Gender Pay Gap Report
PROUD OF OUR PROMISE
Why we’re reporting on Gender Pay...
We believe that reporting on Gender Pay is important, which is why we provide insight into the steps we are taking rather than just producing a report that meets our legal obligations. Enforcing the need to report is a key step in encouraging businesses from all sectors, but especially those like construction where representation is limited, to be transparent when it comes to pay for all colleagues, with a specific focus on gender.
We have made significant strides to attract more women to Novus and this report outlines the steps we have taken to achieve yearly increases. We do however acknowledge that with just over 21% female representation, there is more work to do.
We are continuing to work closely with our colleagues, suppliers and industry experts to continue our ambition to recruit more women into our business, whilst we focus on this, we also are ensuring we focus on developing our female colleagues to support their career growth and therefore their movement into the higher pay quartiles.
A message from our CEO
I reflect on my first year as CEO in 2024, with mixed emotions. It is pleasing to see Novus continue to navigate challenging market conditions and successfully delver on many of our 2024 objectives. However, we cannot ignore the fact that our gender pay gap has widened in the year. Whilst this is disappointing, we need to see it as an opportunity to refocus, push harder, and create real, lasting change.
Our commitment to building a diverse and inclusive workplace remains unwavering, and we recognise there’s still much more to do. We are determined to break down barriers and ensure that everyone at Novus feels they truly belong.
In 2024, I am pleased with the impact our Women In Novus (WIN) Network has had in providing a platform to discuss the challenges specifically faced by females in our industry and how these can be removed.
Our inclusion strategy, ‘Without U There is No US,’ continues to lay the foundation for a stronger, more inclusive workplace. And it’s working. Our 2024 Engagement Survey showed a significant increase in our Belonging score, with over 70% of colleagues reporting that they feel they truly belong at Novus.
Our Nurturing Skills for Growth programme is designed to clearly identify the skills that drive performance and provide transparency around career development. This initiative will help us create clear career pathways for progression and ensure that every team member has the resources and support to grow.Wellbeing continues to be a top priority and we’ve worked
closely with the Lighthouse Club Construction charity, running regular mental health sessions across our locations as well as hosting a mental Health Stand down day. Over 250 colleagues have participated in these sessions, further reinforcing our commitment to supporting mental health in the workplace.
I remain committed to reducing the gender pay gap, fostering a culture where everyone feels valued, and ensuring every colleague has the opportunity to succeed and reach their fullest potential.
Lee Hartley Chief Executive Officer
Gender Pay Statistics
Please see our Gender Pay figures below for 2023/2024 and previous years.
2023/2024 Workforce Gender split
Hourly Pay Statistics
What we are doing
Inclusion Strategy
Our inclusion strategy ‘Without U there is NO US’ highlights our commitment as a business to ensuring Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging are at the heart of our business reducing our gender pay gap is a key part of this work.
The purpose of the strategy is simply that, ‘Nobody ever goes home after a working day and feels they have been discriminated against or treated unfairly.’ To ensure we achieve this purpose we are continually measuring progress against the commitments and defined metrics.
1. Everyone is included and will feel able to be themselves without compromise to achieve a greater sense of belonging.
2. We will enhance education and development opportunities that support everyone, building a legacy where people can live, work, and thrive.
3. We will actively champion diversity and inclusion across our teams, partners, and the industry.
To continue deliver of the Inclusion strategy, we have taken a specific focus on developing our colleague knowledge across a range of internal development programmes.
All new and existing colleagues are enrolled onto Equality, Diversity and Inclusion e-learning which promotes the ideal workplace, highlights unacceptable behaviours, clarifies the protected characteristics and share practical improvements for all colleagues to adopt.
We have enrolled all new and existing people managers in workshops focused on the Language of Inclusion, Microaggressions, and Privilege. This initiative aims to deepen leaders’ understanding and raise awareness, ensuring proactive measures are implemented across our offices and sites.
Additionally, all colleagues have been enrolled in to Preventing Sexual Harassment training in the workplace, gaining a more in depth understanding on the topic and ensuring that we adopt
appropriate relationships in the workplace. We have additionally provided further support to people managers in the business in recognising any signs of harassment and have a dedicated whistle-blowing line to ensure any matters that arise are dealt with swiftly.
We have continued our Hiring Manager training across 2024 following our review of recruitment practices in previous years, these sessions provide leaders with an opportunity to upskill on the external market,
Novus Recruitment process, CV Screening, Interview questioning skills, Bias and objectivity, Feedback and Onboarding. Adapting these measures provides effective use of our recruitment processes and ensures a great candidate experience in a continuing challenging market. The training ensures that decision making is fair and ultimately leads to the right person joining our business.
What we are doing
Inclusion Strategy (continued)
We continue to monitor the success of the development programmes individually via feedback forms and also collectively in our Annual Colleague Engagement survey and half-year Pulse Survey which both have targeted questions in order for us to track the effectiveness of development at Novus and our Belonging score.
2024 saw our first Novus ‘Inclusion Week’ campaign, with regular communications delivered across the week, activities for colleagues to be involved in and conversation starters provided for colleagues to open up, discuss and learn more about the topic of Inclusion. The week was well received with inclusion resource access increasing by two-thirds.
Within this week we launched our new Networking Group the ‘Wellbeing Network’ which focusses on ensuring colleagues have a say in their wellbeing. We hosted our first event in partnership with ‘Coppafeel’ in March to highlight the importance of the awareness surrounding breast & testicular cancer. This group will continue to provide company-wide events highlighting important matters including Menopause, Women’s & Men’s health, Physical Wellbeing & Mental wellbeing.
We continue to focus on our Inclusion strategy as a business and are proud of the strives we’ve made this year, but recognise there is still work to be done.
