Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 26 April 2022

Joint Committee On Children, Equality, Disability, Integration And Youth

Organisation of Working Time (Domestic Violence Leave) Bill 2020: Discussion (Resumed)

Ms Aoife Mulqueen:

There is a very long list of things. Women's Aid was an amazing partner so we were able to get a lot of its knowledge to equip us with this. One of the most important things, as the Deputy said, is around the privacy and safety of the individual and how we access that. We learned from Women's Aid that one of the core components of a relationship in domestic violence is that the power and control is constantly taken away from the victim, so everything we wanted to do as an employer was to put back that power and control to the individual. For us, in practical terms, that would include certain things. It has happened that somebody has come to me to say they have a domestic violence disclosure on their team. One of the first things we will say is that we do not need to know a name and the only person who needs to know a name is the person who is applying the annual leave to the account of that person. Other than that, we can just have conversations about how to support that individual and the best way for them, and make sure they are in control of everything.

There is a huge list around some of the challenges we have had and ensuring our duty of care to our people managers as they go through this training, which is quite difficult to go through and can be quite emotional in a lot of ways. It was probably the first time we have ever created training where we had to look at the emotional trajectory of the room to make sure that, by the end of the half-day that we put our people managers through, they felt really empowered by the end. We did a survey at the end of every training to ask how they felt about taking a disclosure of domestic violence and 95% said they felt moderately to highly competent in taking a disclosure of domestic violence from an employee, which would not have been the case earlier in the day. That kind of forum was definitely important in helping our understanding as the training went on.

Ms Mernagh mentioned the key role that our senior leaders played. Every single one of our senior leaders attended the training and role-modelled and said that they found this incredibly important. We also could not underestimate how our diversity and inclusion work over the last couple of years has really embedded into the employees. After one or two sessions of our training with Women's Aid, the quality of the training, how people felt coming out of the training and how they felt they had learned something they really did not have before and that they were going to use it, not just in their work lives but in their lives in general, created a buzz that made it incredibly successful. It still is quoted as one of the things that makes people the most proud of working at Vodafone, which is obviously hugely meaningful.

There are also other things that come to the fore, such as people letting us know information through a people manager. There is a person in one our business areas who said they had left an abusive relationship because we were talking about it and because it was part of the conversation. In that situation, that person did not even access the policy or take the leave; it was just the fact that we were talking about it that gave them the strength to move on.

There are many different aspects, with key enablers and challenges that we face throughout. We, as a business, have said that we will talk to anybody who is considering it. There are many tricky bits to learn relating to HR. We are open to having conversations and have never said "No" to a conversation with another business or another HR team that is thinking of implementing this. We want them to know that it is possible. There are no privacy concerns, unlike in other areas. It is beneficial. Did I forget anything?