Grow your team
When you become an Inclusive Employers’ Member you grow your I&D team.
Your account manager works with you to understand your goals, your challenges and achievable next steps.
Do you need more support for your inclusive culture to thrive?
Navigating Inclusive leaders for the month ahead
As summer in the northern hemisphere enters full swing, we have plenty to look forward to. In this edition, we’ll look forward to National Inclusion Week, considering Inclusion in a Hybrid World and exploring the key learning from CMI’s ‘The Everyone Economy’ report.
National Inclusion Week
Founded by Inclusive Employers, National Inclusion Week (NIW) is a week dedicated to celebrating inclusion and taking action to create inclusive workplaces. NIW gives all of us the opportunity to engage everyone in inclusion and to empower our colleagues to take action and make a difference.
The theme for National Inclusion Week 2023 is Take Action Make Impact, a call to action for everyone: from leaders to frontline staff. Take Action Make Impact is a powerful message which aims to get organisations and individuals thinking about what actions they can take and what positive impact these actions could and should have on marginalised colleagues. The ‘Take Action’ part is almost the easy bit: what learning and development, culture evolutions and tangible steps are you going to take as a business to shift the dial? The ‘Make Impact’ part can be a little harder to measure.
A common pain point in the organisations we work with is measuring the impact of inclusion and diversity (I&D) work. Often internal I&D data is patchy or non-existent, and inclusion isn’t built into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Increasingly we expect other business data to be live, accurate and trackable via dashboards – why not I&D data? Measuring the impact of I&D change often include multiple data points: demographic changes through the employee lifecycle, HR data, employee surveys and qualitative feedback… it can be easy to get overwhelmed.
If you’re thinking about how you measure impact in your organisation, get in touch with us about how we can support you to establish your baseline, agree on metrics and start measuring your inclusion impact.
We’d love to join in celebrating the week with you. This year, we’ve expanded our in-house webinar package offering and can offer bespoke in-house training during National Inclusion Week – all delivered by our expert consultancy team.
Inclusion in a Hybrid World
It’s the summer of 2023, and yet somehow, we’re still seeing news articles about businesses forcing their employees back to the office, only to be surprised when people leave. Hybrid working has its challenges (just as fully onsite and fully virtual do), but it is here to stay. Workplaces which are struggling to adapt can risk impacting their inclusion strategy if managers and the organisation get the evolving flexible workplace wrong. With benefits such as well-being and greater work-life balance, employees are now actively seeking out and choosing employers who offer hybrid working and deciding to leave those who mandate working in an office.
As with all areas of inclusion, the best approach is to zoom out and consider the whole picture. What does hybrid need to look like – for your business, your colleagues, different departments and ways of working? Complete a SWOT analysis of your proposed way forward to help you consider the consequences, and use our Equality Impact Assessment template to consider the inclusion impacts. Will colleagues who work virtually become invisible? Can you encourage collaboration in person and ‘deep work’ virtually? You will probably find that there is no one size fits all solution; flexibility will be key.
“A Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) is a tool that helps ensure organisations’ decisions, practices and policies are fair and do not discriminate against any protected group.”
Equality Impact Assessments: A Definitive Guide
‘The everyone economy’ and the ‘inclusivity illusion’
For their 75th anniversary, the CMI released their ‘everyone economy’ report. The report found that while many organisations and staff embrace EDI initiatives, the UK has systemic challenges around workplace inclusion, with specific challenges for minoritised groups.
The report found that:
- Disabled people are less likely to work as managers, directors and senior officials or in professional occupations than non-disabled people
- Those from a Black background make up 3.2% of the working population but only 1.8% of senior leaders.
- Those from a Pakistani background make up 1.3% of the working population and 0.9% of senior leaders.
- Even when those from lower socio-economic backgrounds do enter a professional occupation there is a clear pay and progression gap. For example, in 2019 those from professional backgrounds in professional jobs earned 18% (£6,000) more per year than those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
What the CMI call the ‘Inclusivity Illusion’ shows big gaps between top and bottom quartiles; meaning those who feel most included and those who feel least included experience very different cultures within the same organisations, for instance in answering the question ‘Decisions about promotions are made fairly at this organisation’ 87% in the top quartile agreed compared to 39% in the bottom quartile.
So, we still have work to do. Inclusion is not a tick box exercise. Our NIW theme is important here: we need to take action *and* make an impact, and we need to measure our progress and make data-driven decisions.
Do you want to measure your inclusion and diversity activity? Our diversity and inclusion accreditation, the Inclusive Employers Standard, is an evidence-based tool to measure, celebrate and set goals for your inclusion agenda The Inclusive Employer’s Standard (IES) is the evidence-based workplace accreditation tool for inclusion and diversity. Participants answer 35 questions that cover all the protected characteristics and wider I&D themes. We use the responses to measure inclusion and diversity within an organisation and assess where you are at on your I&D journey.
Grow your team
When you become an Inclusive Employers’ Member you grow your I&D team.
Your account manager works with you to understand your goals, your challenges and achievable next steps.
Do you need more support for your inclusive culture to thrive?
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