Contractors Deliver Diversity

Recent research by global management consulting firm McKinsey has revealed that gender and ethnically diverse companies are more likely to outperform their peers by 15 and 35% respectively, while advancing women’s equality could add as much as £150bn to GDP forecasts in 2025.

Having a diverse workforce and an inclusive environment is directly correlated to business performance and an increase in profitability. Post-Brexit, this will take on even greater significance as employers seek to plug the chronic sector skill shortages that exist in UK industries such as engineering.

Yet despite the good intentions of leaders, diversity is often an aim rather than a reality. We examine how diversity can help businesses flourish and what this means for contractors working in both the private and public sectors.

Defining diversity

It is worth starting with a few basic definitions. Diversity refers to people of different cultural, religious or social backgrounds. It encompasses minorities, the older worker, the disabled, the LGBT community and those with cognitive diversity, such as the autistic. Inclusion is taking these different groups and providing an environment in which everyone feels respected and can thrive.

Inclusion and diversity are accepted as positive but many organisations’ ‘unconscious’ biases are omnipresent and people will tend to promote people who share similar characteristics and attributes. It’s an inevitable consequence of socio-economic demographics. But it alienates other groups who aren’t given the same equality of opportunity, so their development flounders, engagement and retention levels drop sharply, there is a talent drain and organisations lose untapped talent.

Diversity and inclusion continue to be thorns in the side of CEOs and their management teams. They may believe they run a meritocratic organisation but statistics from HR departments expose this as a myth: from the executive boardroom down the corporate ranks, the diversity quotient remains abysmally low and only the select few reach the top corporate echelons.

Benefits for contractors

So why does diversity make good business sense? To remain competitive in today’s global economic environment, organisations need to hire talent that understands their customer base and market segments. If we take the construction industry, a greater emphasis on offsite work has led to a demand for logistics, planning and design contractors as well as for virtual modelling experts. This diversity of experience is making a big difference to an industry still recovering from the crisis.

Contractors also bring diverse thinking, different views and perspectives. “If you just recruit among groups, which you always recruited from, then when you’re looking at a project, you are always going to get the same answers; you don’t get people who think differently, so you miss out on original perspectives,” commented Vicky Skene, director of employee engagement and inclusion at Balfour Beatty, in a recent Raconteur special report for The Times.

Diversity and inclusion best practice

The banking, finance and insurance sectors are also making great strides. Bank of America Merrill Lynch is a case in point, having realised the importance of raising awareness of diversity and inclusion. Almost 30,000 of its employee population, including senior and middle management, have undergone unconscious bias training. They have also ensured that their external recruitment partners receive the same training to ensure they don’t miss out on the best diverse talent.

The insurer Direct Line is another example, focusing on gender parity to ensure that the recruiting pool of talent has an even mix of male and female candidates. The company has signed up to the government’s Women in Finance Charter and has set up its own Ideas Lab to encourage employees to have a voice in shaping the direction of the business. Deloitte and HSBC are using ‘blind’ hiring practices that strip names and universities from CVs to remove any bias in the selection process.

But it’s not just the private sector that’s been ringing in the changes. The Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) has produced a document highlighting the responsibilities for contractors working with the government body. Therefore, those supplying services to the DWP must promote equality and adhere to the department’s code of behaviour. This includes an obligation to provide workforce monitoring data as part of the tender and contract process.

Whether improving female or minority representation at leadership level, diversity and inclusion continues to move up the business agenda. While there is still much to be done, training and education will certainly help to shift company culture. Research has conclusively shown that hiring diverse talent has a very tangible effect on performance and productivity. That can only be a good thing for skilled contractors plying their trade in the public and private sectors.