Culture, Diversity and inclusion

Ensuring a diverse and inclusive culture at Pelican is an expression of our values; Trusted, Helpful, Engaging and Expert. We believe our success is a direct result of the many people initiatives we have passionately created for our teams to benefit from. By constantly reviewing, improving and developing new initiatives we have created a diverse, engaging and positive culture. Our people work together in a collaborative way to drive innovation and customer satisfaction.

Joining Our Team

Our journey starts with finding you!

Our job adverts and role profiles have been created to ensure we attract people from as many diverse backgrounds as possible. We respect differences and take proactive steps to embrace them. We have completely reviewed our on-line application forms to ensure inclusivity and encourage people from a broad range of backgrounds to apply for jobs with us.

We guarantee interviews for anyone with a disability. We are flexible in the way we conduct our interviews to suit different needs, including out of hours meetings. We also have mandatory mixed gender interviewers to ensure we remove any unconscious bias in our selection decisions and train our managers robustly to recruit our people solely based on skills, experience and the ability to do a great job.

Your Journey

On your first day, you will attend our state-of-the-art corporate induction programme with people from every team across our business. Straight away, you will start to form relationships with a diverse range of people and build new networks. All our training courses are delivered with diversity in mind, adapting to a range of needs and preferences.

Our managers are all expertly trained in the importance of equality and inclusion and our processes and policies support an inclusive culture.

We have created a unique mentoring framework where we encourage our people to source mentors from different backgrounds to provide a variety of perspectives for them.

Our initiatives

At Pelican, we’re always looking for new ways to ensure we not only recruit and retain a talented diverse team but that we have initiatives in place to generate awareness of the benefits of a diverse workforce and build a real sense of community.

Working Parents Network

We are passionate about everyone achieving their perfect work life balance and we understand what works for one person, doesn’t always work for another. This is why, following the launch of our ‘Family Friendly Policies’, we launched our ‘Working Parents Network’. Our group runs every few months and is the perfect opportunity for working parents to discuss any challenges they may face trying to balance work and family life but to also celebrate achieving a better balance, whether that be attending sports day or finishing early each day to do the school run. The group is also a great chance to share top tips to make both work and home life that little bit easier – we especially love the amazing family holiday hints! We are proud to offer a flexible working policy to help support our team in achieving a perfect work life balance and with so many of our team already taking advantage of flexible working, we are always looking for new initiatives to further develop our suite of family friendly policies.

‘Pride Patrol’

Enter our ‘Pride Patrol’, a team that came together in 2018 to organise our attendance at our local Pride event and to engage our wider team in joining in the fun. Each year we proudly march through the streets of Bristol, (you can’t miss our bright yellow banner) and it has now become one of the highlights of our annual calendar of events. Our ‘Pride Patrol’ is growing year on year and absolutely anyone is welcome to support in organising and attending this amazing event.

Our free ‘Pride Shop’ opens for business the week before where a steady stream of excited team members collect their colourful t-shirts, head dresses and of course…lots of glitter 🙂

Disability Confident

In 2019 we were very proud to achieve our ‘Disability Confident Committed’ status. This scheme is in place to support employers make the most of the talents that disabled people can bring to the workplace. As a business we have committed to:

Ensuring our recruitment process is inclusive and accessible
Communicating and promoting vacancies correctly
Encouraging applications and offering interviews to disabled people
Anticipating and providing reasonable adjustments
Supporting any existing employee who acquires a disability or long-term health condition enabling them to stay at work

16% of working adults in the UK are registered disabled. As a business, we guarantee interview slots for anyone applying for a job with us who has a disability. In addition, our managers are expertly trained to understand disability requirements and how to support with adjustments. With three levels of the disability confident programme, we are always looking for new commitments we can take to successfully recruit and retain disabled people and those with health conditions.

Lifting the Menopause Taboo

With 15% of women in our business at an age that they could be experiencing perimenopause or the menopause, and 12% of men having a female partner they could need to support, we made the decision to lift the taboo on the subject and establish a working group. We also have external experts visit us to provide guidance and support to all our managers on how to support their team members through this transition in their lives.

Our aim is to make sure we support people in every way possible to transition through this challenging stage in their lives by talking, sharing experiences and getting tips from each other to make this time a little easier. We provide flexibility and adjustments to support people in every way possible.

The Future Generation

At Pelican, we are committed to supporting our local community and helping the younger generation of aspiring working adults get started on their career journey. Each year, we support our local schools by sending volunteers to provide career advice, help students prepare for interviews, conduct mock interviews and help with CV preparation. The feedback we receive from these events is that the students feel more confident about leaving school and entering the workplace. We partner with a local college to provide Apprenticeship and professional qualification opportunities for our people too.

We also look for opportunities that we can offer young people to join us during a work experience placement, in collaboration with local schools. Over the last few years we have offered numerous work experience placements including opportunities in our People and Marketing teams. One parent whose daughter attended a work experience placement with us got in touch to share his thoughts:

“She absolutely loved her work placement at Pelican and as her father, I couldn’t have asked for her first experience of ‘life after school’ to be any better. I’ll be eternally grateful for the time, effort and enthusiasm that you put in to ensuring that she had both an enjoyable and educational time with you – thank you again.”

Bristol Pride

Meet some of our ‘Pride Patrol’ who marched proudly through the streets of Bristol spreading the message of ‘Unity in Diversity’.