Workforce Sustainability at Southern Company
Originally published in Southern Company's 2021 Corporate Responsibility Executive Summary Report
Southern Company is focused on having the right people with the right skills who are trained to perform their jobs safely and ethically to meet current and future business requirements. This focus is exemplified through Our Values and our Code of Ethics. We uphold our values, ethics and human capital beliefs in all we do and remain cognizant of what they mean to our workforce’s culture and well-being.
- Our uncompromising values and ethics are key to our sustained success
- People are the power behind a safe workplace
- Our people are central to all we do
Spotlight: Safety First – Southern Company’s No. 1 Value
Safety First is a pledge to our employees, customers, contractors and communities that our actions will contribute to a safe environment for everyone. Our system has long had a commitment to completing every job, every day, safely. We are dedicated to continuous safety improvement to advance our safety culture.
As part of our focus on continuous improvement, in 2018 we recognized that our “Target Zero” safety initiative to pursue zero workplace injuries, set with the best of intentions, had unintended consequences – a hesitance to report minor incidents and near-misses. While we continue to measure rates of recordable injuries, lost-time rate and days away, we have modified a portion of our compensation goals to focus on serious injuries rather than total injuries. We have come to recognize that lessons learned from reporting all incidents provide the best opportunities to build trust, apply human performance principles and advance our safety program. Better understanding the precursors of potentially serious incidents helps us identify and implement the critical controls necessary to prevent serious injuries. We hone and build on our safety culture by engaging all employees in our solutions, continuing to share and build on learnings, and contributing to continuous process improvement to enhance safety. Our programs and processes resulted in a reduction to serious injuries and the best safety performance in our history in 2021.
Our commitment is to Safety First. We work hard every day to live up to this core element of Our Values and to sustain a culture in which our employees are empowered to contribute to making us better.
Demographics and Transparency
To demonstrate our commitment to human capital and all it encompasses, it is essential to transparently share information about our workforce demographics and data. In 2021, 27,300 employees worked at Southern Company.
Of those employees in 2021, the following is representative:
27,300 Total Headcount (99.8% full-time employees)
25% Women
29% People of Color
32% Employees Covered by Union Agreements
58% Underrepresented Groups as % of New Hires
58% Promotions to People of Color and Women
45 yrs. Average Age
15 yrs. Average Tenure
7.7% Low Turnover Rate (Majority retirements)
Beginning with the 2020 reporting year, Southern Company committed to disclose annually an aggregate summary of workforce data each Southern Company subsidiary submits to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) through Form EEO-1.
