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?
Anchor shares their Inclusive Employers Standard journey from foundation to gold in only 4 years.
Anchor is England’s largest provider of specialist housing and care for individuals in later life and is committed to creating an inclusive community for both their staff and residents. Anchor started their journey with the Inclusive Employers Standard in 2019 when they completed the foundation assessment for the first time, and just 4 years later they have achieved a Gold award!
Emily Pattinson, a Senior Inclusion and Diversity Consultant and member of the Inclusive Employers Standard team, talks to Teagan Robinson-Bell, Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Manager at Anchor, to find out more about this amazing inclusion journey.
What made you want to engage with the foundation standard for the first time back in 2019?
“Whilst we might not have always explicitly said it until 2019, our core values were certainly focused around building a place of belonging and inclusion and we knew that we had a diverse workforce, so we wanted to pull more resources and put more focus into diversity and inclusion. It made sense to then find out where we were and I think for us really it gave us a starting point to figure out what we needed to be doing better and it gave us an opportunity to say, OK, well, this is what the organisation looks like at the moment, and this is where we want to be”.
How has engaging with the Inclusive Employers Standard supported your inclusion journey over the past few years?
“Especially, when we were rewarded silver I was in the process of creating a new EDI agenda for Anchor, so it was massively helpful to me actually because it gave me a real clear direction and steer on what needed to be included in in the strategy moving forward, that’s where a lot of the suggestions around return on investment came into it as it was one of the recommendations from the silver report.
It also gave us the chance to step back and think, let’s stop doing things because they look good for optics and let’s start doing things that are genuinely meaningful to the people that are in the organisation, both colleagues and residents. I think once we did that, that was where the shift started to happen, and we saw a lot more people engaged in inclusion generally because it was all about showing how inclusion has a separate meaning to different people and how it related to their role or department.
It was about getting through to people what was their responsibility to inclusion in the company and looking at it from a departmental level. For example, if someone is in IT, how does inclusion relate to what they do in the organisation? They have a massive responsibility to how accessible the things that we do are, so that’s really where they should be putting their focus. A lot was happening in a lot of different departments and that’s when we started to see the shift and that’s when we got to a place where we were comfortable then making the gold submission.”
Learn more about the Inclusive Employers Standard“So many people ask me about doing the Standard and every single time I have said do it, it’ll give you an insight into the things that you are doing, that you simply will not be able to figure out on your own.”
What inclusion work at Anchor are you most proud of?
“To be honest. We have got really good data and I didn’t really think too much of it until I started speaking to other people within this field and they were struggling with this. I could lend a bit of wisdom because this is something we do really well. We do a lot of campaigns to make sure that people are aware of why we collect this data and what we then do with it, which is so important, and that’s why we get such good results.
So, I think data has been really important for us to tell our story and make decisions which we then see the return on investment on, because we see that we have got colleagues who are happier. We see even less absenteeism, from the seemingly simple exercise of collecting people’s diversity data. When we do collect these types of data and surveys, we are actually doing something with them. It’s not just sitting there on an Excel spreadsheet somewhere doing absolutely nothing.”
How did you manage to maintain an inclusion focus during such a difficult time for the care sector?
“Interestingly, especially during COVID, I would say that’s where we saw our highest level of engagement in anything that we did. I think a lot of it was around that sense of belonging, that sense of network, that sense of community that was really important to people during such a difficult time and I think what we did was give people a place where they could be themselves and bring their whole selves to work even when it was difficult.
There was so much going on, especially around when George Floyd was murdered, having those networks in place was such an important message to send to the outside world, but also to provide a place for our colleagues who are really struggling at that time to feel that sense of community and know that there are other people in the organisation that cared.
That’s why I think even though it was arguably one of the most difficult times for the care sector, when you give people a place where they can belong and they can network and they feel a sense of community, you’ll find them really engaged because people need that in a time of crisis.”
What would be your advice for an organisation thinking about undertaking the Inclusive Employers Standard?
“I have had so many people ask me about doing the Inclusive Employers Standard and every single time I have said do it because it’ll give you an insight into the things that you are doing, that you simply will not be able to figure out on your own.
Especially if you’re an organisation that’s looking at this for the first time, you might not even have the dedicated resources to diversity and inclusion. You might have really passionate people behind it, but realistically bringing in those experts is so important to making sure you’ve got a really clear vision.
You’ve got that structure broken down into the six pillars as well. You know where to start tackling your biggest issues first and then putting together a long-term plan. I urge anybody who’s thinking about doing the standard to do it. It’s well worth your time and the payoff is really great and it’s super important to Anchor doing it every year and getting the gold.”
If you are interested in getting involved in the Inclusive Employers Standard
The Inclusive Employers Standard aims to support organisations to assess progress with their inclusion journey and award those meeting the Inclusive Employers Standard with accreditation. It is an evidence-based, objective, accreditation tool for assessing 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.
It’s easy to get in touch with the Inclusive Employer’s Standard team to find out more about our accreditation and how your organisation can get involved. You can use the form below to send us a message and start the conversation to progress your inclusion work.
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?
Read more blogs about inclusion