With an enhanced focus on workplace culture for National Inclusion Week 2019, we’ve been encouraging our people to get involved to recognise that inclusion is worth striving for 365 days a year.
Our guiding strategy
For us, Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) is about respecting individuality and understanding that difference is a strength. Earlier this year, we released our Pentland Brands D&I Strategy, outlining our objectives across the business – to consciously seek diversity of view, experience and background – so that when we make decisions we know we’ve received a varied input, resulting in making better choices.
A focus on inclusion
In the spirit of Inclusion Week, this week we ran a series of events across our international sites to encourage our people to join the conversation.
Highlighting that everyone has a role in promoting inclusivity, our employees were invited to attend a panel discussion with six speakers from teams across our business. Our panel was made up of individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds, ages and experiences.
Our panellists discussed a range of topics including previous experiences of exclusion, inclusivity within our brand campaigns and their efforts not to pass unconscious biases onto their own children.
Fika sessions – a Swedish custom of making time for friends and colleagues – and educational quizzes on gender inclusion helped us to raise awareness of the importance of inclusivity.
Shining a light on our targets
We also took the opportunity to share how we’re tracking against our diversity and inclusion targets.
In 2017, we set a target at least 45% women in Senior Leadership team by 2020. As of September 2019, we’re tracking at 41%. For ethnicity, we set a target of 15% and we’re currently tracking at 12.8%.
98% of our Senior Leadership team have now completed unconscious bias training and this month we released the training to all our employees.
We now have three D&I networks in the UK, as well as a volunteer working group in Asia. These groups bring people together to develop and test D&I initiatives such as parental leave and return to work support, gender pay-gap improvement and men’s mental health services.
We’re proud of the progress we’ve made and by continuously working towards our goals, we’ll create a workplace where everyone can be themselves and embrace what makes us unique.
Take a look at our new film to find out more.