Going Further Together - Working Better Together

We're back with the Work Better Together newsletter from Watch This Sp_ce. Our focus is on helping everyone to understand different types of people. And how we can learn how to listen to each other and find ways to include people and work better together. Plus we share interesting news about things we can learn on to create more diverse, inclusive working environments. And we share some inclusion fails too. If you have been forwarded this newsletter, you can join our community and subscribe here.

In this week's newsletter, we will be covering:

???? The focus on Engagement in Inclusion Journey Mapping

?? The Power of Employee Resource Groups to Drive Your Diversity and Inclusion Changes

?? Stories of change - how Richmond Hill Hotel engaged their employees

???? Inclusion Fails of the week

Focus on Engagement in your Inclusion Journey Mapping

Engaging your people is how to deliver on an impactful diversity and inclusion journey. No-one can do this work alone. It takes a team of people and engagement across the organisation to achieve change and impact. In each newsletter we have looked at each of the 6 pillars in our Inclusion Journey Mapping process. This week we come back to Engagement to look at how you can engage your team.

These are things you might have already been working on. To engage people to go with you on the journey, think about:

• Leadership team - are your leaders ready and convinced that you need to work on this? Are there some who need to consider this more? Or there might be leaders who are so focused on their area of work that they have not had time to stop and think about this. Inclusive ways of working will help you to deliver on all of your strategy and goals. Inspiring and engaging the leadership team is about talking to them about their area of work and how this will help them.
• Employees - your employees will be in different places about this work. Some will be asking about it already, some will be curious and interested, and others may be working on this already. Your employees are key to helping you deliver on actions, so engage with people, ask them what they think and you will find that people will want to get involved.
• Detractors - yes there are those who will be either actively against this work or disinterested and feel it is not a priority. Ignoring the views of these people will not help you to deliver on goals. If people have genuine concerns or fears, talk to them, understand them and listen to what they have to say. The success of any of this type of work is dependent on engaging everyone. It's so worth spending the time to talk to those with concerns.

The Engagement pillar is one we come back to often as delivering on all actions happens quicker and with more enthusiasm if you can engage your people. There are so many different ways you can do that too. Getting started with all of this is about understanding where you are now. If you are not sure about where to start, try our FREE Level One Inclusion Journey Mapping. Answer some questions and then we will send you a report with some suggested actions. Try it out here - Inclusion Journey Level One.

The Power of Employee Resource Groups to Drive Your Diversity and Inclusion Changes

To make effective changes that stick to drive diversity and inclusion in your company, it’s essential to engage employees across the organisation in different roles and functions. It’s often employees who are the ones who want to work on diversity and inclusion to create the company they want to work for.

Programmes of change need endorsement from leaders, but it’s not down to one leader or a team of leaders to make things happen. There is the power to drive real change and deliver results in your employees.

This is an opportunity for different people to get involved in things they are interested and be part of driving the journey. Here are some things to think about:

• What is the employee group for?
• Who is going to lead?
• How do people get involved?
• What frameworks, budget and time is there for the group?
• What are the communication routes to leaders?

To find out more about how you can set up Employee Resource Groups, read our blog.

And to share thoughts and ideas with other people working on similar things for employee engagement, we would love you to join our FREE Slack Community - The Sp_ce.

Stories of change - how Richmond Hill Hotel engaged their employees

Richmond Hill Hotel are such a great example of engaging their employees through their inclusion work. They are a luxury hotel on the outskirts of London. They have a wide range of people working there, but when it came to their senior leadership team – they were not that diverse. They wanted to look at their organisation as a whole, understand what gaps they had and what they needed to work on. Richmond Hill Hotel wanted to engage all of their staff through training, workshops and more.

We worked with Richmond Hill Hotel on a full Inclusion Journey mapping process. We ran Discovery workshops with employees. This was followed by a year of training workshops with all employees to engage them.

What have been the results? Well in the 12 months since this work began, they have seen their retention rate increase from 46% to 72%, which they attribute predominantly to their inclusion efforts.

To read more about the work we did with them, have a look at the case study.

Inclusion Fails of the week

This started as a Slack channel for us, then we felt we had to share with you all, and now we can't stop seeing stories that make us cringe, have our heads in our hands, or make us angry. Here's the stories that caught our eyes this week in the news:

• Gender inclusion fail - a female employee has been awarded over ￡6,000 compensation after claiming she was told that a job she was interested in was only for men. She was told the role involved lots of heavy lifting and carrying boxes. The company denied this, but also failed to ask her if she was physically capable or give her a trial run.

Read more about this here - https://www.hrgrapevine.com/content/article/2024-03-26-female-job-applicant-claims-bosses-said-vacant-role-was-only-for-men?

• Sexual harassment and NDAs fail - the fact that bosses can sexually harass their employees and then pay them off and ask them to sign an NDA is a big fail. It silences people. So this story, although a fail on the behaviour of bosses, gives us some hope. MPs are calling for new laws that would ban City firms from using gagging orders to silence victims, after a parliamentary inquiry found a “shocking” prevalence of sexual harassment and bullying against women in the UK’s financial sector. There is a call for a zero tolerance approach. This report is about the financial services sector, but there is a lot of evidence to show this is also prevalent across other sectors.

Read more about this story here - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/08/mps-nda-inquiry-bullying-harassment-uk-financial-sector-non-disclosure-agreements

• Employment tribunals funding fail - the government have been urged not to reinstate fees for employment tribunals. When the fees were introduced in 2013, cases dropped by 70%. Several worker's rights groups have said the new fees, which start from ￡55 to bring a claim, risked pricing many people out of workplace justice. The danger is that this gives a green light to bad employers to exploit their workers. It puts a hurdle in the way of people seeking justice. We will be following what happens with this.

Read more about this story here - https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/feb/26/employment-tribunal-fees-government-urged-return-unions

That's it for this week. Do you have an inclusion fail story to share? What has caught your attention? Email [email protected] and we will include it in this newsletter!

And if you want to know more about how we can help you with your Inclusion Journey, email [email protected]