CLASS OF 2022
How to implement a D&I strategy in private practice
From asking for help to setting realistic goals, Robert Andrews of Mewburn Ellis explains how his firm is taking action to improve D&I.
Organisations are increasingly recognising the benefits of building a diverse workforce and fostering an inclusive business culture.
For organisations seeking to become more diverse and inclusive, cultural change is often the most challenging part of the transformation. Real change demands new behaviours from leaders and employees that can—initially at least—conflict with historical cultural values focused on hierarchy and operational efficiency.
This challenge is compounded by the fact that effective cultural change takes time and cannot be achieved via a top-down mandate. Rather, it is a mixture of positive feelings and behaviours such as trust, optimism, and enthusiasm that—even if successfully seeded and nurtured—need time to take root and grow before the results are visible.
How can organisations at the start of their diversity and inclusion (D&I) journeys go about developing a D&I strategy appropriate for their business? Even for firms occupying similar niches, there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer—each business will have its own unique culture as a starting point so, even if two firms share a similar goal, their routes to that goal will be necessarily different.
That said, while a D&I ‘cut and paste’ strategy is unlikely to work, sharing experiences and ideas amongst peers is a great way to accelerate progress across the sector.
Ask for help
Mewburn Ellis started our D&I journey in 2020, adding it to our strategic priorities and business plan. Many businesses struggle to know where to start and we were no different. We needed to agree what we wanted to achieve with our D&I strategy, how to go about improving D&I at the firm, and importantly what we meant by this. This wasn’t our area of expertise and we wanted to do the job well, so we asked specialist D&I consultant Brook Graham to guide us.
Our first task when working with Brook Graham was to conduct a company-wide, anonymous, and confidential survey to help us understand the experiences, views, and ideas of everyone in the firm. This was followed by a series of focus group discussions, which looked in more detail at the key themes coming out of the survey.
What the survey highlighted was how challenging a topic D&I is and how it’s hard to find focus. We found that D&I meant different things to different people in the firm. For some it was about more cross-firm team working, for others recruiting candidates from more diverse backgrounds. For others, equal opportunities and feedback mechanisms, or more empathy from senior leaders.
There were common themes, but also significant differences. We realised that while there were many things we could do, we couldn’t do them all straight away: some needed resources we didn’t have, and some we just weren’t culturally ready for.
”Enabling our people to get to know each other better and engage with D&I themes through personal stories has proven extremely powerful in building trust and empathy.”
Robert Andrews
Identify early goals
We needed to prioritise, think about sequencing, and identify areas of focus. Agreeing priorities was challenging. We didn’t want them to be imposed by the leadership team but, rather, to be shaped by all of our people. That was easier said than done, though: it’s hard to get a reliable steer unless you have the systems and the environment in place where people feel safe and motivated to answer. Getting to that point is a goal in itself, and we weren’t there yet.
However, the foundation work we’d done meant we had a much clearer idea of what we wanted to achieve and some of the early projects our people wanted to focus on. That allowed us to kick off phase one and start to make progress. Our priority areas were engagement, learning and personal development, recruitment, inclusive leadership training, and leadership and governance.
Some actions we took on these key areas were as follows:
Engagement
- Ran initial survey and discussion groups.
- Implemented consultative decision-making processes for key policies.
- Launched an internal social intranet.
Learning and personal development
- Restructured the trainee rotation scheme.
- Strengthened trainee pastoral care mechanisms.
- Recruited a learning and development manager.
Recruitment
- External audit of recruitment processes.
- Implemented the contextual recruitment system of Rare, a specialist in diverse recruitment.
- Unconscious bias training for all interviewers.
Inclusive leadership programme
- Embarked 50 leaders on an inclusive leadership programme.
- Our management board signed the IP Inclusive senior leaders’ pledge.
Leadership and governance
- Creation of a chief diversity and inclusion officer post on our management board.
