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Policy statement

Our colleagues play a pivotal role in helping our customers and we are passionate in providing a diverse CR programme that ensures they are truly placed at the heart of our business. This helps our colleagues in achieving their goals and is underpinned by our commitment to attract and retain the very best talent to shape our future success.

We provide a healthy and safe environment for our people, customers, suppliers and contractors. Safestore always complies with current legislation and endeavours to continuously exceed legal requirements and local regulations by:

Health and safety

• Conducting regular health and safety reviews across our estate inclusive of the review of risk assessments and accident reports to identify, control, prevent and nullify potential risks.
• Ensuring our health and safety committee meets regularly to review issues, process, policy and actions harnessing a culture where health and safety always sits high on our agenda.
• Delivering accredited health and safety training and refresher training relevant to job role as standard to all colleagues.

Equality and diversity

• Being an equal opportunities employer that maintains a workforce that reflects the uniqueness of the communities in which we operate.
• Ensuring policies and practices are in place that treat all employees fairly and equally. All colleagues receive the same treatment regardless of their ethnic origin, gender, sex, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, or disability.
• Continuing to nurture the talents of our people and the benefit they bring to our varying business functions through a clearly defined and transparent competency framework.
• Honing a culture of fair treatment regarding recruitment and promotion, making decisions solely based on ability, aptitude and role requirements as outlined in our competency framework.
• Maintaining an active succession planning strategy that considers the ability of internal colleagues before recruiting externally.

Work life balance

• Delivering through our colleagues engagement programme support to our people in achieving a healthy work life balance.
• Providing a range of initiatives that celebrate the cultural diversity of our colleagues including: graduate internships, an apprenticeship scheme developed in association with Street League, a tax free cycle to work scheme and "Busy Bees" child support.
• Encouraging our staff to engage in our accredited Careerstore training and development programme providing them with individual training and a tailored development path.
• Engaging in programmes that encourage our people to self learn and develop with funding for professional qualifications.

Training

As an "Investors in People" organisation since 2003 our aim is to be an employer of choice and we passionately believe that our continual success is dependent on our highly motivated, well trained colleagues. We are delighted that for the year FY2012 our people have participated in over 11,000 hours of training time.

This training consisted of:

• courses fulfilling health and
  safety requirements;
• the continued delivery of Safestore's bespoke Space Specialist programme enabling our colleagues to be experts in self-storage who, by putting their customers first, take pride in delivering the best solution for them;
• people management courses
  which focus on team and individual motivation, performance management, different learning preferences and leadership styles;
• we have also delivered additional workshops around objective setting to support our teams in setting business and personal objectives which are aligned with the Space Specialist scorecard. By adopting this approach we have confidence that all of our team members' efforts, within their individual roles and remits, are driving our four strategic priority areas; and
• 61 colleagues progressed their
  personal development by achieving
  an award as part of our in-house programme Careerstore.

Promotions

31 colleagues were successfully promoted to a more senior position; this is a similar level to the prior year.

Payroll giving

For the fifth consecutive year we were awarded the Payroll Giving Bronze Award in April 2012. We remain committed to supporting UK charities and payroll giving offers our colleagues an easy way of donating to their charity of choice.

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