Our people

Health and safety

We regard the health and safety of our employees and those working on our premises, or on our behalf, as paramount. We are dedicated to providing a safe place of work for all our employees, contractors and visitors to our facilities.

Our vision and goals for health and safety and how we commit to achieve them are set out in our global HS&E policy.

We focus on three key areas:

Capability and culture
To instil HS&E at the heart of everything we do, we need consistent, visible leadership and commitment from managers at all levels. We must also engage effectively on HS&E with all our employees.

Systems and processes
As we continue to grow there is an even greater need for robust HS&E management. We continually strengthen our HS&E management system, running effective assurance programmes and sharing what we learn from incidents.

Risk-based improvement programmes
We implement prioritised work programmes focused on key areas of risk. Recent examples include electrical safety, control of contractors and process safety.

A robust health and safety governance framework helps us to monitor and direct improvements in management and performance.

A main Board director has responsibility for HS&E and the Board receives regular reports on progress. We have forums that range from local team meetings right through to strategic committees, involving members of the Executive Leadership team. A Board Safety and Ethics Committee oversees the operation of all HS&E, Product Safety and Security policies, practices and procedures for the Group.

We are committed to full compliance with all relevant legal requirements and we continually monitor performance in all our businesses. Our HS&E management standards set out mandatory requirements for the evaluation of legal compliance. This forms a key aspect of our management system framework that meets the requirements of the Health and Safety management systems standard OHSAS 18001.

We have global certification to OHSAS 18001 for each of our businesses.

A healthy, resilient workforce is the cornerstone of a high performance organisation.

A healthy, resilient workforce is the cornerstone of a high performance organisation.

Our Occupational Health Strategy focuses on three areas:

  • Compliance – Managing occupation health risks
  • Developing resilience
  • Promoting wellbeing in a healthy workplace

The nature of our work has the potential to expose us to conditions that could harm our health. From noise and vibration to ergonomics and lifting, we continually invest in programmes and controls that mitigate these risks. Our occupational health providers conduct a full range of statutory surveillance medicals to look for any early signs of occupational disease.

The leading causes of illness are noise induced hearing loss, work-related upper limb disorders and stress. This reflects our global risk profile and provides the focus for our health improvement activities.

We have an internal health worksite scheme we call LiveWell. This award programme recognises sites that have taken steps towards creating supportive work environments where healthy choices are encouraged and rewarded. Sites are required to meet a stringent set of requirements to be accredited.

Wellbeing at Rolls-Royce

We take a holistic approach to wellbeing at RR supporting our people to thrive both personally and professionally. It expands beyond physical health to encompass mental, emotional, social and financial wellbeing.

Our approach involves fostering a workplace culture that prioritises the wellbeing of its employees, including work-life balance, mental health and creating a psychologically safe workplace.

By providing resources, programmes, and a supportive infrastructure, we aim to empower our people to prioritise their health and wellbeing and create a working environment where everyone can be at their best. In 2023 we developed a new virtual wellbeing site containing tools and resources to help support our colleague’s wellbeing.

Our new wellbeing resources form a key element in our re-imagined LiveWell programme.

Our LiveWell Framework

When we live well, were able to be at our best. That’s why caring for the health and wellbeing of our people is essential to our success. LiveWell brings our wellbeing strategy to life locally. Our goal is to create workplaces and teams where our people’s health and wellbeing can thrive.

Our LiveWell programme is our global, evidence-based approach to improving the wellbeing of our people. Our accreditation scheme helps our workplaces understand where they are today, and how they can make tangible improvements to support the wellbeing of our people. The accreditation programmes span across four levels from Bronze through to Platinum, our ambition is for all of our workplaces to reach Silver accreditation by 2026.

Healthy mind, healthy body and healthy workplace are all key components of our LiveWell programme, encompassing topics such as mental health, financial wellbeing, workplace culture, nutrition, leadership support, physical activity, our community, and healthy behaviour change.

The programme is for our people, by our people. It enables our global workplaces to tailor their wellbeing approach to the requirements of their workplace and employees. This creates autonomy and flexibility in workplace wellbeing approaches, supporting improved engagement and participation in wellbeing initiatives.

The LiveWell framework was re-launched in 2023 with:

82 workplaces participating globally across 21 different countries and over 100 new resources including toolbox talks, engagement activities, posters, nudges and resources.

Mental Health at Rolls-Royce

Our approach to mental health aims to promote mental health and wellbeing throughout our organisation, increasing knowledge and understanding of mental wellbeing, and enabling people to be at their best.

