Reynolds American Inc. was recently named to Newsweek’s America’s Greatest Workplaces 2024. Borgia Walker, our Senior Vice President of Human Resources and Inclusion, completed an interview with Newsweek where she discussed what makes our workplace truly unique.
Newsweek and Plant-A Insights Group have named Reynolds American Inc. (Reynolds American) one of America’s Greatest Workplaces, recognizing our impact and commitment to offering an exemplar work environment.
America’s Greatest Workplaces 2024 recognizes the top companies in the U.S. based on their performance on a range of relevant metrics, including compensation and benefits, training and career progression, work-life balance, and company culture.
Along with the award, Borgia Walker, our SVP of Human Resources and Inclusion, completed an interview with Newsweek about Reynolds American’s culture and values, professional development opportunities, communication strategies, policies that promote work-life balance, employee involvement in social and sustainability initiatives, and approach to diversity and inclusion.
RELATED: Reynolds American Inc. Named to Newsweek’s America’s Greatest Workplaces 2024 for Diversity
In conversations with Newsweek, Borgia Walker, Senior Vice President, Human Resources and Inclusion answered the following questions:
Q: Can you provide an overview of your company’s workplace culture and values, and how they contribute to a positive work environment?
A: We have a clear purpose to create A Better Tomorrow™ by Building a Smokeless World. Maintaining and building on our diverse workforce with a people strategy that is human-centric, enables high performance and accelerates the building of skills and capabilities for multi-category growth is an essential element of our transformation journey.
At Reynolds American Inc. and its operating companies (Reynolds American), our people play an integral role in our success. Our Diversity and Inclusion goals reflect our commitment to this belief, with targets to increase both women and ethnic minorities in management roles. Our eight executive-sponsored Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are helping lead the way, illustrating how to celebrate our differences. We are also passionate about giving and volunteerism in our local communities, continuing our legacy with organizations like the United Way of Forsyth County. And, of course, we have an unwavering focus on safety in all our operations and upholding human rights for agricultural workers.
Our values weave through every aspect of what we do and how we do it, creating a clear connection to our strategy and purpose. The six ‘values’ listed below are embedded across all areas of our organization and throughout the entire global BAT Group, our parent organization, as we strive to empower our people and foster an exciting, rewarding workplace, emphasizing inclusivity and collaboration to deliver sustainable growth.
Our Six Values:
- Truly inclusive
- Do the right thing
- Love our consumer
- Passion to win
- Empowered through trust
- Stronger together
Q: What kind of professional development and growth opportunities are available to employees? How does your company support career advancement?
A: Delivering development opportunities for our employees and contributing to the strengthening of our talent pipeline has always been an integral part of our people strategy. We offer learning and development resources, and training opportunities for our people to reach their goals, including:
- Tuition reimbursement and student loan support
- Mentorship to help employees acquire skills, knowledge and behaviors needed to perform their current role successfully, and to create exposure and visibility for future opportunities.
- Structured training programs, including Women in Leadership, which aims to support the accelerated development of women at middle to senior level as it is a key initiative to grow the proportion of women in management. In 2022, we expanded the scope of this program and launched new Women in Leadership programs for junior management-level women managers. In addition, our Mastering Inclusion training, open to all employees, aims to raise awareness and build skill sets around key D&I concepts.
- Global opportunities – As Reynolds American is a major region within the global BAT Group, many of our employees can develop their career ambitions further by taking on international assignments
Q: How does your company ensure transparency and open communication between management and employees, fostering a sense of trust and belonging?
A: At Reynolds American, our employee communication strategies ensure transparency and regular dialogue between senior leadership and employees, fostering a sense of trust and belonging across the organization. Through regular updates on our intranet, executive newsletters, strategic communications campaigns, all-employee and functional town hall meetings, and informational sessions, we work hard to deliver transparency and open communication across our workforce.
With over 3,700 employees nationwide across multiple disciplines, including corporate, operations, trade marketing, and scientific research and development, effective communication across various platforms, channels, and formats is key to ensuring our workforce has a unified understanding of our vision and values, regardless of role or location.
Our commitment to clear communication extends to all areas of the business, including transparency around how salary decisions are made across the organization. In 2023, our global parent company, BAT, continued to work with a specialized consultancy to conduct a Pay Equity Review which covered approximately 42,000 employees, in more than 100 markets including the U.S. We are proud to report that the global Group’s results show that men and women are paid within 1% of each other for performing the same work or work of equal value.
Q: How does your company handle feedback and suggestions from employees? Is there a system in place for employees to voice their concerns or ideas?
A: At Reynolds American, we prioritize and value employee feedback and suggestions. We have updated our all-employee survey timeline to be conducted every 12 months to gather employee feedback across dimensions. The survey is designed to ensure an understanding of progress or gaps related to employee experience across the organization and includes a review of the employee feedback through demographic lenses, including gender and ethnicity. We are proud that the most recent 2023 survey had a response rate of 88% across management levels (2,981 employees).
