IP Inclusive Week is the perfect opportunity to review your organisation’s D&I policies. Are you fulfilling our six
EDI Charter commitments? Do you have a sufficiently diverse and inclusive working environment? What more could you be doing?
Why not hold an in-house meeting, fuelled by coffee and cake or breakfast pastries or a sandwich lunch perhaps, to talk about this?
You could, for example, decide to:
- Conduct a D&I audit
- We’re creating an audit package specially for our Charter signatories, particularly small- and medium-sized businesses; keep an eye out for more details on our resources page
- Write a D&I action plan for the next 12 months
- Appoint one or more D&I champions
- Organise staff training on a topic such as unconscious bias, inclusive behaviour or mental health “first aid”
- Set up an internal support group, eg for women, LGBT+ or BAME professionals, and recruit “allies” to work with them
- Change your recruitment and appraisal processes to improve their impact on D&I
- Start gathering diversity data within your organisation
- If you’re a Charter signatory, add the IP inclusive logo to your website, letterhead and/or business cards
- If you’re not a Charter signatory, sign up now!
We’ve produced some notes about D&I champions, based on a talk by Focal Point Training at our AGM last January. Feel free to download them here and use them to shape your own discussions and plans.
If you want to know more about workplace “allies”, in particular although not exclusively in the context of gender diversity, you can listen to our March 2017 webinar on the subject; there’s a link to the recording here.
Our resources page includes various other materials (for example toolkits on unconscious bias and mental well-being, and a presentation on the business case for diversity) that may help you identify areas for improvement and/or training.
Remember that you don’t have to achieve everything during IP Inclusive Week itself. What’s important is that you make a start, a commitment, that you can build on throughout the coming year. Maybe it’s enough to know that during IP Inclusive Week, you sowed the seeds for positive change in your organisation.