Diversity

Equality and Diversity Consultancy

We have recently worked with a regulatory body providing specialist advice and expertise to develop equality and diversity policy and six separate equality schemes attached to this on race, age, gender, disability, religion or belief and sexual orientation. The focus of this work was equality and diversity with the aim of meeting legal requirements and fostering an organisational environment where everyone’s contribution was valued and equality of opportunity exists for all. This also involved developing a strategy for reviewing current guidance and policies against the equality schemes to assess their impact and relevance.

Additionally, we developed proposals for an equality and diversity unit, setting out its objectives, roles and responsibilities in accordance with the organisations corporate objectives and performance targets. Once approved, we successfully recruited the Head of Equality and Diversity and the Equality and Diversity Manager to the unit in collaboration with the client and provided equality and diversity training to the unit so they had the expertise and knowledge to guide the organisation.

Both the client and BCL felt that the work delivered had been successful. All schemes and guidelines were produced within the required tight timescales. The organisation demonstrated an increased awareness of equality and diversity, understanding around the Equality Impact Assessment Process and of their statutory requirements.


Positive Action Leadership Programme

BCL has designed and is delivering an innovative and strategic leadership development programme, which aims to enable black and minority ethnic managers and managers with disabilities to progress into top management positions, as a key initiative in achieving a truly representative organisation.

During summer 2007, the programme was re-launched with BCL again chosen to design, deliver and evaluate the programme. The organisation were keen to build on the success of the original programme which had enabled 50% of Cohort 1 and 38% of Cohort 2 to achieve promotion resulting in an increase in BME staff in senior leadership positions. The emphasis was shifted to support those from minority groups to get into director level positions and to reflect the changing context of the organisation with the new programme having more of a business steer to reflect contestability.

We have designed and implemented an initial sifting process and run a subsequent Assessment Centre to select those candidates who will most benefit from the programme and who have the potential to achieve top level positions. We have also designed and are delivering the development programme for successful candidates. The programme duration is 18 months comprising of development modules, mentoring, coaching, MBTI, 360 feedback, work-based business projects, placements and Action Learning Groups. The programme is seen as a key means of enhancing the mix of skills, perspectives and potential available at the highest levels of the organisation. Our work here has been short listed for a national award in career development three times. 


Procurement

We are currently working with a public body to ensure that equality requirements and best practice are incorporated into the procurement process. Following Training Needs Analysis carried out with the team of 80 procurement staff, we have designed and are about to start delivering a training module, which will enable the procurement team to understand the compatibility of equality with the procurement requirements of transparency, value for money, timeliness and fitness for purpose. This will enhance and support the client to measure and understand the extent to which suppliers are meeting their equality and diversity expectations. 


Equality and Diversity Training

We have worked with a major regulatory body to design and deliver Equality and Diversity training to the whole organisation. We ran a highly successful session with the Senior Managers and Board members to inspire their championing of Diversity within the business, challenge their thinking and to energise the programme from the highest level. Our workshops for managers and staff focused firstly on legislation, personal responsibility and bringing equality and diversity into everyday conversations. We then built on this foundation to encourage individuals to understand the business benefits of Equality and Diversity and identify how their individual action plans would improve the performance of the business and the service received by their customers. The Senior Managers described the programme as the best they had ever attended and champions from this group have volunteered to attend managers and staff sessions to deliver their personal commitments to Diversity and to endorse the cultural shift at the highest level of the organisation.


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