Working towards making a better future for everyone

“At Tyler Grange, we each strive to embody our company values of caring, belonging, opportunity, enjoyment, and honesty. An integral part of this means embracing diversity, providing equitable support, and facilitating inclusion across our teams and throughout our activities. We are proudly working towards making a positive impact on our people, our clients, and our communities in this way.”

This is Tyler Grange’s Diversity and Inclusion Statement. It’s something that we’ve had a long look at recently with the help, support, and guidance of some pretty fantastic people. What’s important to us, is that we’re “working towards making a positive impact.”

It’s National Inclusion Week this week, so we took some time to bring some much-needed attention to our awareness, attitudes, biases, and knowledge surrounding inclusion and diversity at work.

A few home truths.

Our industry isn’t very diverse.

It isn’t something that happens intentionally, but we have to own up to the fact that nobody in our industry is leading the charge when it comes to inclusivity and diversity. There isn’t an existing model we can replicate, it’s up to us to forge our own path.

But why?

That’s what this is all about. It’s vital that we ask this question: What are we not doing in our industry to bring about more diversity and be more inclusive?

Awareness.

Awareness is one of the biggest barriers to diversity and inclusion in the world. You may not consider yourself unaware of these issues, but unless you consciously examine their reasons and realities, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be in a position of understanding, and able to make a positive change. That’s why awareness is crucial to our company being able to work towards the positive impact we hope for.

Making a change

Although it’s true we lack awareness and lived experience, our duty isn’t to criticise the past, it’s in working towards making a better future for everyone.

“I often find if people don’t have experience of discrimination or things like that, they’ve never had to think about why it’s important and what is involved in addressing it.”

Meet Allie Mason. Allie joined our Tribe this year as Talent Coordinator here at Tyler Grange and she’s one of the fantastic people we were referring to earlier. Allie is helping us at TG by embarking on an internal education, advocacy, and awareness campaign; helping everyone in our company better understand diversity and inclusion and why it’s important.

As someone who has experienced discrimination, Allie is helping us understand that everyone has a responsibility to make the workplace safe and inclusive, not just those with lived experience. We’re lucky and proud to have such a great advocate for change in our Tribe that we can collaborate with and learn from.

Taking action

We’ve enlisted some external help and support via an Inclusive Hiring Workshop. It’s a course for anybody involved in the recruitment process to come together and learn about inclusive hiring and its importance. It’s also a course that Allie is now delivering internally to our own Tribe so that we can implement more inclusive hiring practices here too.

The workshop is in-person and incredibly interactive, mostly participant-led. It’s about frankly addressing our biases, figuring out where we’re coming from and how that affects the decisions or conversations we have during the recruitment process.

We’re also using a system called Teamtailor, a centralised hub for all our recruiting that helps support what we’re trying to achieve in diversity and inclusion. For example, we can anonymise candidates up to a certain point in the recruitment process. Using technology in this way removes a chance for us to be biased about name, nationality, language, ability, and much more.

Don’t beat yourself up about it.

We need to learn and understand that our biases are deep in our subconscious and they need to be challenged. It’s just human to make assumptions and if you can find a way to overcome them, using all the tools available to you, it doesn’t mean that you’re not doing a good job. It doesn’t mean that you’re not trying hard enough, just because you’re getting some help. It does mean that you actively want to learn and improve.

Making a better future

We’re changing the way we recruit for the better. Using tools like Teamtailor means that applicants can apply to us in a way that they feel more comfortable and able (video, audio, written), and their application will be received and viewed without bias or prejudice.

Our aspiration in the long-term is to stop using CVs where one can become obsessed with a candidate’s experience and give little thought to their opportunity and potential.

We want to give more time to identifying potential rather than dwelling on experience, providing a platform and infrastructure for under-represented talent to learn and grow, not simply be expected to ‘hit the ground running’. We aspire to educate more young people from more diverse backgrounds and abilities about our industry, providing a more diversified and representative talent pool for the future.

We’re proud to be taking part in National Inclusion Week. The movement is in its 10th year this year and this year’s theme is: ‘Time to Act: The Power of Now’. So why don’t you join us and start making positive changes…now? You can join the movement here.

Working towards making a better future for everyone

A few home truths.

Making a change

Taking action

Making a better future

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