Why is Race Equality Week important?
Race Equality Week is so important as it has only been running for two years this February and its purpose is to bring UK employers, businesses, and local communities together with the objective of addressing the issues that affect ethnic minority employees and help to eliminate any equality barriers, with the hope of driving real positive effective change.
Race Equality Week also helps employees work in collaboration and unite with one another. It also helps to support and encourage buy in from senior management and for them to continue to be a catalyst for change by driving race equality all year round as opposed to a short-term basis.
What are RBH's plans for Race Equality Week?
As part of our business ESG strategy, we will be raising the bar in 2022 on our commitment to ED&I.
We created an ED&I Calendar for 2022. We based this on many of the protected groups such as race, religion, gender equality, LGBTQ+, disabilities and many more.
It was launched last week, and February starts with Race, in line with Race Equality Week.
We will:
- Review our Recruitment Practices to eliminate bias & discrimination
- Promote inclusive incentives & empower our people
- E&D training for all
- Identify & review levels of ethnic diversity to explore any structural/cultural barriers of workplace inequalities
What do you hope to achieve as a result?
At RBH, our aim is to build a more inclusive culture by promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion. We believe that this will allow us to continue to be a diverse employer of choice, where we attract, recruit, and retain a multi-cultural, diverse workforce, where our people have a true sense of belonging at work.
In a recent employee engagement survey that we conducted, an overall 95% of our people advised that they had a sense of belonging at work and we want to increase this to 100% when we do our next survey. We believe that we can achieve this by driving race equality every day, all year round.
Why is this year’s Race Equality Week theme #ActionNotJustWords so important?
This year’s theme is so important as we can say that we are promoting awareness days each month with the best intentions, however, it is easy to move onto something else and forget. Therefore, this year, we have risen the bar with our ED&I initiative and pledged what we will do as a management company such as revisiting our existing recruitment practices, updating policies and HR Data, rather than just providing our managers with suggestions for activities.
By showing that changes are being made from the top, it shows our people and potential applicants, that we are serious #ActionNotJustWords.