The broadcaster Sky is on a mission to ensure its workforce reflects the makeup of its audience, setting ambitious targets to improve diversity and inclusion. Sky is courting publicity, taking an overt stance on its efforts to improve ethnic, gender, disability and neurodiversity representation across its business.
Personnel Today reports on this with comment from Claudia Osei-Nsafoah, Sky’s chief people officer for the UK and Ireland and D&I lead for Sky Group. She says it is important that Sky’s workforce is representative of the communities it serves and that its inclusive culture is represented in the image it portrays. She says: “The good thing about Sky is that it is so diverse in terms of what we do. It’s really important for us that what you see externally is reflected internally. We’ve made bold commitments, but we’re also able to demonstrate that we’ve been successful in delivering those. But we need to make sure that [that success] is more broadly known.”
The bold commitments take the form of setting targets. Sky has set itself a target of ensuring 20% of its employees in the UK and Ireland are from Black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds by 2025. It has also set a target to have 50/50 gender balance among leadership teams. It has hit this target in its senior leadership team and is making progress among other leadership levels.
The approach is interesting in that they appear to have made the strategic decision to go public on their efforts to improve diversity and inclusion. Osei-Nsafoah says: “We’ve been really clear about our intentions to have a workforce that represents the broader society, but we’re also thinking about the content we make and ensuring it can resonate with a broader audience.”
It’s a good example, we think, of taking a holistic approach to D&I which looks both internally and externally, helping not only to attract and retain talent within the business, but also gaining a wider audience and enhancing Sky’s reputation along the way. Obviously it all hinges on meeting their targets but they’re confident they will.
Sky’s story strikes a chord with us because it’s an approach we recognise from work we have been doing with a number of our clients with help from our D&I consultancy Brook Graham. Whilst Sky says it is focused on improving four key areas - ethnic, gender, disability and neurodiversity representation - without a particular focus on any one of them, in the work we’ve done we’ve noticed that ethnicity is the one area above all others that is lagging behind. Clients tell us they really struggle to move the needle in terms of their numbers on race in particular – a point lawyer Anne Sammon highlighted in this programme last week.
As you’d expect we’re trying to help clients address that issue and to that end we’ve developed what we describe as a ‘Race Leadership’ offering designed to improve those numbers. Shuabe Shabudin is an employment lawyer who works closely with Brook Graham and has had a major part in the development of the product and earlier he joined me by video-link to discuss it:
Shuabe Shabudin: “So what we're seeing Joe is a bit of a trend of clients refocusing their efforts around what they can do to try and tackle and reduce race-related inequalities in the workplace. So we've seen a number of clients - very often clients that we've worked with in relation to their gender pay gap - coming to us and asking for us to do similar work in relation to their ethnicity pay gap. So that involves us auditing their processes, it involves us assessing and understanding the position that they’re in. We are then able to work with them to put in place interventions, to put in place new processes or strategies to really address the ethnicity pay gap that they just will have. So it's a focus shift, it’s a refocusing, if you like, on all of the great work that companies were doing back in 2020 after the tragic murder of George Floyd and just really bringing those back to the fore.”
Joe Glavina: “Now, obviously, we have a team of lawyers, but we also have a D&I consultancy, Brook Graham. Does this work with clients involve both camps?”
Shuabe Shabudin: “It does, because not only is this a legal issue - it's not just that there are legal goals that needs to be met - it’s also, of course, about the cultural change piece. So as well as, for example, us being able to go in and do an audit, for example, there might be a client who has a prevalence of race discrimination claims or grievances that are race-related, we are able to go in investigate that, talk to the right people, do an audit and come out with a report on the back end of that. But alongside that report, we're able to put together a legally privileged note that covers some recommendations, some activities, some interventions, that we think the client company should undertake. Very often, those will involve both training - so our award-winning Employment Law Plus team would be able to work there - but also, as you say, Joe, Brook Graham, our in-house diversity and inclusion consultancy, who would, for example, be looking to work with clients on how they can review their recruitment practices for example. So undertaking an audit of their recruitment process. So it's not just legal, it is also, as you say, cultural, and embedding that cultural change going forward.”
Joe Glavina: “You mentioned recruitment and that has become such an important issue in recent times with skills shortages across many sectors and businesses generally struggling to attract talent. Tell me about that in this context.”
Shuabe Shabudin: “Yes, so the war on talent is continuing. We saw it very rife during lockdown and even as we came out of it, and it's no different now. So a number of clients are turning their attention to how they can continue to recruit the best talent and one of the ways that they are able to do that, and one of the ways that we're working with them, is to make themselves an employer of choice. Now, in order to be an employer of choice you need to appeal to people and, nowadays, those that are in the work pool, those who are looking for work. are very much about belonging, about being able to feel like they belong in the place of work that they're going to be in. So, if you have an employee that is able to show that they are inclusive, that they are taking steps to address the inequalities that there undoubtedly will be, it's a way to make that employer more desirable, more appealable, and so not only appeal to the best talent but also then to have a competitive edge over others within the others within the sector.”
Joe Glavina: “The D&I journey that firms are on needs to recognised both within the business and also externally so presumably there is a key role for HR in achieving that?”
Shuabe Shabudin: “Very much so yes, if nothing else in terms of the marketing, the comms, the story that is being told about the organisation. As I say, job seekers are now very much about the experience they're going to get when they get through the door, when they get their feet under the desk. So it's for HR to be working with the company to really sell the company in the right way and to really highlight the right points. So we are able to work with HR to say, look, these are the headlines that you want to be promoting. First of all, this is what you want to be doing. But then secondly, these are the headlines that you want to be promoting, and it's for HR to then be taking that message up to the board, up to C-suite, to say this is what we need to be saying about our business so that we can appeal to the best talent, and that's not just nationally, necessarily, quite often that's on a Euro-wide basis or even globally.”
Joe Glavina: “Finally, Shuabe, this Race Leadership product is, as the name suggests, focused on that one area, race. Why that specific, narrow focus?”
Shuabe Shabudin: “So I think the first thing to say is that it's not necessarily that race-related inequality is the most important area to be looking at, or that there's any particular need specifically to be looking at race over one of the other protected characteristics. What I would say, though, is that certainly after the murder of George Floyd there was some really good work that was done by clients and a lot of targets that were set, unfortunately, what we've seen is that those targets weren't necessarily met, or more often, they just weren't tracked and monitored and progress charted. So this is an area where employers, perhaps, have undertaken the groundwork, if you like, but haven't then built on top of it. As well as that, Joe, unfortunately we've seen a huge number of reports and whistleblowing, very often, around race discrimination in some pretty household names and some very large organisations. So what that's shown is that, actually, this isn't a problem that was solved, this isn't an inequality that no longer exists. So it's for those reasons that I think a focus, a refocus, on race leadership is really, really important and is something that we're starting to see a move towards.”
Shuabe and the marketing team have produced a flyer which describes the Race Leadership product in more detail and gives the necessary contact details. We’ve put a link to it in the transcript of this programme for you.
LINKS
- Link to Personnel Today article
- A copy of the flyer on Race Leadership product is available by contacting Hayley Dalton
