COO Rebecca Sumner Smith shares some ‘thinking out loud’ about the Lab’s ongoing focus on diversity, inclusion, equity and justice, and our efforts to build a more inclusive organisation.
We know that dysfunctions in the financial system lie at the root of many of today’s challenges, from climate change and economic crises to poverty, marginalisation and inequality. As we’ve written previously, economic inequality intersects with other forms of inequality and discrimination. A lot more needs to be done to fully document and understand the problem, but previous research has found, for example, that: people of colour find it harder to access basic financial services; two-thirds of those forced to turn to high-cost credit are women; and people experiencing mental health problems are more than three times as likely to be in problem debt than those without such problems. Centering economic justice is therefore vital for our work to transform the financial system to make it more democratic, sustainable, just and resilient.
In 2020 we wrote that ‘embedding our commitment to anti-oppression … into our strategy and how we implement it is a welcome challenge that we will work on’. To help us in this, in 2020 we created our first working group on diversity, inclusion, equity and justice, formed from members of our team and board; required this area to be considered as part of each programme strategy; undertook our first internal diversity survey; and held a team session with an external consultant to begin thinking about our guiding vision.
We will share more about embedding this focus across our work to transform the financial system in a future blog. In this piece, the focus will be on recent actions we have taken internally at the Lab. As Krania and others wrote in The Water of Systems Change, ‘Any organisation’s ability to create change externally is constrained by its own internal policies, practices, and resources, its relationships and power imbalances, and the tacit assumptions of its board and staff.’
Building an inclusive organisation
With such an important imperative for effective action, it can sometimes feel like addressing culture is just fiddling at the margins. On some measures our efforts have little to show, and we don’t need a survey to tell us we have undeniable lack of diversity in certain areas, not least an all white executive team, and white male Chair and CEO. We acknowledge this as an area which needs attention. We also know that building greater team diversity first requires a meaningful commitment to developing and maintaining an inclusive culture, creating the conditions for inclusion and safety for everyone no matter their background or identities.
Among the actions taken in this area, we strengthened our commitment to wellbeing by moving to a 32-hour work week and instituting a closure week each August where the whole team can rest at the same time. We strongly support part-time working and job-sharers, recruiting to most roles with these as an option, and six of our 13 core staff fall within one of these categories.
We formalised our annual calendar to include ‘quiet weeks’, which are times when we aim to limit larger projects like events, publication dates, and internal meetings. These largely coincide with school holidays, in particular to make it easier for parents to take leave at those often tricky times. We also offer a small amount of paid carer’s leave.
In terms of increasing team and board diversity, we’ve reviewed our recruitment processes in general. One specific development resulting from this has been making fully remote roles a possibility, alongside which we’ve worked hard improving our practices to ensure fully remote workers are equally included. This was done with our disabled and chronically ill colleagues – and future colleagues – in mind, but as with most efforts on inclusion we‘ve found this benefits a far wider group of people, especially in an era of continual train disruption!
In the last few years we also trialled our first ‘trustees-in-training’ programme, taking proactive action to encourage and nurture wider board accessibility and diversity, and we are considering re-running the programme in the next couple of years to continue these efforts.
Perhaps reflecting the impact of these changes, and despite the stresses of the pandemic, staff turnover remains low, and the Lab was listed in Escape the City’s ‘Escape 100’ list of best 100 organisations to work for in 2022, and as one of the top 100 social enterprises (NatWest SE100) in both 2022 and 2023.
What next?
In setting out some of our work so far, we’re not intending this to be read as a ‘look at our shiny diversity and inclusion project’ kind of blog. We’re sharing in the spirit of renewing our public commitment to this work, and as an exercise in ‘thinking out loud’ which might be of interest to other organisations going through a similar process. This work, and our learning in this area, are not yet done.
In that spirit, we also want to share a bit about what happens next.
Firstly, our working group is leading a project to build a shared understanding of key concepts within the team and board, through an ongoing programme of learning and reflection. This shared understanding of what ideas like diversity, inclusion, equity, justice and solidarity look like for the Lab will underpin everything else we are doing in the area.
We will gather better data, based on which we can set some meaningful targets. This includes a monthly anonymous inclusion and belonging survey which we began last year, and of which we’ll be reviewing initial results shortly. We’ve also just completed our second diversity survey, two years after the first, and will be considering what any changes in results might tell us.
Gaps in the data also tell us something. For example, while the survey asked about disabilities and chronic conditions, we realised that this might not be the best way to capture data about our neurodivergent colleagues, and that’s a live area of learning for us right now.
We’ll be finalising our vision for diversity, inclusion, equity and justice at the Lab. Combined with better data, this should then enable us to set some clear targets, both internally and in our programmes. This links to our strategy refresh this summer, as we reflect on progress towards our 2030 goals to date (available here – opens a pdf), as part of which we’re aiming to be more explicit about the centrality of equity and justice within our strategy.
Alongside this, our programme and operations leads continue to review and improve how we embed diversity, equity, inclusion and justice principles in everything we do. We’re aiming to work with external consultants to support us in this, particularly in relation to deeper and more complex areas of systemic oppression.
We’re learning all the time. Progress can feel slow – and always feels insufficient – but we’re committed to moving forward, and doing so at a speed which allows us to do this work safely. We hope that sharing our process so far might encourage other organisations to do so, or to reach out so we can share our learning and improve together across the systems in which we operate. If that’s you, please get in touch.