It’s a privilege to support our learners, across all demographics and lived experiences to achieve their career goals and thus break through barriers and glass ceilings.
Internally, however, whilst there has been passion to drive change, we needed greater clarity on how to achieve this for our own life-changing people. We, along with the industry, have always had a strong female representation as a Group, with the majority of employees (66%) being female. However, we recognised that we were under-represented across a number of demographics, and we wanted this to change. Afterall, we didn’t want to pay lip service to EDI here, instead we wanted to practice internally, the incredible work we do externally for our learners. For us, this meant creating our first ever internal EDI Strategy which includes;
- A clear statement around our EDI commitments (shared internally and externally)
- 3-year goals to drive change
- Annual Actions that will ensure we deliver our goals and commitments.
Where to start? We recognised the irony of not including our people on this journey. Therefore, we commenced our discovery period with an internal EDI survey, run by an external provider who could provide specialist EDI insights and external benchmarks on the survey findings. We also started asking our people, for the first time, to voluntarily share their own individual EDI data with us. This is crucial to understand where our EDI gaps are across each stage of the employee life cycle, from application through to hire, promotion & exit. From there we can put actions in place to address these gaps.
The survey and subsequent focus groups (run for added context and buy-in) informed our actions. It has also led to people speaking up, to share their passions and to ensure that their own stories and lived experiences are heard, understood, and supported. In this way, we are spotlighting diversity, equity and inclusion and building awareness and resources from within our own community that others can benefit from. Our EDI champions have also ensured that the strategy we, the Senior Leadership Team, have built is fully representative and that blind spots have not been missed. Through these insights, actions already implemented include;
- A dedicated EDI page on our comms platform that shares resources, pools our policies that support EDI, shares recordings from the community to raise awareness and shares updates on our progress against the EDI strategy.
- New policies, including the Religious Bank Holiday swap enabling people to celebrate their preferred religious celebrations without having to take their annual leave or unpaid leave to do so.
- EDI Awareness training, which will be rolled out across the whole Group and includes topics such as microaggressions and strategies to overcome unconscious biases.
- Embedding ‘Championing EDI’ as a core behaviour within our Leadership Framework, to ensure our leaders role model EDI at all levels.
We have a long journey ahead of us to achieve our goals, however we believe that through humility, curiosity, a willingness to learn and grow as a community, we will create a truly inclusive environment where current and future talent, regardless of demographic, feel they belong and can achieve their full potential as a life-changing person.