Reporting back on progress

Council staff engagement theme

In our theme of council staff engagement we are:

Renewing our commitment to equality and anti-racism with refreshed and ongoing internal communications and engagement activities. This will include themes such as ally-ship, white privilege, gas-lighting, microaggressions and incivilities

We are reviewing our recruitment processes and have increased the number of Black, Asian and ethnic minority colleagues at the senior management level from 22% to 26% since 1 April 2020 despite the challenges of the pandemic.  We have stopped using the term ‘BAME’ in our workforce. 

Following on from our listening circles in 2020, we appointed an external Equality, Diversity and Inclusions (EDI) partner DWC to design an approach to better understand and appreciate the lived experience of our Black, Asian and ethnic minority colleagues through solutions-focused conversations. 

Following feedback from our workforce, we have developed training, bitesize learning and support on areas such as white privilege and fragility, anti-racist training and micro-aggressions.  We have raised the profile of our valued Black, Asian and ethnic minority colleagues by hearing about their career stories inspiring others to reach senior-level positions in the council and within our communities. 

In February we celebrated Race Inclusion week and the first Black Inclusion week at beginning of May.  

We are creating a culture where everyone can be themselves at work and are supported to achieve their full potential in an organisation that is representative of the community and that has pledges to become an anti-racist organisation.

Embarking upon an ongoing re-training and re-education programme of our leaders and managers so that they understand the critical role, they play in addressing racism, structural racism and injustice in the workplace. We want to ensure our leaders are actively anti-racist

We have put on a number of anti-racist sessions for senior leaders and managers designed to embed positive action and improve the experience of our Black, Asian and ethnic minority colleagues in the council. 

Accountability and responsibility are central to ensuring we embed change for the long term and so the chief officer team and senior management teams are producing departmental action plans to embed positive action initiatives in their approach to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) throughout their services. 

Our senior leaders and managers continue to re-educate themselves to ensure that EDI is embedded in all our practices as a business-critical issue.  This will include ‘creating psychologically safe teams and fostering the active bystander culture’ and ‘critical thinking around the diversity of thought and respect’ among other important activities.

We are working on targeted training for leaders and employees on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion specifically targeted around race.

We are focusing on understanding the lived experience of Black, Asian and minority ethnic colleagues via what is called Solution Focused Conversations.

Page last updated: 31 August 2022