Our employees are our most important assets and are critical to the operation of our business. United by a common purpose and shared valued behaviours, their pioneering spirit, integrity, energy and resilience enable us to create value for all our stakeholders.

With James Fisher operations spread across six continents, our people are geographically dispersed and represent a multitude of cultures. We will continue to develop and build upon a culture which allows them to use their skills and to develop career paths for realising their potential.

We are committed to ensuring that sustainability is at the heart of everything we do, and nothing is more important than keeping our employees and service users safe in all their activities.

We aim to build a foundation for success across the business by empowering our people to grow and drive performance. We aim to ensure our people are provided with experiences, through mentoring and secondment opportunities and participation in activities which fall outside their day-to-day roles and we believe this is crucial in retaining top talent.

Progress on Top talent in 2022:

Our Leading the Business programme (LTB) launched in 2023. Manager behaviour is pivotal to engagement, wellbeing, and retaining top talent.

We adopted an innovative learning platform that we are excited to be implementing in 2024. This will improve the way employees experience learning, with interactive and engaging multimedia content through gamification, social features and personalised, self-paced learning.

Our 2023 priorities include:

• High potential identification
• Top talent retention 
• Employee development 
• Early careers 

Our mission is to cultivate a working environment where everyone knows they belong, where our people are comfortable with sharing their perspectives and experiences without fear of recrimination, uniqueness is embraced, and equal pay and access to opportunity exist for people of all backgrounds, personalities and abilities. With a diverse workforce and an inclusive work environment, we are better able to harness the wealth of ideas that will drive our success.

Our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion extends beyond our own workforce. We aim to benefit and positively influence the communities where we live and work through proactive engagement, employing local people, contributing to local economies, and investing in local supply chains.

Progress on diversity and inclusion in 2023:

We are committed to equality, diversity and inclusion through: 

• Carrying out business fairly, honestly and ethically and celebrating the uniqueness of our people
• Engaging the communities where we live and work through recruiting locally, contributing to local economies, and investing in local supply chains 
• Ensuring global reach across all locations, work environments and taking into account those who think a little differently 
• Developing our understanding of being inclusive and diverse across all levels, to build a workforce inclusive of different backgrounds and national origins

Activities during 2023 included the implementation of additional "Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at James Fisher" learning module as part of our training for all employees, and the ED&I Working Group are collaborating with the Communities Working Group on a STEM engagement programme which will be developed throughout 2024-25.

Our overarching goal is to maintain the health and safety of our employees, contractors, suppliers and customers at all times.

We want people to return to their homes, families, and friends every day and safely. This is the inspiration for our “goal zero” incidents vision. To embed the right mindset and realise this vision, we will invest our efforts in three areas: policy development, education, and engagement.

Progress on health, safety and security in 2023:

In 2023, we launched Exceptional Safety which raises the profile of safety across the Group and provides a unified approach whereby we are all:

• Responsible for safety
• Empowered to speak up, stop the job and champion safety

We provided a new look, feel and tone of voice for Exceptional Safety to create more impact. Managers were provided with briefing packs, videos and animations to help them engage with their teams and to keep safety at the top of the agenda.

In 2023, we also appointed a Head of Group HSEQ to provide a unified approach to safety.

Exceptional Safety runs alongside the roll out of the James Fisher Life-Saving Rules based on the industry leading practices to provide our employees with the knowledge and tools to help keep everyone safe. 73 percent of employees have been trained and this will become part of compliance training going forward.

In the recent employee engagement survey, the three safety questions ranked highly. The question 'safety is often talked about in my workplace' ranked highest at 4.40.

The focus on safety may not have delivered the improvements we were looking for, but we remain committed to maintaining safety at the forefront of everything we do and intend to launch a Safety Culture Survey for all employees in 2024 to inform future activity.

The launch of a new electronic HSEQ systems for Incident Management and Reporting including hazard observation is a major milestone. The system is designed to help us quickly identify any issues or trends and respond effectively and will be an important tool to help improve safety for everyone working for James Fisher.

We are committed to having a zero-fatality workplace, and we are proud to report zero fatalities in 2023.