A market-leading recruitment company needs a market-leading ED&I strategy
summary
BIE Executive (BIE), is an award-winning Executive Recruitment company specialising in building leadership and enabling change through a combination of interim management, permanent recruitment solutions, and transformation expertise.
the challenge
With over 20 years of experience, they realised their Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (ED&I) strategy wasn’t clear and to be the market leader this needed to change. They wanted to increase their confidence to openly discuss ED&I considerations with their clients and better understand their own culture.
Culture Consultancy was briefed to:
- To support the Management Team to agree and clarify their commitment to and ambition for, ED&I
- Understand BIE’s current business and its current approach to ED&I
- Ensure a shared understanding of ED&I principles and clarity as to inclusive behaviours and practices
the solution
We started the project with our Insight phase, interviewing the management team to find out what was working and what wasn’t. From there we created a bespoke survey, inviting everyone in the company to take part. The insight and data from the survey allowed us to establish the strategic ED&I ambitions; identify and prioritise the gaps; develop a high-level roadmap to fulfil these culture ambitions, agree on the next steps, and suggest additional scope.
During the Design phase, we delivered 4 ED&I Education & Awareness Sessions (max. 10 people per session), where staff could interact and understand more about ED&I.
- They could understand what diversity, inclusion, equality, and discrimination are
- Recognising and managing their biases/preferences which impacts equity and inclusion at an individual level
- Identifying bias that exists at an organisational/sector/systemic level, identifying strategies and actions for interrupting or minimising bias
- They explored tools and techniques designed to overcome fears, identify boundaries, encourage confidence to discuss ED&I topics
- They identified actions that individuals and teams can take to create inclusive work cultures.
the results
As a result of our work, BIE invited us to hold team sessions to explore inclusive language, authentic expression, offence, and censorship so the whole company was more knowledgeable and confident.
BIE realised that if their ambition was to become the market leader for executive recruitment, they needed to make sure that their internal and external voice was the same and that their ED&I strategy was the best in class, without that they would continue to miss out on great talent, alienate employees and struggle to grow.
what the client says
“Culture Consultancy were fantastic at galvanising our senior team around commitments to ED&I and to turn education and awareness into tangible action. Getting a holistic education around ED&I and understanding how to ask the right questions is enabling the whole company to operate more inclusively, which is having a positive impact on the way we do business with our clients too.” – Eoin Canty, Director and D&I Strategic lead at BIE Executive
