I think there’s a whole range of things that businesses can do. Some of it is quite simple. It’s looking at your recruitment strategies, it’s looking at your personnel profiles– having a hard look and not accepting a workforce that is 98 percent white. And clearly, that means asking where are we recruiting these people from. What are the questions that we’re asking? Who is sitting on the panels that are selecting people? How do we ensure that we’re not recruiting people that look like, sound like us and have the same profiles as us? Because that’s the kind of thing that leads to exclusion in businesses.
We also have things around people that we call quality data collection. So companies are taking time to track the performance of their DE&I strategies. Having a DE&I strategy in the first place must be a starting point, but also making sure that they have performance measurements attached to each metric, so you’re keeping track of how things are evolving and moving forward. One of the things that keeps coming back again and again at conferences where we talk about how we tackle systemic anti-racism is that we lack data. We lack information about people, the composition we’re experiencing, etc. And I think here there’s a real role that the industry can play in making more data available. It’s even studies that somehow address the topics of diversity and inclusion, making that available to everyone and highlighting that this is accessible. Those are the kinds of things that will solve our equality gap. This is preventing a lot of anti-racism policies to be put forward.
The last point I would say is also reaching out within your local communities to organizations that are working on anti-racism because they need help. They’re under-resourced. They often lack funding and lack the manpower to do the important work that they do. But secondly, I think, from a self-interested perspective, it’s also a good way to build your pipeline. So if you are in the 98 percent white, middle-class male workforce, having these contact points within local communities and building that relationship of trust can also mean that the organizations can help you and your recruiter share information of profiles that she may not even have access to. So I think that long-term investments in local community engagement can also be invaluable and can help ensure that we have strong resilient communities.
