Wolseley Group

About Wolseley Group

Wolseley is a leading specialist provider of plumbing, heating, cooling, and utility products to trade customers. Trading under a number of leading brands including Plumb Centre, Pipe Centre, Climate Centre, William Wilson, Jointing Tech, Burdens, and Fusion Utilities. It has around 550 branches nationally, three centres of excellence in the utilities space, support centres in Warwick and Ripon, and three distribution centres.

In each of the sectors we supply, we act as a trusted partner, providing a range of enhanced services and expertise to help customers to win more work, trade more efficiently and ultimately be more profitable. Customers benefit from the skills, knowledge and expertise of our people, the range of complimentary products and service offerings, its scale, its bespoke logistics network and a market leading digital suite of services.

The Wolseley Group is made up of a number of Business Units, and brands, each of which are specialists in their sectors. This means that we are one of the most complete specialist providers of plumbing, heating, cooling, and utility products to the widest range of trade, direct, and contract customers in the UK and Ireland.

Company culture

Wolseley became a standalone business at the start of 2021, and that gave us the perfect opportunity to define what kind of company we want to be moving forward.

Through everything we do, we look to the ‘do the right thing’ – in the way we treat customers, suppliers, and our corporate responsibilities, but this is especially true in our approach to colleagues. To attract, develop and retain the best people we know that we need to offer the ‘whole package’

Our five core values – Safety, Health & Wellbeing, Exceptional Service, Nurturing Potential, Fairness & Respect and Positive Impact – were developed through our Colleague Forum. They’re by our people, for our people. They reinforce our collective identity and give us all something tangible to live and breathe by each and every day.

Employee benefits and perks

We believe in rewarding the people who contribute to our business success. In addition to a competitive salary package we offer a range of benefits designed to attract, motivate and retain the very best people, such as:

• • Pension scheme (matched up to 9%)
  • Life insurance (four times your salary)
  • Employee assistance program (including counselling)
  • Financial services (payroll-based loans and savings – coming soon)
  • ‘Benefits on Tap’ discount portal
  • YuLife wellbeing app (activities and rewards)
  • Bonuses or other incentives for all
  • Generous holiday allowances

Career development and growth

The Wolseley Talent Guild is the jewel in our crown when it comes to our colleague offering. It is a bold approach to the way we identify, support and develop talent. All our colleagues benefit from a robust framework that maps their potential to ensure they’re progressing and realising their career goals.

With everything from apprenticeship programmes, to talent boosters and career ladders, right through to more technical qualifications and higher education programmes – we have it covered. We’ve also invested in a series of dedicated training centres across the country to ensure that all colleagues have access to the learning they need to grow.

Colleague engagement is vital to the success of any business, as we know that well engaged colleagues give the best service. We have a comprehensive programme of engagement activities, from our ‘Let’s Hear It!’ all colleague engagement surveys to our colleague forum that meets regularly with senior managers to put forward colleague ideas and questions. In this way we ensure our colleagues are right at the heart of our decision-making process and fully aligned to our strategic direction.

EDI (equity, diversity & inclusion) initiatives

Wolseley is an active member of the Construction Inclusion Coalition and we’re committed to building a workforce that reflects the communities we serve, alongside driving improvements in EDI in the Construction Industry in conjunction with our strategic partners.

We strive to recruit and promote colleagues with a broad range of perspectives and backgrounds as we believe that this helps us to better understand our customers and their respective needs. We’re committed to ensuring that nobody will receive less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, marital status, social class, colour, race, ethnic origin, creed, age, sexual orientation or disability. Fairness and Respect is an integral part of our company values, and we embrace what brings people together and also what makes people different.  We value and respect the diversity of our colleagues and promote an inclusive working environment for everyone’s benefit. We take a colleague led approach through two key forums.  Our Group Fairness and Respect Board focuses on driving initiatives to raise awareness about EDI within our teams and contributing to the development of internal policies and guidance for both managers and colleagues.   In tandem, our dedicated business unit colleague forums focus on gathering feedback from our employees on their experiences; highlighting where we can take action to improve these and suggesting routes to create tangible and meaningful change.

Sustainability / environmental stewardship

There’s a lot of change in our sector, especially around heating technologies. The level of disruption this represents for our customers shouldn’t be underestimated. But the plumbing and heating sector, like all industries, has a responsibility to protect the planet and to safeguard the resources that we have for future generations.

Innovation, and emerging technologies such as ground and air heat pumps, hydrogen, and network heating, will play a key role in us hitting net zero by 2030. A big part of what we’re doing now is ensuring that we have the leading propositions in these more efficient technologies, that we understand them, and that we support our customers in making choices around products and services that will improve their environmental performance.