IoD – The Future of Business: Harnessing Diverse Talent for Success

We are proud members of The Institute of Directors (The IoD), and are delighted to be a part of their latest business paper which provides practical guidance for employers on how to create working environments where all talent – with specific reference to disability, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation – can thrive and contribute to business bottom-line and growth.

The IoD is a thriving membership community for directors in the UK and beyond. It is the UK’s longest running organisation for professional leaders, having been founded in 1903, and allowing its members to connect with other leaders, develop their skills, and be heard. Developed by an IoD Commission of senior business leaders and experts in the field, the business paper was launched on 19th October 2022 and makes a number of recommendations to businesses, including:

  • How to develop a data strategy to inform all decisions relating to equity, diversity and inclusion (ED&I).
  • How to review and update recruitment practices to ensure that applications are processed based entirely on candidates’ skills, experience, and potential.
  • How to review the extent to which there is a pipeline of diverse talent into an organisation’s senior leadership.
  • How to develop an inclusive workplace culture, including assessing how all communications convey and project how organisations value and harnesses diverse talent.
  • How to drive change on ED&I through senior leadership and accountability structures, including at board level.

We are delighted to have been included in the business paper as a case study around the topic of building an evidence base to target interventions. Please see our case study below:

“Silver Birch Care is a provider of support for looked after young people aged 16 years and over, with 120 employees. They are committed to building an inclusive workplace; they were awarded gold standard accreditation by Committed to Equality after an in-depth audit of their ED&I processes and documentation and were one of the first organisations to receive the Good Business Charter accreditation, which requires accredited organisations to commit to employee diversity and inclusion as one of its 10 principles of responsible business behaviour.

Silver Birch Care is implementing a data strategy to support its ED&I strategy by helping them to understand what change is needed and why. They recently used an anonymous survey to better understand the demographics of their workforce and to ask employees directly whether they feel their workplace is inclusive and what policies and initiatives the company can implement to go beyond legal compliance and make the workplace more inclusive. They achieved a 98% response rate and senior management is in the process of implementing policies based on the feedback received, such as creating an internal succession plan. The next step in Silver Birch Care’s ED&I journey is to use insight from the employee survey and wider employee data to understand if there are stages in the leadership pipeline where employees from diverse backgrounds are more likely to drop off, so that they can then target interventions at the appropriate level.”

Download the full case study below.