Armed Forces Day recognises the people who make up the Armed Forces community: from currently serving personnel to Service families, veterans and cadets.
To commemorate this important day, Steve Reynolds, Head of Architecture in our Corporate IT team, writes about his first year of chairing our Armed Forces colleague network, Military@SGN, and why it’s so important to us.
Armed Forces Day is an opportunity for us to show our support for the members of our Armed Forces community. It’s exactly 12 months since we officially launched our network – it’s been a busy year for us all at SGN and, although the internal online community has grown steadily, I know we can do even more to build an active and thriving community for our veterans, reservists and military families across the company. We want to make SGN a place where members of our Armed Forces community feel recognised and supported for the skills and values they bring to the workplace.
We’ve not sat still though.
Simon Kilonback, our CEO, is the Executive sponsor for the network and is actively engaged and very supportive as he recognises the huge value that our Armed Forces colleagues bring to the company in terms of transferable skills and their “can do” attitude. He is also rightly very proud of the fact that SGN is recognised as an Armed Forces Covenant Gold Award employer. Along with other colleagues from the network, we’ve supported our recruitment team at a number of Career Transition Partnership events around the country to promote the career opportunities SGN has to offer, and I’m pleased to say that we’re starting to see the fruits of that effort with new Service leavers joining the business.
I’ve also used those events as an opportunity to make contact with peers across other companies in our sector so that we can share ideas and best practice. Hopefully, in time, we will extend our Armed Forces community beyond SGN to make our sector as a whole a career destination of choice for Service leavers.
Back in November, we invited colleagues to pause on Remembrance Day on an online virtual act of remembrance and we also marked the 80th anniversary of VE Day together.
I have regular conversations with our Wellbeing team and they’ve provided some great resources focused around mental health and wellbeing for the veteran community. Colleagues in the network have been active in individual fundraising efforts in support of some of the wonderful forces charities that provide much needed support to those physically or mentally impacted by their experiences while on military service.
So, what’s in store for the year ahead?
We need to continue to build on these foundations and actively engage our membership to help grow the network to become a thriving community. I want to work with teams across SGN to make sure we’re really clear in what we offer our Armed Forces community and to make it easy to find the information about how SGN supports them. To that end, we’re planning an online drop-in session later in the summer where colleagues can find out more about what we’ve got planned, have their say about what they want from the network and find out how they can get involved with shaping and building it moving forward.
We want SGN to be truly recognised as a great place to work for members of our Armed Forces community and to embody the commitments we’ve made under the Armed Forces Covenant: by actively promoting employment opportunities at SGN to service leavers and forces families and supporting the transition from service to civilian work; supporting our Reservists and Cadet Forces by providing additional leave to enable them to attend training; and to our military families by offering flexibility when needed, such as when serving family members are deployed.
