Understanding our results

Read on to understand our commitment to sustained change and our areas of focus

Understanding
our results

Ricoh UK has a long-term approach to addressing the gender pay gap. Our end goal is to achieve greater parity at senior level, and we’re doing this by increasing our female talent pipeline at entry level roles, then accelerating them to more senior positions.

Implications of the Covid-19 pandemic

Reporting and data analysis over the last two years have been challenging and skewed due to certain business impacts such as furloughed employees being excluded from figures. This means results in this report cannot be looked at in isolation and we would look to longer term trends in the organisation, which up until 2019 was indicating a steady, but slow decrease in the gender pay gap.

This longer-term view and our current results indicate that we still have a long way to go and that closing the gap will take some time. The technology industry has typically attracted men in the past, and we’re committed to changing the landscape and the way we view the contribution of women in the sector in numerous ways. To do this we are focused on both entry points to the business for women and an increased female representation in senior roles.

We must now look to accelerate the initiatives and activities that we have in place and introduce new strategies to strengthen our approach to gender parity.

Key areas of focus to assist closing the gender pay gap are:

Awarding employees in the lower pay quartiles a higher percentage increase than higher pay quartiles, during our annual pay review process. Our data shows we currently have a greater proportion of female employees in these roles.
Attracting more females into our sales roles, as our bonus mean pay gap, at 39.4%, shows we currently have more males in our sales commissionable roles.
Celebrating the achievements of our female employees, for example at the Women in Sales Awards (WISA), in 2021 we had five of our female salespeople shortlisted. This allows us to recognise and congratulate a job well done and challenge the idea of what success looks like in a role traditionally held by men. Ultimately helping to grow the pipeline of sales talent.

Our initiatives

To fulfil our commitment to sustained change, we recognise we need to progress in a number of different areas to ensure we recruit, promote and develop the best people regardless of who they are. At the same time, we must consciously seek to reduce any barriers which exist to stop our people bringing their whole selves to work.

Our Diversity and Inclusion Strategy has five key focus areas:

Recruiting and Enabling Talent

Working in Partnership

Ways of Working and Policies

Providing Tools and Support

Data and Analysis

Recruiting and Enabling Talent

To attract the best people, we need to ensure that we’re offering inclusive entry points to all levels of our business and that our workforce is reflective and representative of different communities, attitudes and perspectives.

Example initiatives:

We ensure that advertising for our job roles is written in neutral language, with all adverts run through a gender language decoder
We design flexibility into key strategic positions to enable females to develop and progress
We advertise as many roles as possible with the option of flexible / hybrid working
We participate in the 30% Club mentoring programme (Mission Gender Equity), which supports and develops the pipeline and parity of women at all levels of the career pyramid. Our employees make up both mentors and mentees in the scheme

We work towards having two identified potential successors for key positions including at least one female
We celebrate International Women's Day and International Men’s Day to create allyship across all employees, and recognise that those in the majority can make change happen

We offer our Emerge development programme and currently have a 50/50 gender split across participants

Apprenticeships in total we have had 12 female apprentices on programmes during FY20 - 21

Completed & achieved	33% (4 apprentices)
In progress & on track to achieve	67% (8 apprentices)

Working in Partnership

At Ricoh, diversity and inclusion is part of everything we do, and this extends to who we choose to partner with. By doing so, we can ensure positive change for all of our employees, other organisations and wider society.

Example initiatives:

Founding member of Women Ahead and Moving Ahead, a social impact organisation working to improve workplace inclusion and diversity. We work closely with Moving Ahead on initiatives such as their mentoring programme to create a supportive and inclusive culture for our people to be their best

We also work closely with Business in the Community to benchmark from a gender diversity perspective and support on interventions across all diversity strands

We are working with our customers in strategic partnerships to drive the diversity and inclusion agenda including The Prince’s Trust, Business in the Community and Moving Ahead.
We continue to be recognised in the FTSE4Good, FTSE Blossom Japan, and the MSCI Japan Empowering Women Indices on a global level which drives diversity and inclusion focuses through all Ricoh operating companies

Ways of Working Policies

Adopting policies that support the needs of a diverse and inclusive workforce, building agility and flexibility to suit the needs of the individuals and the business.

Example initiatives:

We have enhanced all of our family friendly policies, including Maternity and Shared Parental Leave to encourage and support both men and women in the workplace. This includes an enhanced benefits package and a return to work bonus for maternity. We believe that by offering this, we can provide a better balance for work and family responsibilities for all of our employees, helping us attract and retain valued employees, and in doing so create a more engaged workforce
We are embedding blended and flexible working practices to enable all employees to have a better work life balance

We have launched a trans inclusive policy, to support our employees who are looking to transition, have already transitioned, or who are in the process of doing so, which also raises awareness of the trans community to all employees

We are a living wage employer and this year we increased 60 employees' pay to the “Real Living Wage” rates of £9.50 per hour. Of those 60 employees, only 17 of them were females (28%). Our focus will be to try and move some of those lower paid employees into the higher paid roles in the future

Providing Tools & Support

Every employee needs to be involved on the journey to achieving greater diversity and inclusivity within the workplace. We’re providing employees with support networks, tools and development programmes to promote fairness and collaboration, and to build a culture of openness.

Example initiatives:

We have imbedded inclusive leadership competencies into all our leadership development programmes
We have a dedicated Inclusion and Wellbeing Manager role to support efforts to attract and develop a diverse workforce
We are identifying talent to participate in an EMEA wide female talent programme

We give access and support to our senior female leaders through our European-wide Women’s Leadership Forum where they can share best practice and network, drawing on key skills and talent to encourage personal development. This Forum discusses topics such as career progression, inclusive behaviours and approaches to diversity across Europe
We have a designated Board Member - Glenn Griggs - as a Gender Diversity Champion to help lead and drive initiatives across the business

Data and Analysis

Our data is fundamental to understanding what the existing barriers are within the organisation and will also enable us to measure our progress over the coming years.

Example initiatives:

We set five year targets from April 2018 to increase our gender representation across the business and have seen a 2% increase in the overall representation of females
We continue to measure the gender mix throughout the recruitment process to identify any barriers and then put relevant actions in place to address these
We are developing a diversity dashboard to give us greater visibility and insight to our
workforce which will enable us to focus our efforts for change

We have undertaken detailed analysis as part of our pay review to address any pay disparities
We have analysed how many of our employees who have been promoted are females. 36.14% of all employees promoted were female and 49.82% of employees promoted to management positions were female. This is very positive particularly when compared to our gender split of 25.62% female

We analyse our leavers data to identify any trends. For this reporting period, 25.98% of our leavers in this period were from our female population and 16.67% of our female leavers were in senior/leadership roles which has had an impact on our gender pay gap figures. We are happy that we have been part of the journey for these employees which has enabled some of them to progress with their career journey outside of Ricoh.