Helen Wells, Director of Opportunity Now (BITC), provides ten impactful steps towards a diverse pipeline that do not require employers to reinvent the wheel, but they will change the gear of the pace of women’s progression in their workplaces.
Disappointingly, Opportunity Now’s research consistently confirms that the UK’s talent pipeline still suffers from gendered leaks, even among leading employers that are committed to promoting women’s advancement.
Since the Lord Davies report, and in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, UK employers have approached the issue of diversifying our workforces with renewed vigour. In fact, several changes to UK legislation have been made or are pending, relating to company reports, UK Corporate Governance Code, shared parental leave and joint allowances, and the right to request flexible working. All of these legislative changes are designed to support gender equality in the UK’s workforces, and are a positive indication that this issue is vital to the country’s economy. Even among organisations committed to gender equality, women’s workforce participation reduces from 54 percent at non-managerial levels to 29 percent at senior management level, and further still to 18 percent at executive level, or just 12 percent in the private sector.
There is much to be done by employers to ensure that they are recruiting and progressing women fairly, not just to conform to new legislation but to ensure that they benefit from the best talent. Opportunity Now has condensed more than 20 years of research, knowledge and insight to identify the ten most impactful factors employers need to know for recruiting diversely, tackling gendered leaking of the talent pipeline, and increasing diversity in senior management. Changing Gear: Quickening the Pace of Women’s Progression, provides ten steps that do not require employers to reinvent the wheel, but will change the gear of the pace of women’s progression in their workplaces.
Here are ten steps towards a diverse pipeline.
Step 1: Meaningful measurement
Effectively monitoring the outcomes of all interventions to enable the progression of women within your workplace is an absolute. Done well, gender-led monitoring highlights longitudinal trends and quickly flags up anomalies or weaknesses in performance that can be responded to in a timely fashion. Four crucial questions should inform companies approach to monitoring their success on women’s advancement: What factors will you measure, what metrics will you use, how will you collect your data and and how will you use it? The more performance indicators you measure against, the more detailed a picture you will accumulate.
Measuring workforce data by gender is essential, preferably vertically, horizontally, by cross-cutting diversity strands and by working patterns. Other factors leading organisations frequently measure with a gender lens are: recruitment and selection, promotion and appraisal, learning and development, staff turnover, exit interview, bullying and harassment, pay and reward, change management processes, product and service design, marketing, consumer profile, consumer satisfaction, procurement and purchasing, and community investment. However, capturing a breadth of information is only worthwhile if all that information is relevant and, most importantly, used to actively inform organisational learning and drive insightful, evidence-led change. Communicating your women’s progression data upwards and sideways within your organisation on a regular basis will ensure all business areas are aware of the impact of their actions.
Step 2: Accountability
Any approaches to advancing women in the workplace are only likely to succeed if all invested parties are clear on one thing: where the buck stops. Explicit executive accountability for ultimate progress, combined with designated lower-level management responsibility for meeting individual targets or achieving specific outcomes, provides several layers of incentive and answerability, ensuring that the organisation genuinely controls and accelerates its journey towards gender equality. Opportunity Now recommends that boards set ambitious but achievable targets for increasing their gender diversity, which are communicated to all business areas, with named individuals taking responsibility for defined actions towards achieving them.
Step 3: Inclusive leadership
Inclusive leadership is a leadership style which embraces, encourages and taps into the creativity and ideas which come about in non-homogenous groups. Truly inclusive leaders make everyone in their workforce regardless of gender feel more valued, confident, authentic and clearer about their career opportunities. This inclusivity increases loyalty and motivation, leading to better staff retention, greater innovation, and better advancement of women.
However, inclusive leaders are currently pioneers, not a product of organisational design: 68 percent of employees say that less than half the leaders and managers in their organisation are inclusive leaders. Opportunity Now recommends that employers define the strategic imperative for inclusive leadership, identify the organisation’s inclusive leadership gap, and equip leaders to become inclusive leaders.
Step 4: Inclusive cultures
In order for diverse talent to flourish, employers must create a working environment in which each employee can authentically “bring themselves to work” and feel motivated to realise their potential. From meeting times to internal communications, from physical environment to management behaviours, small nuances in a workplace can accumulate into a culture that enhances innovation, individualism and engagement, or one that undermines it.
