Jane Ide writes about what ACEVO has been doing to be a truly inclusive organisation. This blog has been adapted from a presentation Jane has delivered alongside ACEVO treasurer Joyce Materego at the ICAEW Conference in January 2023.
At ACEVO we have for a number of years now carried out regular audits of the diversity of our board and of our staff team. We are a small organisation – a staff team of sixteen and a trustee board of around ten. And it can be difficult to gather data in a small team where people feel more exposed than they would be in a much bigger organisation when sharing personal information.
But we are clear about why we want this information. We started by setting out a clear expectation of ourselves to be diverse and inclusive, so everyone involved in ACEVO understands the value of us having that information and trusts that we will use it appropriately, respectfully and with good intent.
By gathering the data, we were able to better understand how well we reflect the people we serve and wider society at large, and to have an informed discussion around where the gaps were and which ones we needed to fill.
And that in itself is an important point: diversity is not a tick box exercise where you make sure you have at least x% of staff from every protected characteristic. You can make choices about the areas you most want to focus on – the important thing is to have that internal debate and come to a conclusion that you can stand by. At ACEVO we focused initially on three areas: gender, race and disability, and because we knew we needed to improve on each of those criteria we set targets accordingly.
Setting targets
Some people think that setting targets is controversial because it can lead to tick box thinking where achieving the target becomes the be-all and end all. However, what gets measured gets done. As long as those targets are grounded in a genuine commitment to wider cultural change they can be hugely important in focusing the mind (and the resources) on making the difference where it counts most.
I joined ACEVO in May last year and I knew I was inheriting the most diverse organisation I have ever worked with. But having now carried out our annual audit, I now also know exactly where that diversity is coming from and where we still have work to do. We are doing well on our race diversity and in our trustee board we are above target on disability – whereas among our staff team we have a little way to go to meet our disability target for 2024.
The area we are struggling most is gender balance. Ironically, in common with much of the charity sector at the smaller end of the scale we have too few men. Following this year’s audit and comparing the results with the diversity profile of our membership we have introduced a new target for the board around LGBT+ representation, which helped us to articulate our recent call for new trustees and did indeed attract greater representation in that space.
Recruitment, retention and culture
So far so good. We have a good story to tell on building a diverse team, and we are happy to share our learning from that. But that is just the start of it. Any healthy, sustainable organisation wants to retain its staff and build its culture – so if you put all your efforts into recruiting people who, by definition, are different in some way from your majority, you have to think hard about how you adapt your organisation to help them thrive and not just survive.
I hope in this day and age no one would employ someone who uses a wheelchair without ensuring that they would be able to get into the office or go to the loo once they are there. We still are a society deeply unaware of the barriers that our colleagues who are neurodivergent or have invisible disabilities face in their working environments, and of the deeply impactful negative experiences that can be experienced every day by people who are gay, or black, or in some other way in a minority in the workplace. And there is a whole conference, and more, to be had about the systemic barriers that work against a truly inclusive culture in every organisation.
So if you are serious about this work, prepare the ground for your more diverse workforce. Think about your processes and how well they work for people with a variety of characteristics.
Move from unconscious assumption to actively thinking through the barriers that you may not experience but that others will. You can ask for feedback from your diverse colleagues but don’t ask them to carry the load on this.Do your own work. There are multitudes of resources through which you can educate yourself on some of the ways in which you can improve your processes and your culture to make your organisation truly inclusive rather than just diverse.
Removing barriers
One of many areas to consider is whether your diverse recruits will be able to progress, or whether there are cultural or systemic barriers that mean they get stuck in less influential roles while others move ahead of them.
One example: if you are looking to promote to a senior role and you state that a degree is a requirement for the job, you are most likely excluding talented and very competent members of your team who come from a background where higher education was not an option – and in those groups people who are black or disabled are highly over represented. Ask yourself:why you are making that requirement? Does it truly reflect the skills and needs of the job? (If you are appointing a senior clinical role it might. If you’re appointing a director of fundraising, a chief operating officer or a chief executive, most probably less so.)
