Positive About Inclusion Commits to Race Equality Week
February 1st – 7th, is the very first Race Equality Week – when organisations from across the UK can unite in activity to seriously address race in the workplace. The initiative is the result of a collaboration between Green Park, The Collaboratory and Black History Month with the purpose of creating a not-for-profit community who (in their words) would commit to doing more than just ‘putting up a slogan’ or put the sole responsibility for creating inclusive workplaces solely on the shoulders of an organisation’s Race Network Group (if they have one).
The numbers are startling:
- 85% of race experts said senior leaders did not know what ethnic minority colleagues wanted or required
- 75% of race network chairs said recent PR gesturing is meaningless if proper action is not taken
When I talk with clients about creating inclusive cultures in their organisations, one of my favourite topics is to talk about the importance of ‘setting out your stall’. For me this means making an active and visible commitment to doing the right thing and defining the culture they want their organisation to have. You can’t achieve what you can’t articulate.
So it stands to reason that despite being a new and small organisation we also wanted to ‘set out our stall’. It was important for Positive About Inclusion to actively commit to an initiative like Race Equality Week and to do more to support this initiative than just changing our social media profile picture. One of the resources available to organisations committing to Race Equality Week is Safe Spaces. Safe Spaces is a structured approach to a courageous and possibly uncomfortable conversation between Board Members and minority ethnic employees, conducted in a way that guarantees the employee’s ‘psychological safety’. Having received the training for Safe Spaces, this is now something that we can facilitate, and we commit to donate to Race Equality Matters (a fellow social enterprise).
For those organisations that perhaps are not large enough or with the staff profile for such an initiative, Positive About Inclusion can also facilitate similar Board development initiatives such as reverse mentoring.
Positive About Inclusion can support your organisation’s senior management team and Board to create an inclusive workplace culture. Contact us for more detail about how we can help.