Mental health is a key component of our overall wellbeing strategy and is embedded throughout our LiveWell programme under healthy mind. It supports people to make informed decisions that can improve both their mental and physical wellbeing, and the wellbeing of others. It empowers teams and individuals to set data-based goals and focused actions on removing barriers to health and wellbeing. A mandatory element of our LiveWell programme’s bronze accreditation level is the completion and regular review of workplace pressure risk assessments. Our workplace pressure risk assessment programme (Pascal) supports our people leaders to manage and mitigate risks in the workplace which may prevent our people from being at their best. Our programme allows people leaders to examine current workplace pressures in their teams and identify team level actions that can be made to better manage workplace pressures and reduce potential mental health impacts.

Working with a partner we recently developed a learning programme on mental health to support our leaders and over 500 leader have already taken this training to better support their people. Additionally, in 2023 our global mandatory training focused on psychological safety in the workplace, supporting our people leaders to develop a psychologically safe working environment with their teams.

A key element of our approach to mental health is our mental health champion network, the network spans over 700 voluntary champions globally. Our ambition is to create inclusive and supportive working environments where people can talk freely and opening about wellbeing including mental health and are confident in seeking any support they need.

The role of our mental health champions includes championing mental health campaigns, events and resources throughout the organisation, increasing understanding of mental health and wellbeing. All our champions undertake training for their role, and we share best practice and develop new learning and toolkits for our champions through a global community of practice.

We are dedicated to providing a safe place of work for all our employees, contractors and visitors to our facilities.

We continue to analyse high-potential incidents and each of them is investigated at business level. Lessons learnt are shared across the Group. We develop our improvement programmes on high consequence activities in accordance with our risk profile. The number of high-potential incidents has declined slightly from previous years and the number of "near miss" reporting has significantly increased. This reflects our greater risk awareness, overall proactive reporting, risk based investigation and other improvements.

In 2019 our Total Reportable Injury (TRI) rate for employees was 0.55 TRIs per 100 employees, compared to 0.74 in 2014.

We require all contractors engaged by Rolls-Royce to acquire third-party prequalification before undertaking work. Prequalification of contractors is a small but important part of assuring ourselves that our contractors are competent to undertake the work activities we request of them.

Our people strategy and approach

We are committed to creating an environment where every employee can reach his or her full potential, by encouraging diversity, wellbeing and development.

Our people strategy and approach

We are committed to creating an environment where every employee can reach his or her full potential, by encouraging diversity, wellbeing and development.

We continue to develop our employee base, ensuring we have the right skills for our business today and the right capabilities for the future.

Our people strategy focuses on three key areas:

Enabling business transformation – Embedding a simpler organisation to introduce greater performance enablement, helping our people achieve their potential every day.

Building strategic capabilities – Developing key organisational, leadership, technical and functional capabilities for future performance and growth.

Creating a lean, agile, high performance culture – Achieving our strategic goals requires that we have the right cultural elements that support our workforce to be enabled, engaged and energised to drive performance and growth.

A diverse and inclusive workforce

We continue to incorporate diversity and inclusion into everything we do. Diversity is critical to achieving a high performance culture and is a key enabler of innovation. We seek to embed diversity and inclusion in our employee training, communications and cultural change programme.

Global demand for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) qualified employees continues to grow. Our need to recruit and retain locally based diverse leaders intensifies as our global footprint develops.

Our global Diversity and Inclusion strategy has four key phases: awareness, understanding, application and commitment.

Our goals are to:

  • Increase awareness and understanding of all employees of the value of diversity and inclusion
  • Build diversity and inclusion into the way we work
  • Drive commitment to diversity and inclusion

These ensure all employees are dedicated to making Rolls-Royce a place where all talent can thrive and succeed.





We continue to incorporate diversity and inclusion into everything we do. To support this, we have made three public pledges to diversity campaigns in the UK:

Your Life Campaign – dedicated to encouraging more females to enter engineering and technology career paths

WISE 10 Step Plan – committed to improving the pipeline of women in to STEM

The 5% Club – committed that 5% of our UK population is made up of young people on formal Early Career Development programmes

We continue to see increased levels of diversity in our Early Career Development programmes, with females making up 32% of our graduate intake in 2019. Our general population is 16% female.

At a Board level we continue to participate in the FTSE 100 Cross-Company Mentoring Programme which aims to increase the number of eligible female candidates for Board positions. Females make up 50% of our Board profile.

We give full and fair consideration to all applications for employment made by people with disabilities and support disabled employees, helping them to make the best use of their skills and potential.

