Building services sometimes suffers from a reputation that it no longer deserves, and that makes bringing people into our business, and our industry, a little harder than it might otherwise be.

If you do just a little digging, you often find that people’s perceptions of building services are pretty dated; according to surveys, when young people hear the word ‘construction’ they think ‘dirty, messy, dangerous, and a huge contributor to climate change’. And what really stands out as a recurring theme is that building services is not flexible or family-friendly, and so feels unwelcoming to women in particular.

At Saltire, we have built a culture over the last 20 years, which is absolutely welcoming to women, and in fact to any employee who has caring responsibilities, or for whatever reason might be suited to something a little different to the old 9-5 routine. We’re a very female-led business in many ways; our 247 call centre is led by women and full of female employees who are highly trained, multi-skilled, and critical in dealing with domestic emergency situations quickly and safely.

It’s because we offer our customers a 247 service that many of our employees can find a way to make their career work alongside their other responsibilities; for example, a four days on/four days off shift pattern can really help to cut down on childcare needed, working late at night leaves days free for people who need or want to structure their lives that way.

We are lucky to have teams full of people who are brilliant at their jobs, and who have stuck with us for many years; it’s because of them that our culture feels closer to family than to any dated perceptions that people outside of building services might have of us. Hopefully, those old-fashioned notions of what it means to be a women in the construction industry are being replaced with more positive stories like ours – and in fact, we recently signed the Inspiring Women in Construction pledge, which commits us to attracting and welcoming more women to our industry.

It’s been a few years since we could really get out into the local community of North Lanarkshire, and talking to people about why they should consider getting into building services as a career. With things now looking much brighter, we’ll be back out on the road again soon, challenging perceptions about the building services industry, and showing young people why a career that involves cutting-edge renewable technologies might just be worth considering after all. We’re really glad to be part of the United Capital group’s United For All campaign, which is dispelling the old myths about our industry, and we’ll be talking about this a lot more over the next few months.