October is Black History Month. An annual celebration that aims to promote and celebrate Black contributions to British society, and to foster an understanding of Black history in general. This year’s theme is Time for Change: Actions not Words and we wanted to share the actions we are taking towards becoming an anti-racist organisation.
At Prospectus, we set up our EDI Working Group in October 2020 and began work on an anti-racism project at the start of 2022. We’ve spent time during October sharing our learning internally. We’ve run sessions where we’ve updated our colleagues on how the work is progressing and created safe spaces and opened up discussions around what it means to be anti-racist.
When we began the project we had to first understand what being anti-racist means. Why is it different from just not being racist? We discovered that essentially, being anti-racist is not passive. It’s not enough to just consider yourself ‘not racist’ – to be truly anti-racist you must be constantly working towards dismantling racist actions, behaviours, processes and systems. Prospectus must be actively engaging in anti-racism work and listening to and supporting the learning of our colleagues.
Our anti-racism focus began life as a sub-stream of our internal EDI Working Group. In our work in trying to understand what it meant to be an anti-racist organisation we quite quickly came across Business in the Community’s Race at Work Charter. This has given us a great way to structure our approach. For a business of our size, becoming a signatory to the charter means you make five key commitments:
- Appoint an executive sponsor for race
- Capture ethnicity data and publicise progress
- Commit to zero tolerance of harassment and bullying
- Make clear that supporting equality in the workplace is the responsibility of all leaders and managers
- Take action that supports ethnic minority career progression
We have made inroads so far into the first three commitments. We have an Executive Sponsor, a member of our Leadership team who also co-chairs the EDI Working Group. Having an executive sponsor ensures that the great insight we get from our EDI Working Group can be heard at leadership and board level and the resulting initiatives can be moved forward.
Our EDI Working Group also worked hard to ensure we have accurate and up-to-date data on ethnicity by encouraging all colleagues to complete the ethnic origin section in our personnel database. We were incredibly pleased that over 90% of our colleagues completed this as it gives us the ability to monitor and report on ethnicity along the lines of seniority, learning opportunities, promotion and more. We can clearly see that there is a lack of ethnic diversity at manager level and above across our business and therefore where significant work needs to be done and the data also gives us the ability to track the progress of our work. We will also be rolling out our annual internal equal ops and inclusion survey later this month which will help us understand perceptions of fairness and equity across different ethnic groups within the business.
In line with the commitment to zero tolerance of harassment and bullying, we have developed a specific company policy, as well as hosting sessions on the Equality Act which covers harassment specifically.
The biggest parts of our work are the fourth and fifth commitments to the Charter. We have the data to understand where we need to improve and we must now move forward with making it the responsibility of all managers and leaders and, ultimately, taking action to support minority career progression.
Business in the Community offers guidance on approaches to this and we have also reached out to other signatories to the Race at Work Charter to understand their approaches and best practice. One key approach which we have been excited to talk about at our internal sessions this month has been reverse mentoring or, as one organisation we’ve met with describes it, reciprocal mentoring. We’re really excited about rolling this out and look forward to sharing our progress!