Gender and ethnicity pay reporting for the UK

Gender pay reporting

We’re committed to creating a diverse and inclusive place to work where our people can be themselves and be at their best. We welcome the UK Government’s requirement for large companies to be more transparent on gender pay and in line with UK legislation we have published our gender pay data for our UK subsidiaries with 250 or more employees. We also show the total picture for Rolls-Royce in the UK regardless of employing entity.

UK Gender pay report 2023 
pdf – 234KB
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UK Gender pay report 2022 
pdf – 335KB
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UK Gender pay report 2021 
pdf – 283KB
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UK Gender pay report 2020 
pdf – 135KB
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UK Gender pay report 2019 
pdf – 134KB
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UK Gender pay report 2018 
pdf – 134KB
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UK Gender pay report 2017 
pdf – 76KB
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Ethnicity pay reporting for the UK

We’re committed to creating a diverse and inclusive place to work where our people can be themselves and at their best. In advance of the UK Government’s requirement for large companies to publish their Gender Pay Gap data, we have decided to voluntarily disclose our Ethnicity Pay Gap data too. In line with the legal guidance on the Gender Pay Gap reporting, we published our Ethnicity Pay Gap data in 2021 and 2022. In 2023 the UK Government has published their first ever legal guidance on the Ethnicity Pay Gap reporting, so we have adjusted our reporting for 2023 and will be following the legal guidance in coming years. We publish overall figures, including all UK employees regardless of their employing entity.

UK Ethnicity pay report 2023 
pdf – 232KB
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UK Ethnicity pay report 2022 
pdf – 489KB
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UK Ethnicity pay report 2021 
pdf – 193KB
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Sustainability data

We measure and report about the impacts of our business operations and activities. This reporting is informed by our materiality assessment and the needs and expectations of our external stakeholders.

View our performance data charts

Human rights

We are committed to maintaining the highest ethical standards.

We are committed to maintaining and improving global policies and processes to avoid any potential complicity in human rights violations related to our operations or supply chain.

We have taken an integrated approach to minimising the risk of slavery and human trafficking taking place in our supply chain or any part of our business.

Our commitment to human rights, including our position on forced labour, involuntary labour, child labour, and human trafficking, is outlined in our Global Code of Conduct, Global Supplier Code of Conduct and Global Human Rights policy. Our principles related to human rights include:

  • We are committed to protecting and preserving the rights of our employees, those employed in our supply chain, and those affected by our operations;
  • We believe that all employment should be freely chosen and commit to refrain from any form of forced or involuntary labour;
  • We are opposed to the use of any form of child labour or practices that inhibit the development of children.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM)

A strong future pipeline of well-qualified scientists and engineers is critical to the future success of our business.

Reaching 25 million people

We set a global target to reach 6 million people through Rolls-Royce STEM education programmes and activities by 2020. As we have now met that target we have now extended it to inspire 25 million of tomorrow’s pioneers by 2030.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM)

A strong future pipeline of well-qualified scientists and engineers is critical to the future success of our business.

We hope that our STEM education programmes will inspire people to study the STEM subjects and show them the life-long opportunities that STEM careers can offer. Opportunities that might even include a career at Rolls-Royce.

By investing in STEM education we hope to widen the talent pool from which we – and our customers and suppliers - will recruit in the future, ensuring that we have the best people with the right skills to help fulfil our future responsibilities.

Globally we have around 1,400 Rolls-Royce STEM ambassadors who are actively involved in education programmes and activities.

More information on our STEM outreach target

Employee engagement

An engaged and empowered workforce is critical to our success. Our managers have an important part to play in engaging their teams. We support their development to ensure they have the management and leadership skills they need. We encourage collaboration and use a variety of channels to communicate with our employees.

We measure employee engagement through our annual Employee Opinion Survey

We believe the decision on whether or not to join a trade union is an individual choice.

We engage openly with our people and are committed to creating a working environment where everyone can be at their best. We have regular dialogue with our people, and with their representatives, where relevant, in line with local practice and frameworks. This helps to build strong relationships and a common understanding of business priorities and our customers’ needs. We work with established employee and representative bodies, including a European Works Council and local forums.

* The percentage of represented employees is an approximation based on the major geographies in which we operate. The major geographies include the United Kingdom, Germany (100% due to co-determination rights), Italy, Singapore, North America and Canada.

Employee development

We encourage our employees to improve their knowledge and enhance their careers by providing them meaningful training and development. In 2016, we invested over £32m in employee learning, delivering over one million hours of training.

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