Member Insight: Looking Inward
It is no secret that organisations across the UK, and the world, have applied a greater focus on Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Belonging over the past few years.
In the UK, a lot of this focus has looked at issues and the nuances of challenges experienced in the workplace by those with a protected characteristic, such as age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. Those organisations and practitioners further along the maturity curve have started looking at intersectionality and class, specifically, social mobility or immobility.
Our members will be aware of these issues as they are high on many organisational priority lists. Perhaps you are being tasked to incorporate EDI activities and initiatives into already busy and stretched workloads, which is never easy. But as a profession, we benefit from a high level of understanding of the challenges and opportunities that result from diverse and inclusive practices, given the beneficiaries of so many of our Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability programmes.
As efforts are made to diversify workforces and talent pipelines, broadly, our sector is also being asked to look at ourselves as a community practitioners and a wider profession. How inclusive are we? How diverse? What could we be doing better?
With this in mind, and born from an idea planted by the Aspire Hub, the ICRS wants to establish a baseline of the diversity of our members via a Self-ID survey.
This anonymous survey includes questions which many of you will have become familiar with, but completing it, even with a prefer not to say response, will allow us to develop a sector-wide view, which we intend to share with you all and discuss at this year's Exchange Conference. It’s our intention to create a member-led approach to building a more diverse sector, while continuing to complement the work already being done to support the CR&S Apprenticeship.