Why is Race Equality Week important?
Race Equality Week is a great week to generate awareness, conversation and most importantly action to address the barriers facing race equality in the workplace. It’s important because, despite the incredible positive momentum for change, we know there is still more work to be done – there are still visible and invisible barriers that people of race must overcome – be it in work or not. The week is important for gathering allies – allowing everyone to grow and learn about ourselves whilst building confidence in others.
“Race equality week is important as it help us keep a focus on a problem we can help solve – it gives employees from an ethnic background the confidence that their companies are doing more and helping. I think organisation should get involved in Race Equality Week to show their employees that they are behind them, they support them, there is plan and there is a future.”
“We should all respect and accept people for who they are and so live in a society where everyone can participate to fulfil their potential and be their best. We can help by ensuring fairness and look to removing barriers to help people feel welcome and appreciated.”
What are Amey’s plans for Race Equality Week 2022?
Throughout the week we want to be an honest and inclusive voice for race within Amey. Our Multicultural Network – will lead the planning and delivery with a focus on allyship and understanding privilege, bias and inequalities in the workplace. We will also be taking part in the Race Equality Matters initiative, Safe Space. This will be a facilitated dialogue between senior leaders and employees representing ethnic minorities, discussing the reality of what it’s like in our workplaces and identifying what needs to be changed.
What do you hope to achieve as a result?
We want all Amey employees to feel comfortable talking about race and be able to ask questions without fear – fundamentally, we want all employees to feel included at Amey. We want to provide race equality training and awareness to leaders within Amey, ensuring one cohesive message of unity that recognises there is diversity within our multicultural community. Lastly, we want to promote and widen our Multicultural Network as the everyday forum to give people a voice and representation.
Why this year’s theme #ActionNotJustWords is so important?
Words without action aren’t enough. To seriously address race in the workplace, we all need to unite and work together to ensure we have an impact and change attitudes and behaviours that affect our ethnic minority employees. It’s why we’re committed signatories to the BitC Race Equality Charter and publish our Ethnicity Pay Gap. As part of our commitment to deliver on the aims of the charter, Michael Burgess, Chief People Officer, has been appointed our Executive Sponsor for Race. We have also developed inclusion dashboards to collate and publish diversity demographics down to account level. Our commitment to zero tolerance of bullying or harassment is clear in the Amey Code and Inclusion Policy and implemented across the business and fully supported by our Executive and Senior Leadership teams.