Sep 27, 2022
By Susi Farnworth, Head of Internal Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)
At EngineeringUK, inclusion is at the very heart of our core ambition as an organisation, to inform and inspire young people and grow the number and diversity of tomorrow’s engineers.
We have been delivering on an ambitious EDI strategy since 2019 – which has led us to reach more young people from underrepresented groups to inspire them into engineering. A key part of this strategy is to build a truly inclusive workplace, where all of our employees feel they belong.
Our inclusion work
Over the last two years we have done a lot to make our workplace inclusive. Our board and staff have worked together to create an inclusion vision – this vision work helped us have the important conversation about what we felt was important for us as an organisation and as individuals and all our inclusion initiatives and training are shaped by this. Our employee training programme is comprehensive and includes allyship, different perspectives, trans awareness and many other topics.
We also continuously review and improve our inclusion policies. We have introduced an inclusive recruitment policy and are reviewing our recruitment approach so that it reflects best practice inclusive recruitment and attracts the talent and diversity of experience we need.
How we measure inclusion
Measuring the perception of feeling included can feel like more of a challenge than employee diversity, which can be measured more tangibly through demographic data of staff and the Board.
We take account of several areas in keeping track of our progress on inclusion:
- Our staff survey includes key indicators of inclusion, such as ‘our organisation feels like an inclusive place to work’ and ‘as part of this organisation, I feel I can achieve success as my authentic self ‘ – we expect to see improvements in these year on year as we grow and embed our inclusion initiatives.
- We analyse our staff survey results by demographic background to understand the experiences of different groups.
- Our leavers’ interviews and surveys ask about the experience of inclusion so we can learn from this.
- We participate in the Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion TIDE Benchmark which looks at all areas of an organisations EDI – we’ve made very good progress on this and are challenging ourselves to reach the highest level over the coming years.
- We will also be asking staff to do a self-assessment of knowledge of key areas of EDI, to understand the gaps – so that we can prioritise training and other initiatives.
- Alongside this, we collect demographic data on our staff and the Board and will use this to gain insight and set targets and action plans.
We’re on a journey to improve our inclusivity and as an organisation we’re marking National Inclusion Week with training and social activities, but our inclusion work is all-year round and encompasses every aspect of our work.
< Back to Blog
