21 April 2021
Walking the diversity talk
CEO Susmita Sen & Community Partnerships Manager Fokrul Hoque
Tower Hamlets Homes
EQUALITY, diversity, inclusion. We’re all talking about EDI, but do we really know what it actually looks like? Do we understand that it is not supposed to be a bolt-on, a tick-box exercise that all too easily leads to one of those ‘oops’ moments when we think ‘Ah, have we done an equalities impact assessment?’.
At Tower Hamlets Homes we’ve travelled from being ‘diversity specialists’ to an organisation that strives to make EDI an integral part of our core business strategies. We’ve discovered it’s all about consciously changing the way we think and work. Walking the talk, and building a values-based organisation that is acutely aware of the pitfalls and, every single day, is actively looking for positive, organisation-wide solutions.
Our vision is to ‘Create Great’ – Great Service, Great Homes and Great Communities – and we cannot do this without great people. And you don’t get great people by excluding talent.
EDI is now built into our people strategy. It aims to create more agile service delivery within an inclusive organisational culture which values everyone for what they bring to the table as individuals and as part of a team.
Why do we need to do this at all? Let’s just remind ourselves of the basics. A four-year-old boy lives on one of our estates. He has the whole world ahead of him. But simply because of who he is and where he lives, the chances are –
-he won’t live as long as the rest of us;
-he is less likely to go to university;
-he won’t earn as much;
-he will live in poorer quality housing;
-he is more likely to be in debt;
-he is more likely to be involved in crime and antisocial behaviour;
-he will grow up in a society and economy that is rigged against him
Candidates with a traditional Muslim name are three times less likely to get selected for interview than other candidates with the same CV
In 2017, a UK ONS survey found that candidates with a traditional Muslim name are three times less likely to get selected for interview than other candidates, even when the rest of their CV is identical. So, when we last upgraded our recruitment system in early 2018, we introduced name-blind recruitment.
But we have also learned that good EDI demands constant vigilance. Remove one form of bias, and the unconscious will often find another path to wander down. ‘Only went to University of East London’; ‘I wouldn’t take anyone from that organisation’; ‘They’ve only been there three months’.
So we are now looking at “work sampling” – giving a candidate a job-relevant scenario as part of the application process and asking them how they would approach the issue. This tests the skills that the candidate has acquired through their experiences, not our perceptions of their experience.
Good EDI practice also comes from being willing to ask critical friends to look at what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. For instance, we invited HACT’s social value team to help us to develop our community investment strategy. While it can be uncomfortable to see your own organisation through the eyes of outsiders, the unvarnished truth can also be a powerful tool for institutional transformation. And for us, there was the added bonus of developing a list of priorities that were informed by hard evidence, and setting targets that could be measured.
Since 2012 HACT has pioneered a social value approach that makes it possible for housing organisations like ours to say: “We have the evidence; we provide these services because we know they matter for our residents and our communities.” Social value is, after all, an intrinsic part of the ALMO sector’s DNA and central to our collective social purpose.
Pulling together internal and open source external data, we were able to analyse both areas of need and also those areas where we, as landlords, are likely to have the greatest impact. We identified four priority areas that our work should address: safer neighbourhoods; support for residents’ physical and mental wellbeing, and for their financial resilience; and the building of resilient and cohesive communities.
So what does built-in EDI look like in real life?
Our work on residents’ financial resilience, for example, began with a feasibility study that set out to understand strictly local need for this kind of support. It looked at the work we were already doing around money and debt advice, and asked how we could do that better and in a way that targeted specific needs; for instance, low employment among BaME women.
Good EDI practice also comes from being willing to ask critical friends to help you see your organisation through the eyes of outsiders, even if that feels uncomfortable
One outcome was our bespoke Financial Health Centre which opened its doors in September 2018. Partners from nine organisations came together under one roof, including the CAB, Tower Hamlets Council, several third sector organisations and staff from our rent and leasehold teams. Residents were no longer passed from one organisation to another. The result:
· more than 4,000 residents have used the Financial Health Centre;
· over £1.4m of debt has been consolidated;
· over £2.1m benefits have been applied for;
· 1115 residents have accessed training through the Centre;
· 306 residents have been supported into sustainable employment.
We could write a book about the many, many initiatives we’ve come up with that dovetail EDI into the work of Tower Hamlets Homes. And we know that we don’t have all the answers and we still have an awful lot of work to do yet. But, now that we’ve begun, we can say that the bonus of building diversity into our core values has been the creation of an environment where there is an underlying ‘buzz’ running through the whole organisation.
Difference should not just be accepted and respected; employers should actively respond to it so that everyone feels able to be themselves. This makes it possible for our staff and residents to have adult-to-adult conversations, and work together to boost business impact – while harnessing their own rich experiences and different perspectives to inform everything we do