Our Leadership Teams use this data to create robust strategies and action plans, both across the enterprise and within functions. These plans are focused on ensuring diversity and inclusion outreach, employee development and specific areas of focus.
In addition to the annual survey, we conduct periodic “pulse” surveys to assess employees’ level of engagement and sense of belonging within the organization.
Furthermore, our CEO conducted employee listening sessions across all levels of the organization over the past year to hear feedback on opportunities for improvement.
Q: What have your employees told you is their favorite policy regarding work-life balance at your company? Which of your company’s policies do you think sets it apart from other companies?
A: Employees have shared that our 16-week paid paternity leave and hybrid work policies are two of their favorites.
For new parents, both birth and adoptive, we offer 16-weeks of paid leave to help our employees balance work and life to care for their newborn or newly-placed child and adjust to their new home situation. We’re proud to offer a parental leave policy that is among the best in the U.S.
Key details:
- Up to 16 weeks of fully-paid leave and benefits to help employees bond and care for their child.
- Up to eight months of a reduced work schedule immediately after the paid leave period. *Employees work schedule can be reduced by up to two days a week. Pay will be prorated based on the number of days worked in a given week.
- Employees are eligible to participate if they are full-time, a new mother or father to a biological or adopted child or standing in place of a parent.
We aim to help support improved work-life integration to create a more productive and empowered workforce. Across our business, a hybrid remote working model is considered normal practice. We offer all full-time regular employees the option to work from home two days a week, allowing for greater flexibility and work-life balance while maintaining productivity and collaboration.
Q: Do you have any social and sustainability initiatives that you actively participate/contribute in? How are employees involved in such initiatives?
A: At Reynolds American, we believe that a community where all individuals have an equal chance to thrive is a strong community. Supporting opportunities for individuals to sustainably improve their economic mobility and well-being is a core pillar of our giving strategy. We have developed partnerships with organizations that provide services like education, job skills, and financial management to empower people to lead fulfilled lives.
2023 marked the United Way of Forsyth County’s 100th anniversary, and Reynolds American is proud to have been a partner since the organization’s founding. All Reynolds American organization employees may take two days off annually to volunteer during regular working hours. Over one month in the fall of 2023, 86 employees logged over 330 hours across 22 projects and 11 locations, including beautification projects, sorting food, renovation projects and serving on nonprofit boards. Our passionate teams mobilized for considerable efforts at Second Harvest Food Bank of NW North Carolina, Keep Winston-Salem Beautiful, Parenting PATH, Dream Center of Forsyth County, Children’s Center, Enrichment Center, Special Children’s School, New Communion, United Way of Forsyth County and Catholic Charities Food Pantry.
To support the causes important to our employees, we offer up to $7,000 per year for employee matching donations and two paid days off annually for regular full-time employees to volunteer in their communities.
Sustainability is at the forefront of our business and paramount to our success. To keep our employees informed and actively involved in our sustainability efforts, we launched the Today Tomorrow Together campaign, which includes monthly updates and challenges to engage our workforce in our sustainability agenda.
Q: How do you approach fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion within the organization?
A: We are proud to be a diverse organization that encourages our people to value their differences. We embrace diversity in the widest sense as those attributes that make us unique. As an organization, we are committed to celebrating all that makes us unique including race, ethnicity, cultural and social background, geographical origin, nationality, gender, age, any disability, sexual orientation, religion, skills, experience, education, socio-economic and professional background, perspectives, and thinking styles.
By 2025, we have ambitions and plans in place to reach gender parity in management roles and to have 25% minority representation in management roles (African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-American). Since 2019, we have achieved growth of 18.2% to 23.3% on minority representation and increased women in management roles to 35.5% companywide.
Our success is driven by our Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) strategy which is underpinned by three strategic pillars: driving ownership and accountability; building diverse talent pipelines; and creating enablers that support our commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive culture.
D&I remains fully embedded in our talent review processes and meetings, and we work to update all employees on our progress toward our diversity goals, which we share during employee town halls and on our company intranet.
Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are one of the ways we foster inclusivity for our teams. Currently, over 1,500 Reynolds American organization employees are members of one of our executive-sponsored ERGs, including:
- B United – LGBTQ+
- Women
- HOLA – Hispanic Origin & Latin American
- Veterans
- E. Y.O.U. – Black Employee Network Yielding Outreach and Unity
- Asian American
- ADAPT – Mental Health and Disability
- LINK – Networking
Our ERGs play a critical role in building the culture at Reynolds American as we strengthen diversity, equity, and inclusion.
NOTE: Reynolds American Inc. is a member of the global BAT Group and is the U.S. parent company of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company; Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, Inc.; American Snuff Company, LLC; R. J. Reynolds Vapor Company; and Modoral Brands Inc. (the “Subsidiaries”). The Subsidiaries operate and conduct separate, distinct businesses. References to “Reynolds American,” “Reynolds,” “the group,” “the company,” “we,” “us,” and “our” are simply for convenience and are not intended to imply or suggest that the Subsidiaries’ businesses are operated other than as separate, distinct businesses.