Regularly gauging employee engagement can provide real insight into the current organisational culture and the impact this has on staff. It is essential that this learning is acted upon and changes put in place wherever negative practices or processes are detected. Information from employees should be disaggregated by demographics to ensure that diverse groups feel equally valued, motivated and rewarded. Where one dominant group is found to succeed and thrive in a workforce at the expense of others, those in the dominant group should be made part of the solution in working towards a healthier culture to ensure their understanding and buy-in for doing things differently.
Step 5: Identifying talent
Traditional methods of assessing the skills and potential of current and future employees have historically been subject to bias on the part of line managers and recruiters, leading to blinkered perspectives of what talent looks like. This has led to unconscious mirror-imaging in appointment and promotions processes, whereby employees who exert similar behaviours and skill sets to their superiors flourish.
Effective unconscious bias training should be rolled out to all staff involved in assessing employee talent. Continually measuring the diversity of candidates against their progression within the organisation will reveal how effective this is proving.
Step 6: Appraisal to promotion
Promotions should be closely monitored through a gender equality lens to learn more about each department’s record in advancing women. Extensive internal advertisement of upcoming vacancies should run in parallel with intensive management encouragement, to ensure factors such as ambiguity about responsibilities, concerns over long-hours culture or confidence do not deter any potential candidates. This best practice should apply to promotions panels, including external recruitment panels. Here, transparent processes, inclusive methods of assessment and gender-balanced interviewing panels are vital.
Step 7: Embedding agility
Flexible and agile working is a key enabler towards women’s participation in the labour market. By acknowledging that most jobs can be designed outside of traditional nine-to-five patterns, employees with responsibilities or interests outside of work can be enabled to make a fuller contribution in the workplace. Research consistently confirms that agile workplaces reduces overheads, carbon emissions, sick days and attrition. Leading employers regard work as an activity, not a place – assessing employee output, not ‘presenteeism’. However, in some workplaces agile working risks being seen as a ‘mummy track’, available to working mothers only. To avoid it becoming a new form of segregation, employers should roll out agile working opportunities to their whole workforce, at all levels and re-plan workspaces to enable it as necessary. This organisational approach is not only easier to deliver for the many than the few, but is more likely to boost productivity and morale.
Step 8: Interventions with impact
The best intervention programmes are designed to meet the particular development needs of candidates, whilst filling gaps in current business needs and advancing the leadership skills of mentors, coaches and sponsors. In deciding where to run a scheme, ‘sticky’ areas of the employee pipeline where female employees fail to progress in equal numbers are the obvious starting point. Consideration must also be given to whether women-only schemes are the most suitable way to advance women candidates. Evaluating the short and long-term impact of any intervention is critical, with any disappointing impacts analysed to inform the redesign of future programmes.
Step 9: One size fits few
Gone are the days when a job was for life. Employers with talent management processes that recognise the value of life and work experience gained in different environments will be better positioned to select top talent, than those that are rigid in the types of experience they expect staff to have gained in order to be considered for particular roles, projects or promotions. Revisit any rigid pre-requisites for advancement, especially for areas of the business that show gender progression discrepancies. Factors that inadvertently filter out disproportionate numbers of women could include international placements or previous boardroom experience. Consideration must also be given to management of carer breaks, particularly parental leave. Many organisations have strong maternity return rates after a first child, but diminished rates after second or subsequent children. Tailored support during the year following return from maternity leave can assist long-term retention.
Step 10: Beyond his and hers – occupational integration
Occupational segregation of men and women remains deeply ingrained. A disproportionate number of women in the UK are clustered in job categories known as the ‘5 Cs’ – cleaning, catering, cashiering, clerical work and caring. Women hold only 12 percent of all posts within the science, engineering and technology sectors, and just 1 percent of frontline jobs in the construction industry.
Even within organisations that have a well balanced workforce, vertical segregation is often present. In retail, entry-level positions are dominated by women and executive roles by men. Horizontal segregation of professional roles occurs across all sectors, for example women in HR roles and men in IT roles. All of this contributes to the UK’s continued gender pay gap. Employers should closely monitor the percentages of men and women in different roles and departments, and be proactive in encouraging current and future employees into non-traditional areas. Working with schools, colleges and universities to offer inspiring insights and experience into non-traditional areas can reap rewards in generating a more diverse future pipeline, as can targeted public relations campaigns to bust inaccurate myths about the industry’s culture, hours, conditions or opportunities.
