Colleagues

We will be a more inclusive company by breaking down barriers to employment and progression, and by building skills for life.

Our targets

Improve gender balance to 35% women in senior leadership and 40% women in management by 2025/26.
Enable more than 20,000 colleagues to complete an apprenticeship, traineeship or formal qualification by 2030/31.

Our FY24/25 progress

30.1% of senior leaders and 39.8% of managers are women, compared with 28.6% and 39.6% respectively in 2023/24.
3,221 colleagues completed apprenticeships, traineeships and formal qualifications across the Group this year. This brings our total to 8,248 colleagues since the introduction of the target last year.
Embedded our allyship campaign, ‘Together. Stronger.’, across all markets to emphasise the importance of allyship and inclusion.
Introduced our new e-learning platform, LEO, offering colleagues unlimited access to thousands of online courses to support their development.

Our Group-wide Inclusion and Diversity strategy and action plan is focused on four themes. It was developed by our People and Culture taskforce, a cross-section of representatives from around the business and included input from more colleagues via ‘listening sessions’.

Senior Leadership:

Our senior leadership team role models Inclusion and Diversity. Representation and authentic sponsors of culture change.

A Culture of Inclusion:

Our culture supports everyone to thrive and succeed. Deep understanding of diverse groups to enhance the ‘lived experience’.

Customer Proposition:

We commit to accessible and inclusive products, and multichannel experiences. Inclusive, accessible design as a brand differentiator.

Inclusive Youth Employment:

Our impact on society is amplified through investing in skills and work experience. Targeted initiatives focused on addressing disadvantaged youth unemployment.

View examples in Responsible Business Report

Commitment to gender diversity: closing the gap

We support women across the business to progress their careers and offer accelerated development programmes to those with leadership potential. For example:

Through our partnership with Diversity in Retail, we’ve participated in various UK and international development programmes, such as the Aspiring CFO, Global Women Leaders, UK Women Leaders, and Women’s Non-Executive Director programmes. These offer cross-company mentorship and reverse mentorship, engaging both senior teams and emerging talent.
Castorama and Brico Dépôt France run a joint Women Leader programme to help emerging female talent to join senior leadership.

We’re constantly reviewing our recruitment processes and career development programmes to ensure we’re building a diverse female talent pipeline throughout the business. Initiatives we’ve introduced include:

At B&Q, our people managers attended our in-house equality, inclusivity and diversity workshops to increase buy-in on the importance of leading inclusively. We have also refreshed our mandatory ‘Licence to hire’ training for all colleagues with a hiring role, launched ‘Lean in’ mentoring circles and introduced ‘I Will Elevate’ leadership development programmes to support women and ethnically diverse colleagues into leadership roles.
Screwfix launched a female-focused recruitment campaign, utilising video content across social media platforms to widen the pool of female applicants.

Investing in the future of retail

To create a healthy, robust workforce it’s essential we invest in colleagues’ futures, equipping them with the skills to grow their careers.

Having met our initial target of providing 5 million hours of skills for life learning, three years ahead of schedule, we introduced a new target last year; by 2030/31, more than 20,000 colleagues will have completed an apprenticeship, traineeship or formal qualification. Over 3,200 colleagues have completed apprenticeships, traineeships and formal qualifications across the Group this year. This brings our total to over 8,200 colleagues since the introduction of the target last year.

This year, we introduced a new learning platform (LEO) offering colleagues unlimited access to digital learning with thousands of flexible courses from over 200 learning providers, including skills development training for those interested in management roles. By the end of 2024/25, over 124,000 training items and over 71,000 total training hours had been completed in LEO since its launch in Q4.

View in Responsible Business Report