Race recruitment and retention - an instigation for change: action plan

Building an Anti-Racist Culture

Our workplace culture is inclusive, collaborative, accountable and enables the skills, talent, experiences and diversity of our minority ethnic employees to flourish. 

We know that an inclusive culture where difference is valued and can flourish is critical to harnessing the benefits that diversity brings. Colleagues told us that it’s not enough not to be racist; that we need to do more to promote an anti-racist environment and create safe spaces for calling people out. While minority ethnic colleagues report high Inclusion and Fair Treatment in our People Survey, we saw that some of the core elements our definition of inclusion (e.g. feeling valued for your unique perspective) are not as strongly felt amongst the minority ethnic colleagues who responded to our D&I survey. 

The goal of anti-racism is to challenge racism and actively challenge the policies, behaviours and beliefs that perpetuate ideas and actions. Racism is a societal system of inequality and therefore solutions must involve everyone. We will capitalise on the strong individual commitment to advance race equality at work which emerged through our survey and will focus on delivering cultural change through allyship. We will create opportunities to build empathy and to gain exposure to different perspectives, and we will ensure we are engaging minority ethnic colleagues so that their lived experience and insights shape what we do. 

Minority ethnic staff feel significantly less comfortable talking about their race issues at work (35.0%) than white staff (62.2%).

Around 85% of both minority ethnic and white respondents understand the difference being ‘not racist’ and being actively ‘anti-racist’.

"We need to put real energy into the ‘hearts and minds’ battle rather than the policy and formal processes."

Focus Group Participant