At the start of this year, we made a number of commitments to accelerate meaningful improvement around diversity and inclusion within our business.

Frankly, we know we haven’t been doing enough, and we are committed to making real progress by taking the right action to make a difference. We need to ensure these commitments truly become part of our business, and it is clear that this will be an ongoing journey which we will constantly strive to improve.

As a business, we have always put team and culture at the heart of everything we do, and this means we are aiming to be at the forefront of not only ensuring we are an inclusive environment but also supporting action that tackles systemic issues that will take time to address and move forwards.

So, what are we doing to change things?

Talent

One of the most important areas of this work is attracting and retaining a diverse and inclusive team. We are evolving our recruitment and interview process and have partnered with the likes of the Taylor Bennett Foundation and are exploring wider partnerships to accelerate this.

We also believe it is vital to our role that we support those from minority and marginalised backgrounds getting into comms, in the first place. This is a much bigger industry problem, but we can start with our own approach and begin to make a difference.

We are working with 2020 Change, a youth empowerment organisation, to launch a yearlong internship, where we will support and train a candidate within the business.

Also, two of our team members have become mentors for The Girls Network, whose mission is to inspire and empower girls from the least advantaged communities by connecting them with a mentor and a network of professional female role models.

While these are steps, naturally more needs to be done. We will continue to openly share further initiatives, support, and updates on what we are doing. It’ll take ongoing investment from us as a business into the industry as a whole, to support the shift towards a more representative makeup across a range of areas in relation to diversity.

Our agency culture

We know we can’t achieve what we want on our own, so we are working with a partner consultancy to audit and consult on our Diversity and Inclusion policies, to ensure we are creating the right environment and our policies and practices are robustly challenged with diversity at their core.

Our work here involves a full audit of all our agency policies, focus groups with the team to talk about what is sometimes a difficult topic to discuss, and the creation of a plan following assessment to determine where we need to improve, and set commitments, and ultimately change.

We commit to discussing and driving diversity with our clients and partners, specifically having diversity on the agenda when it comes to the campaigns we develop and talent we work with. We are also reviewing our supplier lists to engage with a wider pool of partners, and ensure those that we do work with share our values and commitments.

Training

All of this work is supported by Diversity and Inclusion training for every member of staff, which includes all areas from allyship, anti-racism, disability, gender identity, neurodiversity and more, to educate the whole team and to support our recruitment process.

We’re also providing these training sessions as e-learning resources to become part of the onboarding training for all new starters.

Next steps

This is a much bigger journey for us, we know we are very much at the start and will be updating on our progress through our blog to be transparent about our journey.