If the requirement is there just as a way to quickly filter applicants, or because you hold an inherent assumption that a degree infers on one candidate a higher level of articulacy or thinking skills than another candidate without a degree then you are upholding those systemic barriers that keep certain groups of people out of senior roles.
Another example: you are offering opportunities to participate in a training programme that is likely to lead to more responsibility and career progression in your organisation. The training runs over two full days, face to face at a residential venue. Are you thinking about the reality for a member of your team who has caring responsibilities and cannot commit to being away from home, or a colleague who has a hidden disability that makes staying away for the night challenging and difficult for them? What could the alternatives be that would provide equal access for everyone on your team and not leave anyone disadvantaged?
EDI in leadership
I’m proud that at ACEVO we have a high proportion of diversity amongst our senior management team as well as elsewhere in the team, but it is certainly true that across our sector and indeed most sectors any diversity that has been achieved starts to narrow the higher up the career path you look. Every year ACEVO produces its pay and equalities survey which focuses on the leadership of the sector.
In our latest survey, published just last autumn, just 7% of our sector leaders were from Black, Asian and Minoritized Ethnic backgrounds, and that percentage isn’t shifting. Disappointingly, the gender pay gap rose to 10.8% from 7.6% in 2021, reversing the downward trend that had been achieved over the past few years, with male respondents reporting a median salary of £60K compared with £53,500 for female respondents.
As a general rule I don’t honestly think there are many employers these days that would pay a man £7.5k a year more than a woman as a conscious decisionWhat is much more true is that women for a whole raft of reasons don’t get the same opportunities as their male counterparts.They sacrifice their earning power to meet their caring responsibilities, they have less confidence in negotiating their rewards packages, and they are given far fewer opportunities to lead larger organisations that pay better salaries than their male colleagues are. Some employers might say ‘well, that’s their problem, it’s up to them to up their game’ – but in our sector I believe we are better than that, and we have a responsibility and a duty to do everything we can as individuals and as organisations to tackle those underlying issues.
Last year we included questions on socio economic diversity for the first time and responses indicate that 74% of CEOs attended state funded schools with 66% of respondents reporting that neither parent had attended university – which was a little surprising and very encouraging. However, there is evidence to show that you are more likely to be leading a small charity if you are female and working class, whereas the leaders of the bigger charities (with all the salary and career implications that brings) are much more likely to be male and privately educated.
Perhaps our best story as a sector is around disability, where the proportion of leaders who are comfortable to report in our survey that they consider themselves to have an impairment, learning condition or learning difference increased to 20%, close to the 21% of working age adults nationally who declare an impairment.
But I do wonder how many of those are leading condition specific or disability focused charities as opposed to a children’s centre or an animal shelter or a heritage organisation. Our sector can be very good at prioritising lived experience in the leadership of particular organisations, but the flip side of that is that people with different characteristics can far too often find themselves pigeonholed – or choose to stay in those organisations because that is where they feel safe. And again, as a sector, we then lose out on the strengths they can bring in a whole range of other contexts.
If you care about your organisation’s success why would you not want to give it the competitive edge that comes from having truly diverse, genuinely inclusive, senior leadership teams?
Measuring outcomes
There are some hard measures you can use to give yourself a clearer focus of where you might need to address issues. Even as a very small and very flat team we report annually on our gender pay gap and our ethnicity pay gap, and while that does not tell the whole story by any means it does give us some information on whether we are really delivering on our promise to be a truly inclusive organisation rather than telling a good story that has no substance behind it.
Where there is less sophistication in measuring outcomes, not just in our own sector but more generally, it is in the understanding of intersectionality – acknowledging that gender, race, socioeconomic background, age, disability and sexuality can all interplay in an individual’s experience to create multiple barriers to their success.
If you are serious about moving towards being a genuinely antiracist and inclusive leader you have to do the work. If you want your organisation to make meaningful and sustainable change you have to be prepared for some difficult and challenging conversations and situations.
But, especially since 2020, there has emerged a wealth of guidance, insight, expertise from within lived experience that you can draw on to get your organisation ahead of the curve with best practice in policies, procedures, practice and reporting. As a starting point ACEVO has a raft of resources available to all.
