Employees
Alliander employs about 7,450 people (6,800 FTEs), who work together to ensure a reliable, affordable and accessible energy supply. We offer our employees a safe and healthy working environment that they can be proud of.
This chapter is about what we do for our employees. Our colleagues have indicated that they are particularly interested in information on the following material themes (the figure behind the theme corresponds to the position in the materiality matrix):
Objectives and results related to employees
Lost Time Injury Frequency (LTIF)
Employee absenteeism
Employee survey score
Active safety culture percentage
Women in leadership positions
People at a distance from the labour market
- 1 A new definition and target were adopted in 2018 for the active safety culture KPI. From 2018 onwards, we will exclusively look at the business units in scope, and the target is 100%. No comparative figures were included for 2017.
Continuing to prepare for the energy transition
The energy transition is in full swing. In this transition, it is our employees who have to make sure that our homes remain warm and the lights stay on, both today and in our sustainable tomorrow. It is important for Alliander that our organisation and our employees are prepared for this. That is why we constantly assess whether our employees have the knowledge and competences that are needed today and in the years to come.
We are working to create a culture in which there is room to talk openly and freely about that new reality, a culture in which it is normal to continue to invest in yourself, irrespective of your age, work experience or training. We do this every day, for instance by offering training, internships and other learning experiences and by getting employees and managers to talk to each other about how to remain employable in future. In 2018, we launched a pilot project in which managers were given training on talking to employees about long-term employability. This involves discussing the skills that will be needed to carry out work in future. We are seeing that people think about what is expected of them and what they need to achieve their ambitions. In this way, we are working together to ensure career continuity and the continuation of Alliander as a going concern.
More capacity to carry out work and sharper focus
The Netherlands continued to have a major shortage of experienced technicians in 2018. Economic growth and the acceleration of the energy transition are creating more and more work for us, and the number of vacancies is increasing rapidly. Predictions for the coming years also point to significant demand in terms of capacity. Compared to previous years, in which we specifically looked for technicians, for example, our target group was broader in 2018. We focused on technicians, engineers, project managers and team leaders, and construction supervisors. Besides young people with a senior secondary vocational education and training qualification and highly skilled people with a technical profile, we also approached candidates who were prepared to retrain. Going by the number of vacancies that were filled, we can conclude that our recruitment activities resulted in new employees being taken on, but not yet in sufficient numbers to enable us to complete the work package. We therefore remain alert to the need to have skilled people trained in good time to carry out the work on our networks.
In addition to looking for additional staff, we also looked for ways to carry out work with a sharper focus through the use of more efficient working methods, better planning and more accurate forecasting of work, both in our operations and at the central support departments. By improving collaboration between departments, we learn how to make more effective use of each other’s professional expertise and qualities.
Workplace wellbeing
We are aware that the energy transition and technological advances, such as robotisation and digitisation, are picking up momentum, and as a result jobs are being lost, created and changing. This places heavy demands on our people. In 2018, we saw an increase in absenteeism due to illness, and in particular long-term absenteeism. To us, this is a sign that we need to maintain an effective, honest dialogue with all our employees. Besides this dialogue on long-term employability, we also offer other tools, such as the long-term employability budget, to enable our employees to continue to work in a healthy, sustainable and effectual way.