Inclusive Employers National Inclusion Week 2022: Theme announcement
In 2022, we are celebrating 10 years of National Inclusion Week! Here Rupert Moyne, Managing Director of Corporate Services, explains what this year's NIW theme is, why its important and how you can use it to celebrate and progress inclusion this year.
I can’t quite believe it is 10 years since the Inclusive Employer’s team were thinking of ways to foster greater interest in and understanding of inclusion and we came up with the idea of National Inclusion Week.
Little did we know then that we would be responsible for a campaign that really has helped to ignite a commitment to inclusion in thousands of workplaces. WOW!
For those of you that are joining us this year for your first National Inclusion Week, welcome! It may be year 10 for us at Inclusive Employers, but every year our network of inclusioneers widens and we’re delighted that you are signing up.
It is wonderful news that McDonald’s are the sponsor of National Inclusion Week 2022. We are very grateful to them for sponsoring us in the 10th year of the campaign. McDonald’s is a founding member of Inclusive Employers and has supported us from the beginning.
The theme for National Inclusion Week 2022
This year, the theme we’ll be focused on and supporting you on is:
Time to Act, The Power of Now.
So, what is this all about? Simply, it is about embedding behaviours now, that will make inclusion an everyday reality. National Inclusion Week is the opportunity to kick start this. It is about being in the moment and alert to inclusion and exclusion (and responding).
Now, we understand that we all respond in very different ways. Some of us reflect and respond, some of us jump straight in, and we’re all different.
Recognising that we may need to reflect and then act, is still action, it is owning your commitment to inclusion just as reacting at the moment is.
If we can really use National Inclusion Week to help hardwire our commitment to inclusion into every moment of every day, we’ll start to truly drive inclusion.
How the theme was created
So, you may be thinking, why Time to Act, The Power of Now?
At Inclusive Employers’ we’re working hard on the concept of living in the inclusion moment and considering our inclusion impact and how we can be even more inclusive.
We have been considering whether there are some of us who are instinctively inclusive and some of us who aren’t. We concluded that every single one of us needs to work on being more inclusive, none of us are perfect and we need to build deeper habits of inclusion.
National Inclusion Week 2022 is the week to really crack on with developing and deepening this habit so that for the rest of the year, it gets easier and our workplaces get more and more inclusive.
Why the theme matters
Lots of our member organisations are really striding ahead in making inclusion an everyday reality – we see the evidence of this, for example, through their submissions for the Inclusive Employers’ Standard.
These members can evidence that they have moved past the concept of inclusion to where they are able to evidence the impact through policies, practice, commercial outcomes, attraction, retention and loads of key inclusive culture indicators. This evidence is what we use to assess accreditation for the Inclusive Employers’ Standard.
However, we still see and hear from other organisations, less advanced in their inclusion journeys, about their performative action on inclusion, the lip service of leaders, the exclusion of colleagues and we’re concerned that for many organisations inclusion is still not an everyday reality.
If these organisations do not, right now, start to deepen their commitment to inclusion, do not start to focus on inclusion action then all evidence points to them being the organisations that are left behind commercially, or in terms of innovation, and they will be the organisations in which colleagues feel vulnerable, unhappy, excluded and unable to contribute in an authentic and innovative way.
Celebrating National Inclusion Week 2022
Inclusive Employer’s tenth National Inclusion Week is from Monday 26 September to Sunday 2 October 2022.
Registration is now open and for the first time, we are offering two different types of registration – free and supporter. In line with our theme for 2022, do it now, register and act now. Procrastination is the thief of time and it is up to every single one of us to take part.
The free toolkit for National Inclusion Week 2022 is available to everyone that registers and is all about Time to Act, the Power of Now.
In addition to this, the enhanced supporter level toolkit can be purchased (free to members of Inclusive Employers). This provides an enhanced level of support for those organising National Inclusion Week within their organisations.
Members, please speak to your account manager about the events and additional support options that are available. We are looking forward to embracing the #ThePowerOfNow with you all!