Social Responsibility
Click to play Southern Company employees are part of the vital delivery of electricity. We value diversity and a wide array of jobs make up our team. Positions include plant and line workers, customer service reps, engineers, and finance and technology professionals. Click to play Tom Fanning, CEO, as he outlines his views on how diversity leads to success.
Throughout its history, Southern Company has developed and sustained a highly skilled and stable workforce. For its approximately 26,000 employees, the average age is 46 with an average tenure of 17 years, and of about 4.2 percent in 2012. A stable and highly competent workforce has fueled the company's superior performance in reliability, customer satisfaction, and shareholder return. Our deep skills and high percentage of long-tenured employees are evidence of our success in providing a desirable workplace with competitive pay and benefits and ongoing development opportunities. People come to Southern Company for a career, not just a job.
Southern Company employees bring a strong sense of commitment to the job. Results of the 2011 employee engagement survey show that 92 percent of the workforce has a high level of engagement. Our overall scores are above utility and general industry benchmarks.
Southern Company is readying itself for workforce transitions brought on by a large segment of the employee population becoming eligible for retirement. We must continue to attract, develop and retain skilled workers to ensure reliable supplies of affordable electricity. To do this, we focus on providing a variety of programs designed to meet the needs of our tenured workforce as well as attracting the emerging workforce of the future. These programs include pay and benefit programs, recruitment and retention initiatives, leadership and employee development programs, and diversity and inclusion strategies.
People Priority
Valuing & developing our employees is one of Southern Company's top five priorities. The people priority states: we will elevate performance in our people and culture through the following ways:
- Continue to demonstrate safety first in everything we do - Target Zero
- Develop leaders and employees at all levels
- Increase accountability with our performance management efforts
- Leverage diversity in every aspect of the business
- Cultivate an innovative culture throughout Southern Company
Find additional information on community and volunteer work across Southern Company businesses. »
Top Work Force Challenges Facing Southern Company
- Target Zero: Working every day, on every job, safely
- Representation: Reflecting rapidly changing demographics of the labor force marketplace in promotion and new hire rates
- Recruitment: Replacing near-term retirements of long-tenured employees in significant numbers
Stakeholder View:
Work Force Challenges
"Companies need to take on issues of race and gender first. An organization's management of diversity can be defined and judged in absolute metrics, most easily with human-capital statistics. Race and gender are the most dominant centers of discrimination.
"Your standards for unquestionable trust, total commitment and superior performance easily fit into a diversity message. You're ahead of many organizations because it's already in your culture."
Luke Visconti, partner and co-founder of DiversityInc
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