Diversity is a way of life at Thales — it shapes our human resources and recruitment policies every day.
To retain our market leadership we have implemented a best-in-class recruitment policy. That means hiring people from a variety of backgrounds and taking active steps to fight all forms of discrimination.
We believe that gender diversity in the workplace is vital to innovation and key to our business performance.
We have adopted a proactive stance on this issue since 2004, introducing a number of measures aimed at recruiting women and helping them to build on their talent and develop their careers.
As of 31 December 2014, women accounted for 22% of a global workforce of 61,000, and this proportion is steadily rising.
Improving the gender balance
We have made a real effort to ensure that women are not under-represented in the intake of new employees. All Thales companies in France supports equal opportunities and sets specific targets for the recruitment of women.
Encouraging girls to choose careers in science and technology is also critically important, and we regularly organise outreach programmes to support this effort.
Since 2011, Thales has partnered the French Elles Bougent association, which provides networking opportunities for young women and conducts a range of actions to promote careers in science and technology. Under this partnership, Thales women act as mentors and share their passion for their engineering.
Thales is actively involved in the annual Réseaux et Carrières au Féminin forum, the Journée des Sciences de l’Ingénieur au Féminin event and various other initiatives to promote careers in science and technology to female pupils, students and graduates. Currently, over 150 Thales women are Elles Bougent mentors.
Thales also encourages the development of internships and apprenticeship contracts allowing female candidates to gain experience at our businesses.
Support for career development
Gender equality in career development is one of Thales’s key objectives. We pay special attention to career development opportunities for women, through training and mentoring programmes as well as active support from Thales’s in-house university.
Thales managers also attend awareness sessions focusing on gender stereotypes. We actively encourage the development of internal networks to keep the channels of communication open and share experiences throughout the Group. The men and women taking part in these forums help Thales to promote diversity and are a major valuable source of innovation and new ideas.
Thales women recognised for their achievements
- Johanna Dominici, engineer at Thales’s Innovative Cockpit Design department, voted Most Promising Woman of 2012 by Usine Nouvelle magazine.
- Isabelle Buret, Telecoms R&D and product policy manager at Thales Alenia Space, awarded the Irène Joliot-Curie Women in Business prize in 2012 (organised by the French ministry of higher education and research and the Airbus Foundation). She also won a prize for her professional achievements at the Tribune Women’s Awards in 2013 (organised by Objectif News in the Midi-Pyrénées region).
- Trang Pham, Thales development director for the Aquitaine region, winner of the Women in the Economy trophy in 2013 (organised by the Idecom group).
Ensuring equal pay
Thales is committed to maintaining equal pay for men and women. In France, a specific budget equivalent to 0.1% of total payroll has been set aside since 2006 to rectify unwarranted discrepancies in compensation between men and women. Today, this budget is also used to recognise experience through promotion.
Work-life balance
To ensure that its employees enjoy a healthy work-life balance, Thales is committed to improving the work environment for working parents.
- In France, we have set up inter-company childcare facilities in partnership with Crèche Attitude, a private service provider.
- In Spain, Portugal and Germany, Thales has formed partnerships with childcare organisations to help parents find daycare services for their children.
- In Italy, Thales helps cover employees’ childcare costs.
For more than 20 years, Thales has actively promoted recruitment and career development of people with disabilities.
Our Mission Insertion integration unit maintains is permanently in contact with public institutions, government agencies, non-profit structures, teaching and training establishments and association networks. of associations. It also works to forge inter-company partnerships to enhance employment opportunities for disabled people.
Reflecting our commitment to diversity, we renewed the Group-wide agreement in 2014 that will run through to 2017 with all the trade union organisations represented at Thales.
Our key commitments:
Recruitment and employment
We will accelerate hiring and replace departing retirees. Our target is to recruit 120 disabled employees, 38 work-study students and 246 interns by 2017. We actively support employees with disabilities through a range of actions, such as:
- Tailoring positions and working hours
- Enabling teleworking where required
- Helping with transport and the purchase and fitting out of personal vehicles
- Supporting the transition from protected employment to ordinary employment
Cooperation agreements
Thales is consolidating and developing new cooperation, mentoring and tutoring agreements with professional reintegration centres and universities near our facilities, including the universities of Brest, Lille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nice Sophia-Antipolis and Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris.
Technologies to help disabled employees
Since 2012, we have opened our e-learning modules to the visually, hearing or motor impaired, which is a first in Europe.
This initiative, the result of a cooperation agreement between Thales, Pierre et Marie Curie University and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, aims to provide all disabled employees with the same personal and career development resources as their colleagues, by giving them access to the full range of training modules offered by Thales’s in-house university.
For example, we provide visually impaired and hard-of-hearing employees with a range of tools developed using Thales technologies, such as Eyeschool and Tadeo.
Awareness and support
Thales also encourages and supports employees who help people with disabilities outside of work in the area of disability awareness. For example, employees who devote time to non-profit associations assisting disabled people can apply for two days of annual leave.
We also take account of the family context of our employees by adapting the working hours or work organisation of parents with disabled children, as well as providing financial help for their education.
For a global, multidisciplinary organisation like Thales, diversity is a way of life. We actively promote interaction between staff members with different backgrounds, cultures and experiences.
The quest for diversity in the workforce shapes our human resources and recruitment policies in very practical ways. It means hiring people from a variety of backgrounds and taking active steps to fight all forms of discrimination:
- New team members from diverse backgrounds are invited to discuss cultural and job diversity as part of their induction process.
- New employees receive specific training about working in multicultural environments.
- Thales recruitment professionals are trained to ensure that all job applicants are treated equally.
In 2013, we signed a Group-wide Generation Contract, which formalises our commitment to employing young people and the over-50s, and encourages diversity and the transfer of knowledge and skills between generations. Under this agreement, we work closely with a non-profit French association called Nos Quartiers ont des Talents.
Since its launch in 2006, Nos Quartiers has worked to promote equal opportunities and facilitate the professional integration of young graduates under the age of 30 from underprivileged neighbourhoods and social backgrounds. Thanks to an innovative system of mentoring by Thales employees, who give advice on recruitment tools, job search strategies and networking, these young people are offered a fast track to employment.
More than 50 Thales employees act as mentors and take part in numerous events organised throughout the year by Nos Quartiers or at our own initiative.