The stakes are high for working women. Choice, challenge and change are what
today’s career women look for, and that is what organisations that have made
it into the Where Women Want To Work Top 50 are the best at providing.
With busy lives and complex responsibilities, women who work in good
organisations are much better off. Their careers are more satisfying, the
rewards fairer, support more available and the opportunities truly
limitless. In fact, everyone is high performing if they do the right job in
the right company.
Gone are the days when women were lucky to have a job and devoted their whole
career to just one employer. These days, women desire both flexibility and
control over their work. They want to decide for themselves where to work,
how to work, and even why they work. They rely on detailed information from
a wide range of sources about what is on offer company by company. Women
really want to make the right choices.
Now in its third year, the Top 50 is a reliable and trusted reference for
women seeking to choose the right employer. Competition between
organisations was extremely tough, and identifying only 50 was certainly
challenging. In total 27 organisations have made it into the Top 50 for
three consecutive years.
Interestingly, a big trend this year is the range of channels being used by
organisations to find female talent. For example, aligning with rock
climbing communities and teacher organisations is particularly popular at
present because both attract large numbers of talented, intelligent and
highly motivated women who may be interested in exciting career moves.
Progressive organisations know that fishing in the same pools with the same
bait only gets the same catch, so innovative ideas, channels, angles and
techniques for recruiting high performing women are definitely required if
organisations are to excel in the “war for best talent”.
Another noticeable change this year was how many female-friendly benefits have
become the norm. While this is good news, it does make it more difficult to
identify the true market leaders – those who go well beyond what is now
industry standard. This was a major divider between those in, and out, of
this year’s Top 50.
A third factor exhibited by many of the organisations in this year’s list is
that they successfully articulate why women might want to work with them
from an “outside in” perspective. This means being able to reduce the
corporate line and instead explain to candidates “what’s in it for you”.
Finally, it is important to note that being an employer of choice for women
should not simply be a bull market luxury. The best organisations where
women want to work are, in fact, constantly committed to winning the war for
talent regardless of economic climate – and this is a strong differentiator
when determining market leaders and laggards.
The Where Women Want To Work Top 50 educates women and industry about
effective practice, provides information and evidence to assist with key
decisions, and reinforces to women that they have total choice and control
of their careers.
Glenda Stone is the chief executive of Aurora, an independent source of
information on the jobs and benefits offered by companies.
How the Top 50 organisations were identified
The Where Women Want to Work Top 50 invited organisations with more than 1,000
employees in the UK to submit detailed entries to Aurora, which undertook
the study for The Times.
Organisations were required to address three key areas: how they effectively
recruit top female talent; how they retain and develop female employees; and
to give some examples of their successful female role models.
For the recruitment section, entrants tabled evidence on how they externally
educated women about their organisation, its benefits and opportunities.
They needed to explain how they targeted women and encouraged them to apply,
detailing how long they had been doing this and how successful they had
been. They had to show what was innovative about their strategies, with a
quote from a senior executive attesting to their success.
In retention and development, organisations had to describe initiatives for
retaining, developing and advancing female staff. Information was sought on
how they supported women's careers and helped them to balance outside
responsibilities. Entrants had to explain which of the initiatives were most
utilised by women and what the successful outcomes were. Again, it was
essential to say what was innovative about the initiatives, with a quote
from senior management on their success.
In case studies, organisations had the chance to showcase staff who typified
the success of women in their organisation. The case studies needed to
demonstrate how women could manage work-life responsibilities while working
in critical roles.
Five of the Top 50 organisations received awards:
Best Women's External Recruitment Initiative: Deloitte
Best Women's Retention Initiative: Barclays
Bank
Best Women's Training and Development Initiative: Morgan
Stanley
Best Women's Internal Corporate Event: Accenture
Best Women's Case Study: BAE
Systems
