We help organisations achieve their equality diversity and inclusion ambitions by taking a comprehensive holistic systems wide approach to tackling inequity. We provide advice and support on how to analyse systems, people and processes to identify the elements causing inequity in your organisation. We then work with you to design evidence-based interventions to address the issues identified and ways to evaluate the success of these interventions. 

Organizational Culture Change 

We bring together intelligence and insights gained from four sources of knowledge to ensure our inclusive culture change programmes are designed for your organisations specifically.  These are – quantitative and qualitative data providing in-depth understanding of your organisation, the views of key organisational stakeholders, the view of your own in-house experts and that of leading practitioners and relevant academic research. 

Using sound change management principles we work with you to develop a comprehensive and holistic action orientated strategy to address the various organisational factors sustaining the current situation. A complete inclusive culture programme will involve, data gathering and analysis,  a change methodology, audit and review of policy and procedures, leadership and staff training and development, and impact evaluation. We can provide each element separately depending on your organisation’s inhouse capacity and expertise 

Because we understand the science behind organisational change we can provide advice and design a bespoke methodology for your EDI change programme based on an evidence-based assessment of ‘what works’. We can then work in partnership with you to implement this approach resulting in a strategic action plan to enable you to achieve your EDI objectives over a sustainable time frame. 

Organisational audit and review of EDI, Human Resource, and Organisational Development policies 

Inequity and exclusion are maintained by the interaction of structural systems and processes with the conscious and unconscious biases of individuals as well as organisational culture.  We can review your organisation’s systems, processes and procedures to identify where there is a risk of bias and to ensure that they are following best practice and sound empirical evidence. We will then suggest alteration, adaptation and redesign to minimise this risk. 

This audit can be particularly relevant for:

• Attraction, recruitment and selection
• Assessment and development centres 
• Promotion and performance assessment 
• Grievance, Disciplinary and Respect 
• Dignity and respect 
• Leadership  and talent  development

Strategy and Action Plans 

We know that the hard work begins once specific actions have been identified. You need our recommendations to be both realistic and stretching and be backed up by clear evidence so that you can demonstrate their reasoning. Our experience is focused on a combination of robust academic research and practical recommendations for public and private sector business. In this way, we bring rigour and realism to our work so you can be confident in ability to demonstrate clear findings and associated practicable recommendations.

Once we have helped you identify your orgnisations EDI issues and challenges as well as your areas of strengths and success we will sharing our findings from all earlier phases of the project with your key stakeholders in a workshop. At this point, we will test out some of the recommendations we believe come out of our findings. We believe that a workshop context is the best format at this stage as we know from previous work that this can be particularly challenging, especially for organisations that want to make a step change in their diversity and inclusion context and activities. After this workshop, and taking account of our findings, good practice and your views we will prepare a draft action plan.

We will organise our recommendations, with rationale including quantitative data, qualitative evidence and wider benchmarking as appropriate. We will use the evidence base to develop a realistic, practical and yet stretching SMART action plan to enable you to see real impactful change in your EDI agenda. 

We can run a deliberative workshop to test, review and challenge our proposed action plan before we finalise it. The workshop will seek to involve and get buy-in from your Senior Leadership and any other key stakeholders. We will use this opportunity to refine the narrative and ensure that the action plan is aligned with and understood by your stakeholders  to gain full support for the action plan in order to implement and build success.

Frameworks and Charters 

Whether it is the Higher Education Athena Swan Charter or Race Equality Charter (REC), the Work Force Race Equality Scheme (WRES) in the health service, or the Race at Work Charter (BITC) or other sector wide frameworks we can provide expert assistance to increase your organisations capacity to engage effectively with these frameworks.  This can range from specific advice, briefings and workshops, ‘critical friend’, project management and assessment of submissions and mock assessment panels.