- Established the 12-member D&I collaboration group (CG) drawn from across the firm.
Keep on listening
The structures and momentum built in phase one were crucial to the evolution of our D&I strategy. In particular, the establishment of the CG proved pivotal to the next stage as it brought experience and viewpoints from right across the business into the heart of strategy development. That focused the next stage of our journey onto inclusion, with principal themes of communication, trust, representation and support.
The focus on inclusion is the next logical move for us and also a pragmatic reflection of where we are as a business. An inclusive environment is a prerequisite for a successful and sustained increase in diversity and, for us, this means first working to fit the existing pieces of our business together better, before looking to shuffle or add to those pieces. Inclusion is key because there’s little point in prioritising increased recruitment from under-represented groups if many of those new recruits leave after 12 months because they are excluded by the prevailing business culture.
Building inclusion
The practical steps we plan for building inclusion fall into three main areas:
Leadership
Working with the firm’s leadership group is key because evidence shows that leader behaviour is the single biggest determinant of inclusion. The behaviour of leaders, individually and collectively, will be decisive in the success of our D&I strategy.
A major strand of the leadership-focused activities is the continuation of the inclusive leadership programme from phase one. That programme has been refined based on feedback from earlier modules—for example, we now have smaller groups to allow more conversation, and provide additional context to improve applicability.
Another leadership strand is the establishment of a reverse mentoring scheme. Here, members of our leadership group are paired with more junior members of the firm to embark on a series of structured conversations and activities exploring D&I themes.
A final leadership strand comprises changes to help embed inclusive leadership behaviours into our everyday way of working. This is challenging for time-poor professionals, so we are developing tools to help our leaders make this change. These tools include building D&I goals into our existing professional development reviews, where we set objectives for the coming year. Another important change is to incorporate D&I requirements into progression criteria in our promotion system.
”Our pioneer community is the Menopause Group, which has made huge leaps in raising awareness of this female health issue within the firm.”
Engagement
A major theme was the need for increased opportunities for our people to engage with the business and each other, so the D&I strategy includes a range of facilities and activities to encourage conversations.
A facilitator of these activities has been our new internal social network known as ‘The Hive’, which has transformed the ability of our people to communicate with each other.
A leading example of these conversations is our ‘D&I Introductions’ series: regular posts in which people introduce themselves to the firm and relate their D&I experiences. Enabling our people to get to know each other better and engage with D&I themes through personal stories has proven extremely powerful in building trust and empathy.
Another engagement initiative encourages the establishment of ‘D&I communities’— groups of people sharing a common interest who come together for conversation and mutual support. Our pioneer community is the Menopause Group, which has made huge leaps in raising awareness of this female health issue within the firm. That’s even reaching beyond the firm, with our Menopause Group being invited to take part in external D&I events.
Metrics
Being able to measure progress is key for keeping the strategy on track. Unlike some diversity characteristics, inclusivity is not straightforward to measure. As a reflection of culture, itself a product of behaviour, there are inherent measurement challenges.
Nonetheless, inclusivity is measurable. There are quantitative and qualitative readouts which can be assessed to build up a picture. We are working with Brook Graham to develop a structured approach for measuring inclusivity. Outcomes are expected to include recommendations for new, ongoing listening mechanisms, and highlighting of future focus areas.
Conclusions
Our experience at Mewburn Ellis has been incredibly positive, with the D&I programme being driven forward by the energy and enthusiasm of our people. The firm is already a better place, and conversations and activities are being undertaken that would never have happened before. We are at the early stages of a long journey, but we now have the tools to build a truly inclusive culture and growing confidence in our ability to use them. This is the right approach for our people and for our business.
Robert Andrews is Mewburn Ellis’ chief diversity and inclusion officer and part of its D&I collaboration group. He can be contacted at: robert.andrews@mewburn.com
Images, from top: Shutterstock / Andrey Popov, Vitalii Vodolazskyi