Professor Peter Urwin’s ground-breaking research is helping to forge a new path for diversity and inclusion policy in the workplace.
We have reached a point in time where the benefits of diversity and inclusion (D&I) in the workforce are widely understood. Diverse organisations have a broader range of perspectives around the table; they are more in tune with increasingly diverse populations in the UK and elsewhere – avoiding the pitfalls of tone-deaf marketing or ad campaigns; and they make your brand more appealing, to both potential clients and potential employees.
The question of how you create a truly diverse and inclusive workforce, is a whole other matter. And one that has been preoccupying Professor Urwin and his colleagues at Westminster Business School (WBS), for more than a decade. As the landmark McGregor-Smith Review (2017) shows, D&I advances in the workplace have stalled; traditional D&I initiatives simply aren’t working . So, what does work?
Finding what works in diversity
During a five-year collaboration with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) – the professional body for Human Resources professionals – Professor Urwin and Jonny Gifford, Senior Advisor for Organisational Behaviour at CIPD, focused on building an evidence base that shows what works in workplace D&I policy and practice.
This research involved the creation of the “What Works in Diversity: Evidence into Practice Workshop Programme”, led by Urwin and Gifford between March and July 2019. These workshops brought together 28 D&I leaders, from 20 small, medium and large (including multinational) organisations from various sectors, such as finance, health, retail and government. These workshops enabled D&I leaders to learn about D&I interventions across various sectors; to discuss their effectiveness, share their own experiences and help them to develop robust research-based policies of their own.
“It’s really helpful to talk to public sector, private sector, third sector, global organisations as well,” says one NHS Foundation Trust D&I strategic lead who attended. “We get more creativity and some innovation in our thinking through this kind of network.”
“The series of Evidence into Practice Workshops provided an exciting forum to share my own experience and insights,” said Kent Fire and Rescue’s Inclusion Officer, speaking over a year later. He added: “Through these workshops this latest research was debated and considered in the context of everyday D&I work, making the outcome really useful. It has certainly helped me to further improve policy and practice at my own organisation.”
You can view a video on the D&I workshops on the Good Work TV website.
Influencing government diversity policy
Professor Urwin and the CIPD prepared a joint-report, Diversity Management that Works: An Evidence Based Review (2019), which brought together findings from the workshops with scientific literature and organisational data, in order to identify which strategies and practices are most likely to promote workplace diversity and inclusion.
The report can be read at the CIPD website.
That this is one of the most impactful studies of D&I across the Human Resources profession is confirmed by the Government, who partly based its Civil Service guidance to phase out unconscious bias training on the report’s evidence that such training does not improve diversity in a sustained manner, compared to other D&I interventions.
Beyond the Civil Service (which had 430,750 full-time equivalent staff, in 2020) the Government is encouraging other public sector bodies, including local government and the NHS, to review their D&I policies, in light of such findings on what actually works in diversity and inclusion practice.
Using transparency to bring greater diversity to the legal sector
In 2017, the landmark McGregor-Smith Review, which drew on research from Professor Urwin and Westminster colleagues, called for businesses to publish their long-term diversity targets and annual progress towards them, side by side, to encourage greater progress.
By this time, Urwin had already tested and implemented this strategy of sharing diversity data, through his decade-long collaboration with the UK’s Black Solicitors Network (BSN).
Urwin collected and analysed data from around 25,000 employees of 51 UK law firms and introduced a ‘Policy Score’ calculated from the responses of the firms to a variety of questions. These covered five areas of diversity policy and practice (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabilities, and social mobility), to create the BSN’s annual Diversity League Table (DLT).
“Through this publication, law firms are encouraged to share best practice and are able to gauge progress in the recruitment, retention and progression of diverse lawyers,” says BSN Chair Paulette Mastin, pointing out how ahead of its time this approach to diversity monitoring was: “Many firms now compile and publish the diversity statistics of their workforce as part of this trend towards greater transparency.”
PULL QUOTE:
Since the publication of the first Diversity League Table the profession has seen significant change in the profiles of those who work within it. There has been positive change, for which the DLT can take much credit.
- The Hon. Dame Linda Dobbs DBE, a former High Court Judge
In 2017, after analysing 10 years of DLT data, Urwin found that while firms and chambers now recruited diversely at entry level, this wasn’t translating into greater diversity in higher leadership. In line with Urwin’s broader research on diversity and inclusion, BSN has responded by shifting from analysis of raw data to case studies of successful D&I interventions, to uncover, as Mastin explains, “what success in diversity and inclusion looks like, whether there is tangible commitment beyond ‘box-ticking’ policies and practices and what policies and practices actually work.”
Urwin and Mastin plan to convert these studies into evidence-into-practice strategies for other firms to follow in the future.
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