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP) – Ensuring that our people can get counselling across a wide range of disciplines for when things don’t go to plan.
- Be Well… Powered by Humanoo – A platform to access recipes, guided relaxation, and meditation, in addition to exercise classes and fitness plans
- Healthy Leadership Training – training for line managers on how to establish wellbeing as a topic and spot signs a team member may need extra support
In recent years, we have worked hard to bring wellbeing to the forefront. Our people are our greatest asset and looking after their wellbeing is crucial. Our commitment to breaking barriers and opening difficult conversations has enabled better self-care practise and relationship building across the Group. Our Group led activities, programmes, and initiatives are complimented by additional localised activities, ensuring that whatever we do is appropriate for the people directly affected.
To ensure we support our people holistically, our wellbeing agenda is driven through our four ‘Be Well’ pillars; Exercise Well, Eat Well, Think Well, and Sleep Well.
Employee Impact Groups
We want our people to have the opportunity to influence and create a working culture they are proud to be part of. Our Employee Impact Groups (EIGs) give employees the opportunity to help shape and drive sustainable change. Our first EIG focuses on ethnic diversity in the UK. In 2022 it has led a wide range of activities including a ‘Breaking Barriers’ event, co-hosted with CRN, where 195 professionals from the sector joined expert speakers and industry leaders to share advice and best practice in making our industry more inclusive to people from ethnic minority backgrounds.
We are creating country-specific EIGs focusing on in-country priorities such as gender and wellbeing. Each group has an Executive sponsor aligned with representation from all areas of the business. We are also committed to support for our wider communities, the UK Armed Forces Covenant, achieving Bronze in the Defence Employer Recognition scheme in 2022. We are recognised as an armed forces friendly employer.
Our Employee Impact Groups bring together colleagues from across every business area to drive change and improvement, with objectives and plans supported by the Diversity and Inclusion Manager. The first Employee Impact group launched in the UK which focuses on Ethnic Diversity. Our EIGs have delivered a range of activities and events including:
- Hosted regular ‘open Mic’ discussion sessions which are open to everyone and have so far covered topics including identity and representation
- Delivered training on allyship and hosted inspirational speakers including Dr Regina Benjamin and Denise Lewis
- Co-hosted an industry event in September 2021 with CRN which was attended by over 180 professionals from across the sector to discuss and learn about how we can make the IT industry more accessible and inclusive of people from ethnic minority backgrounds
- Launched our new ethnic diversity focused development programme, giving people the opportunity to explore their development through the specific lens of ethnic diversity
- Continues to grow an active staff network
Our commitment to creating a fair and inclusive organisation is reflected in our policies and ways of working, we’re proud to have signed diversity charters in France and Germany, and we are a Disability Confident employer in the UK.
Employee Impact Groups are a great way to give employees a voice that is not only heard but acted on by the business. They change the narrative by enabling employees to be at the heart of solutions and drive beneficial change via actions over words.
Wellbeing in the UK
We are immensely proud of our strong network of over 70 Mental Health First Aid trained Wellbeing Champions across the UK. These volunteers from around the UK business are passionate about wellbeing, both physical and mental, and play a key role in how we support our people. Our Mental Health First Aiders are there to support and guide our employees and help us destigmatise talking about mental health at work by embedding it into everyday conversations. From a mix of different backgrounds and levels of seniority, they are able connect with and support our diverse workforce across the UK.
To continue our commitment to promoting positive wellbeing in the workplace, we are delighted to have signed up for the Mind wellbeing index 2022. The index will give us insight into how we can improve and what we are doing right. We can also hold ourselves accountable for creating a stigma free working environment.