Baxi Heating is proud to celebrate International Women’s Day, at an exciting time for the heating industry.
Living in changing times, led by a reassessment of how people treat the planet and each other, increasing digitization, and the roll-back of globalization towards national priorities. These ‘megatrends’, which have been accentuated and accelerated by the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, are incredibly relevant to the roles that women take up in the workplace and the wider society.
Going carbon neutral by 2030
Baxi Heating launched its Sustainability Pledge in November 2020. The pledge states that the company is going to be carbon neutral in all their operations by 2030 and by 2025, all heating and hot water systems that they manufacture for residential and commercial customers will work with low-carbon energy.
Gender is clearly a factor, but this extends to diversity and inclusivity in all of its forms
They also aspire to create a diverse and inclusive workplace that supports equal opportunities where barriers, discrimination, and intolerance have no place.
It’s very well documented that organizations that reflect the diversity of their customer bases and the communities in which they operate are more successful than those organizations that don’t. Gender is clearly a factor, but this extends to diversity and inclusivity in all of its forms.
Bringing new skills to the HVAC industry
What this means for a decades-old industry, such as HVAC, is that it’s time to change the conversation and mindset, and to open up vast potential for people from a variety of backgrounds, so as to bring different and much-needed new skills.
Historically, the heating industry has been very starkly male-dominated. However, there’s a paucity of actual data about the role women play today. The starting point is to better understand the current state, before making the step changes that the industry will require to successfully transition to the new forms of technology, services, and energy, on which the customers will depend in the future.
Smart digital controls, big data, and heat pump technologies
There’s no doubt that the HVAC industry’s future requires new skills, from people with different backgrounds and experiences. This will include in the space of smart digital controls and diagnostics, big data, hydrogen, and heat pump technologies, heat as a service, and having better, and richer conversations with the customers.
These are just some of the areas in the decarbonizing future, where the industry needs to introduce new skills and retrain existing expertise. Baxi Heating is also looking much further ahead.
Encouraging girls at a young age to explore STEM subjects at school is critical
Encouraging girls at a young age to explore STEM subjects at school is critical, to the future of technical and engineering-based roles. Baxi is pleased to be partnering with Primary Engineer, with which they will develop curriculum-based activities for primary age children in the North West, where the company’s manufacturing facility is located, to engage them in STEM.
International Women’s Day
International Women’s Day is a day to celebrate all the achievements, all the progress, and all the differences that women have made to so many parts of society. Additionally, its ethos should flow through each and every day. Let’s shake it up, not ‘do things because they’ve always done them that way, and look for new ways of doing things and shaping the future.
On International Women’s Day, Baxi Heating is celebrating the wide variety of roles women do at the company. In the future, they'll play an even bigger part, driving the transition to new and low carbon technologies. The company even hopes to convince the young daughters and nieces of the women working in the company to one day have their careers in the future of the heating industry and HVAC.
