Inclusive Employers awards inclusion accreditation to over fifteen organisations in the latest round

Today organisations that have participated in the latest round of the Inclusive Employers Standard (IES) are receiving their results. The IES is an inclusion and diversity accreditation that supports organisations to find out how effective their inclusion work is and provides detailed feedback to enable them to develop and progress their I&D strategy.

Anchor Hanover, The Law Society, Mitie, Nuveen, Reed, Pilotlight, South Western Railway, DFS and the Centre for Process Innovation ltd are just some of the organisations who are receiving their accreditation.

Accredited organisations are awarded Bronze, Silver or Gold accreditation status. These three accreditation levels reflect successful organisations’ commitment to embedding workplace inclusion and diversity.

Addison Barnett (he/him), Director of Impact and Major Programmes at Inclusive Employers, comments;

I’m delighted to congratulate all the organisations who took part in the latest round of the Inclusive Employers Standard – well done! It’s wonderful to see both new and returning organisations demonstrating their commitment to inclusion by undertaking the IES. As ever we’ve seen some great work across the submissions and some shining examples of best practice.

The IES is a holistic, externally validated assessment of inclusion and diversity that gives you a comprehensive action plan for making inclusion an everyday reality for everyone in your organisation. We know from conversations with our members that measuring the impact of I&D work is increasingly top of their agenda. The IES provides a clear framework for establishing your baseline, identifying gaps and areas of good practice, and supporting you to prioritise your next steps to make the biggest difference. Many organisations use the IES as a regular touchpoint to validate their progress, and we’ve seen several organisations move from Committed, to Bronze, to Silver and even Gold over the years.

Achieving accredited inclusion status

In this latest round, we have awarded fifteen accreditations across the three levels, Bronze, Silver and Gold, ten of these are from organisations that are currently members of Inclusive Employers who their account manager supports on a regular basis. Fourteen of the participant organisations were first-time entrants of either the IES or Foundation Assessment, and the results achieved by these organisations were of a very high level.

It has been fantastic to see that those returning participants who started out by completing our Foundation Assessment have now gone on to achieve accreditation and demonstrate excellent progress in their I&D work against the recommendations initially received as part of the assessment process.

Results highlight stabilised inclusion activities post-pandemic

The results have highlighted that organisations are moving on from the impact of the turbulence of the last few years. The submissions demonstrated that organisations had stabilised their inclusion activity for largely the first time since the impact of Covid-19, putting resources and budgets back into foundational inclusion and diversity work that had been put on hold. And more excitingly, we are also seeing organisations having time to innovate their projects and consider new ways to do things.

What is particularly great to see is the impact of changes that had to happen as a result of the pandemic, i.e. agile/flexible working are now having a positive impact on the overall inclusive culture in an organisation. We are also seeing some of the benefits of organisations coming together during that time that worked collaboratively across sectors to learn from each other and adopt shared best practice. That shared learning approach was needed during such an uncertain time, and we are seeing organisations continue with this as best practice leading to more meaningful, informed and impactful approaches.

As always, we’ve seen some outstanding commitment from organisations just beginning their I&D work. Committing to participate in an activity like the IES is an achievement in itself and a real visible demonstration of an organisation that wants to be better – we look forward to seeing their progress in future IES rounds!

How to take part in the IES and become inclusion accredited

The Inclusive Employers Standard supports organisations to assess progress with their inclusion journey and awards those meeting the Inclusive Employers Standard with accreditation. It is an evidence-based, objective accreditation tool for evaluating and promoting inclusion in the workplace developed and run by Inclusive Employers. The process is via online submission of narrative and evidence against 35 questions arranged over Inclusive Employers’ six pillars of inclusion, Engage, Equip, Empower, Embed, Evaluate and Evolve.

The current round of the IES is now open for organisations to begin their applications.