"Data is king" when it comes to addressing issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, according to Eversheds Sutherland partner, Sophie White.
White explained tracking data is crucial to understanding what the makeup of firms actually is.
"You can look at a firm and think it is doing well through how many recruits it takes in and by how close it is to its target on a partner level," White said.
“However, if in the middle of this all the women drop out and you’re not tracking the data, you can’t target your efforts effectively."
She added that it is "really important” to understand what the makeup of firms actually is, where there might be issues, what firms are trying to achieve, and how firms are trying to achieve it.
As a result of this understanding, White encouraged people to not be worried to stop initiatives and try new ones if they are not working.
She added: “There’s no point continuing something that clearly isn’t having the impact you thought it would have."
Danger of superficiality
White also warned of firms focusing too much on 'superficial' diversity initiatives.
As an example, she said firms may encourage its employees to talk and celebrate Ramadan, something which she described as very important but acknowledged “that in and of itself is not going to drive change”.
“You want your employee resource groups to drive those good events but that is not your diversity and inclusion strategy, that’s the groups making sure that different representative groups within the firm celebrate the things that are important to them,” she explained.
Instead, she said that the strategy “sits quite a long way above that” and looks at ideas such as what the firm looks like at the moment, what their targets are for the future, and how they intend to get from A to B.
“Those individual things are effective, but they are not the strategy,” she added.
“They’re all really important as they drive awareness, it’s just that it isn’t the overarching strategy and I think the two have been confused.”
Women in the workplace
White also spoke on the importance of encouraging women in the industry, but identified that the most important facet of this lies in areas other than recruitment.
She said when she first started in her industry, there was “never an issue” with women showing interest and applying to the industry, instead the difficulty came in keeping them on as they started families.
However, she pointed out that a major recent development has been very encouraging in the retention of women workers, the increased use of working from home.
“There is no inkling of presenteeism anymore whereas when I started, there was a feel that you had to be seen to be there and that was often easier for men rather than women,” she explained.
'Happy balance'
She added that in some sectors there could be a danger of losing the practice of working from home.
“There are definite discussions about ‘is there a drop off in productivity? Are we losing teamwork? Are we losing culture?,” she said. "I think it is about being brave and getting the right happy balance."
She added: “None of us really wanted to be fully remote and locked in our houses during Covid but that was an emergency situation.
“That overnight move to everyone working from home in which the IT stood up to the challenge, in my opinion, drove diversity and inclusion strategies forward by about 10 years in one year in terms of what is possible.
“Whereas when we used to look at flexible working requests in certain roles there would be a question mark about whether that could really work in a flexible way.
“Actually, now Covid has shown most employers that most things other than very frontline roles can be done via working from home.”
tom.dunstan@ft.com
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