National Inclusion Week

Now in its 10th year, National Inclusion week has given Pick Everard an opportunity for reflection and action planning, as we strive to raise awareness of difference and drive further acceptance across our diverse business. We aim to protect the dignity at work of our colleagues, and uphold an environment in which everyone can thrive regardless of background. I’m proud of the strides we’ve made over the last few years and particularly the efforts we’ve made in 2022 to understand our people better.

This year’s theme is ‘Time to Act, The Power of Now!’ There are a number of pieces of work that we’re particularly proud of putting in to action this year. We’ve made concerted efforts to understand our people better across all areas of the business through our Equality, Diversity & Inclusion index. In compiling this, we’ve asked everyone at Pick Everard about who they are and what history they’ve experienced, as well as provided them with a voluntary opportunity to update all their diversity data held within our systems. We’re reporting on this weekly and setting suitably focused targets for improvements in key areas for 2023, as well as checking that the many initiatives we run appeal to our diverse population.

In response to our commitment in supporting individual lifestyles, we’ve continued our agile working model aligned to personal, professional and cultural needs. We have a real mix of working preferences and we’ve accommodated our people’s needs under a ‘right work, right place’ approach. This, in turn, has supported staff wellbeing as a top priority. We enjoy enhanced family leave policies, have implemented daily wellbeing moments, a content rich wellbeing hub for our different genders, ages and nationalities and we hold bi-monthly group sessions for our diverse collective of mental health trained staff.

Our culture for EDI is supported by an all-year-round staff engagement programme - #BeingYou - delivered through our online diversity hub. This includes podcasts, toolkits, guides, interactive lunch & learns and e-learning on different EDI topics including dignity at work. We sponsored our first Pride event earlier this year in Leicester and we’re looking forward to Black History Month in October, where we’ll be welcoming in external speakers and discussing BAME leadership in a new in-house podcast. We encourage our people to get involved in any way they can.

We know to succeed, we need a truly diverse talent density and we’re re-thinking our talent attraction strategies to widen the net as much as possible. Our latest thinking has given proactive consideration to social mobility in particular.

As ever, valuing the diversity of Pick Everard and the communities in which we work must be part of everything we do. As the founders of National Inclusion Week state,