Increasingly, clients are asking their law firms what they are doing promote diversity and to create a more inclusive place to work. Quite rightly, our clients want to know that we are able to offer up teams that have excellent cognitive diversity, and which reflect the client’s own people profile and values. This client dimension overlaps with our own people and business imperative; the right thing to do is to challenge ourselves to try new initiatives, to continue to put ourselves in the shoes of others, to discuss openly the issues and change our behaviours and mind-sets, and constructively challenge non-inclusive behaviour, in order to ensure that no one feels like an outsider. In theory, with more diversity, (whether gender, physical, cognitive, social, generational, cultural, ethnic or sexual), we create the chance to learn something from someone different, or with a different perspective to our own, and it creates a fertile breeding ground for new ways of working and operating. That makes us more resilient and sustainable as a business. Diversity, however, is ornamental without inclusivity; we have to make sure different people are in the rooms where decisions are made and not only make sure that they feel safe sharing what is on their minds, but actively encourage them to contribute.
The process of crafting a more diverse and inclusive environment gives us the opportunity to engage with clients on this subject, and find out what they are doing, what works, what hasn’t worked, and how their challenges are different or similar to ours. We can use it to deepen our relationships with them, and at the same time learn from each other.
A Board member is directly responsible and accountable for working with our D&I Group (comprised of a cross-section of engaged people from all around the business) and with the leaders of our networks. The Board is committed to evolving our strategy and to “mainstreaming” the infrastructural changes necessary or potentially useful to achieve our goals.
In addition to continuing with our #BeYourself initiative, we have continued focussing on making more progress on our gender balance at senior levels, and on LGBTQ+, BAME and disability inclusion. We have maintained our Women in Law Empowerment Forum Gold Standard in June 2021. Our LGBTQ+ and our BAME networks have gone from strength to strength creating channels for feedback and input from colleagues in these under-represented groups, this year we are launching a disability forum and all of these networks have been consulted on key projects to make sure our communication and implementation is as inclusive as is can be.
We continue our progress using an infrastructural audit, designed to identify areas for improvement in various systems, from our recruitment processes, to our communications, to our bid and tender processes, among others and have been able to make significant improvement including linking our recruitment processes with our minority networks to ensure we manage our processes as inclusively as possible to ensure we continue to attract as diverse a pipeline of talent as possible.
A really fundamental piece of work to collect attributable diversity information under the umbrella of our “Count Me In” survey has been an Important part of the communication of our D&I strategy with board level support and a number of communications to the business from our board sponsor. This has resulted in a 70%
contribution of information from our people, we continue to encourage participation. By showing that the data can drive specific changes to the way we do things at Womble Bond Dickinson we can show our people that we can make improvements within our business using this important information, whilst also providing a safe space for people to provide it. We have also introduced a pulse survey approach this year focussed on important topics such as health and wellbeing and reporting processes – our aim has been to have a rapid response, “you said, we did” approach to demonstrate the feedback we get drives the changes our people want to see within our business.
Our D&I journey continues with zest.