Measuring our Diversity
We continue to track and monitor diversity data for applicants and new starters to provide insight into the recruitment process and ensure the effectiveness of our measures. We use this to gain valuable insight into our gender balance across all roles, monitor any trends and identify opportunities for improvement. We recognise all opportunities to support colleagues from minority groups within the process.
In addition, we capture and track the diversity of any colleague completing or attending a development activity and company events, ensuring that we track and identify any barriers that may exist when accessing development. We want to continue to ensure there are fair and consistent opportunities for all colleagues.
What we are doing
Colleague Network Groups
Our six Colleague Networks continue to drive forward more openconversation on important Inclusion topics. Sponsored by Executive Directors and led by colleagues from within the business representing the network. The networks have been instrumental in ensuring that policies, procedures, company events continue to be inclusive and supportive.
Our Women In Novus (WiN Network) continue to petition to advance and support the careers of females working at Novus and attracting females to the industry. Novus has signed the Women in Construction Industry Pledge and the Menopause Workplace Pledge and continue to support the progress in each of these areas. The Network has around 50 members including females and allies and meet regularly to discuss challenges specifically faced by females at Novus and how barriers can be removed. Within the network meetings we have seen guest speakers including from Build UK, help the group to understand challenges and successes in the wider construction industry and explain how the industry has changed from previous years and is a lot more inclusive.
Charity Partners
We continue to work closely with Women in Social Housing (WISH), a Community Interest Company dedicated to attracting new female talent into the UK Housing Sector. We currently have two of our senior female colleagues supporting the charity as Board Members, with Claire Bailey-Jones, Business Development and Marketing Director, supporting as a board member for the North West and Gemma Edwards, Senior Business Development Manager as a board member for Yorkshire and Humberside.
What we are doing
Enhanced Policies to Support our Colleagues:
In addition to several new policies which have been in place for the duration of our Inclusion strategy, including our Menopause Policy and Carer’s Leave Policy. This year we launched our Hybrid Working Policy and updated our Flexible Working Policy ensuring that we support our colleagues with ensuring a suitable work-life balance supports their wellbeing. We have seen an increase in the number of Flexible Working Requests which have largely been accepted or agreed new terms to benefit our colleagues. Our Hybrid Working policy provides the flexibility to work from different locations, delivering on our promise to support our colleagues in this area.
Listening to our colleagues to shape our future:
We have continued to listen to colleagues feedback throughout the year with a Pulse Survey and full Colleague Engagement Survey in November/ December. 70% of our respondents answered positively regarding their sense of belonging at Novus, which has been a consistent score over the previous two surveys. Action plans have been implemented for each team to ensure progress in engagement bespoke to each department and we look forward to seeing the output of these plans.
To ensure our colleagues who join the business are able to have their voice we continue to have check in calls throughout the probationary period and take action on feedback to ensure a great colleague journey into the business.
What we are doing
Apprenticeships
We are continuing to build on our success of attracting females to work in our business through our apprenticeship scheme.
Our apprentices are fully onboarded and provided with a trained Mentor to support them on a day-to-day basis. The mentor training ensures that we have a consistent approach to supporting our apprentices and that they are equipped with a variety of models to complement their toolkit.
We also continue to offer our internal colleagues the opportunity to develop their career by apprenticeship.
Currently we have 5% of our workforce enrolled on an apprenticeship.
What we are doing
Attraction, Recruitment and Onboarding
We have continued to see an increase in receiving more diverse applications including more applications from women, as a direct impact from changing the language of our adverts. We ensure all adverts are checked by Gender de coder technology, and that all adverts only display the key and essential criteria to perform the role. In addition we ensure all our adverts include a statement of encouragement to the applicant to encourage applicants to apply even if they do not meet the full role criteria. We ensure all our recruitment standards are consistently applied regardless of the role to ensure we find the right candidate. We have created processes that are thorough and fair and our recruiting managers are fully trained to consistently use competencybased interview questions. This year, we re-freshed frameworks for each role to ensure they reflect the essential requirements, and in turn, updated our interview guides to ensures candidates display the right competencies and skills that are essential whilst also assessing their behaviours too. Our scoring matrix has been created alongside the questions to ensure answers are reviewed and scored fairly and consistently to ensure the candidate is hired based on their competencies and behaviours alone.
Ensuring we spend time with future generations is important for us. We aim to promote the message there are roles in our sector for everyone, we have hosted and attended various events. Attending local school and college careers fairs, sharing insight to our networking groups in particular, Women In Novus (WIN) to try and breakdown the stereotypes within our sector, aiming these messages to a younger audience to help us succeed in evening the gender balance in the future. Another key part of these events is to encourage more females into our industry.
In March we took part in Build UK’s Open Doors event across our sites in Manchester and Leeds. We welcomed school and college students to meet our team, and to showcase the opportunities within the construction sector beyond the bias of hard hats and boots. The events saw students take part in multiple exercises and meet various roles from across the team. They also took time to tour live sites to showcase some examples of work we have completed and work in progress to give them a flavour of what we do.
Improving diversity at Novus
We remain fully committed to our Inclusion Strategy. We understand that to attract diverse talent we need to continue to ensure we create a culture where everyone can feel they belong, which will require us to seek new ways to move the dial on diversity related matters.
We acknowledge that the gender pay gap increased in 2024. We understand that there is more work to be done to address this imbalance.
We are committed to making further progress. Moving forward, we will continue to focus on reducing the gap and advocate for greater inclusion across all aspects of our organisation. Our goal is to ensure that everyone, whether they are part of our workforce, customers, or clients, feels a sense of belonging at Novus
If you have any questions relating to this document or wish to know more, please do not hesitate to reach out to our People team
Email: HR@novussolutions.co.uk