As well as our policy dealing with our UK employees' training and personal development, we also help our managers and staff deal with other HR issues such as work-life balance and equal opportunities. Employees can get copies of our policies and guidance documents from our intranet.

 

Personal development

We recognise that volunteering activities provide employees with valuable personal development experience and we are working closely with the UK HR department to ensure every employee has the opportunity to participate in a volunteering exercise during working hours. Powergen UK spends around 4% of its salary bill on training and development activities. This equates to about £1,200 per person per year. During 2003, we ran a number of development initiatives.  

Emerging leaders programme

This was a new programme designed to spot talented individuals early in their careers and give them a tailored development package to help them move into senior managerial positions. This includes structured placements across Powergen's business, attending development events hosted by our parent company, E.ON, and personal mentoring by a member of our board.  

'Achieving Our Potential'

This is our new coaching programme for managers, initially given to our top 100 managers. Some of our staff were later trained to deliver the programme to the next set of managers. By September 2003, 450 managers had attended and we intend to roll it out to all remaining managers in 2004. Introduction to management
This programme was developed to give new managers some of the basic skills needed to manage teams. During 2003, five courses were run and 57 managers attended.  

E.ON Academy

Our parent company, E.ON, has its own corporate university, the E.ON Academy, which works with international business schools to deliver senior management programmes. A total of 106 Powergen managers were registered with the Academy in 2003. Of these, 51 attended Academy programmes or participated in e-learning activities via Academy Online.  

E.ON Leadership Model

E.ON has developed the E.ON Leadership Profile, a management competency model for use across the group. It was adopted by Powergen in 2003 and our senior managers were profiled against the model. To supplement this, a 360-degree assessment tool based on the model was developed with the intention of rolling it out among senior managers in the first instance. The E.ON Leadership Model was also used as the basis for a development centre for Powergen's Emerging Leaders.  

Employee volunteering

Powergen has a long tradition of supporting employees who do voluntary work in the community, ranging from the delivering our Changing Climates programme to schools nationwide through to restoring an overgrown garden for a community centre. We recognise that volunteering activities provide employees with valuable personal development experience and we are working closely with the UK HR department to ensure every employee has the opportunity to participate in a volunteering exercise during working hours.  

Personal development working group

When Energy Trading introduced a new performance-related pay system, it went to a lot of effort to make sure its managers had the necessary skills to assess and manage performance. The next step was to focus on personal development planning, which clearly supports a high-performance culture. Energy Trading set up a working group, consisting of people from across the business, to recommend ways to improve personal development planning. The main things the working group recommended were developing a training programme focused on planning development and revitalising an existing mentoring scheme available to all employees. These will both start during 2004.
 

See also

In this report
Training and development - case study