One concept discussed during our HR director private dining event in Milan was: “Master in Maternity”. The aim of this programme is to connect a parent on maternity or paternity leave with a trainer / coach to translate the parental experience of caring for a new born into business skills. This concept is particularly interesting as it brings together our personal and work life experiences.
Frazer Jones is currently working with Stonewall to ensure we do all we can to be inclusive towards employees, candidates and clients. These assessments in particular help us to understand whether our processes and procedures support D&I. Very often the learning points are on a very basic but important level such as asking somebody coming to your office whether they might need any support upon entering the building.
The biggest challenge for all efforts around D&I remains conscious and unconscious bias. There are two schools of thought on how to overcome these:
- One would be around training and coaching which is an excellent step to helping make people aware, but this might not change their conclusions.
- The alternative would be to ensure conscious and unconscious bias can’t be triggered in the first place, and again a very simple approach can often be the most effective. For example, we will often suggest to our clients to review CVs just featuring the candidate’s more recent career; no name, no year of graduation, no mention of names of educational institutions and no pictures.
So the conclusions we have drawn from this is that rather than focussing on big PR, the real steps forward are made with simple and very practical solutions to ensure we are inclusive in our day to day professional and personal lives.
What is a simple and yet effective D&I strategy you have recently discovered?
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