Equality, Diversity & Inclusion
Diversity makes us stronger. We're proud to celebrate our differences and strive towards an inclusive company culture.
We are proud to be on a continuous journey with our clients, candidates, corporate partners and employees to foster and build a more diverse vision for the future.
Our global workforce now comprises 65 nationalities and at Resource Solutions we take equality, diversity and inclusion (ED&I) very seriously.
Our ED&I mission
Our equality, diversity & inclusion mission is to ensure our business is always striving to create a world-class culture, in which everyone is empowered to be their authentic self in the workplace.
In order to ensure we remain focused on this and to help us measure our success we are committed to:
Raising awareness
Raising awareness and cultural learning amongst all our people across our business, to ensure we embrace each other’s uniqueness and the value that our diverse organisational make-up brings to our business.
Best processes
Ensuring the best processes and policies are in place across our business to support our people to bring their whole self to work with transparency and fairness at the heart of all we do.
Driving ED&I agendas
Working with our clients to not only support but drive their ED&I agendas for their own business.
Our new inclusive value
The launch of our inclusive value, along with the thousands of inclusive pledges made by our employees across our organisation, is about driving forward the conversation, and ensuring that all our people take responsibility for making Resource Solutions an inclusive place to work.
Our Inclusive value describes what we are, but also asks more of what we can be – individually and as a business. Whatever we look like, wherever we come from, however we identify, we are welcome and we are accepted.
Training and development
Inclusive Leadership Programme
We’ve partnered with Pearn Kandola to launch an inclusive leadership training programme for our business leaders. This training is designed to help our leaders understand their blind spots and implement inclusive practices in all areas of their role – including hiring, communicating effectively, and getting the best out of their team. In addition, all new and existing employees will receive ED&I training.
Providing diverse benefits for our employees
While there are core benefits that appeal to all demographics, we understand that the benefits that appeal to different groups can change over time. Recognising the diversity of our workforce, we enhanced our core benefits offering. Wherever you're located, our flexible benefits platform gives our employees control to select the benefits that support their wellbeing, financial goals and lifestyle.
Our partnerships, commitments and accreditations
We recognise that achieving and maintaining true equality, diversity and inclusion is a journey. In order to ensure we remain consistent and committed to the highest standards throughout this journey, we work with a number of strategic partners. We have also made a number of pledges relating to our core pillars of focus.
Strategic partnerships
Pearn Kandola were selected to be the Robert Walters Group’s global diversity and inclusion (D&I) partner in 2020. Founded in 1984, Pern Kandola are specialists in helping to review and embed best-in-class organisational D&I practices. Their founding principle is to make the modern workplace fair for everyone by promoting D&I and eradicating prejudice and unfairness.
Black Young Professionals Network
BYP Network is the UK’s largest network of black professionals existing to change the black narrative and improve representation of black professionals.
In the UK, we partner with 2to3days, a jobs board for parents looking for part-time work.
Commitments and accreditations
We are members of the Valuable 500, a global community of businesses making active commitments to put disability and inclusion on their leadership agendas.
Along with the Robert Walers business, we are certified as Level 2 Disability Confident Committed through the UK Government’s Disability Confident initiative, which recognises our efforts to foster an inclusive workplace that supports disabled people to find and stay in work.
We are recognised by Clear Assured, which identifies and removes barriers in recruitment for people from a number of the protected characteristics as well as underrepresented candidates.
We are proud to be a signatory of the Halo Code, a pledge by businesses and schools to members of the Black community that they have the “freedom and security to wear all afro-hairstyles without restriction or judgement.”
Our global Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Council
Our global Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (ED&I) Council is committed to providing an inclusive environment for all our employees across the world – where everyone feels empowered to bring their authentic selves to work and share their story.
Our ED&I Council is overseen by Coral Bamgboye, our Group Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. Supported by senior regional leads across APAC, EMEA, India and the US, the council works alongside our leadership team, HR and employee resource groups to ensure we remain focused on our ED&I mission goals, and continually challenge ourselves in order to make improvements and achieve excellence.
Our Global ED&I Council focuses on four core strands, including:
- Ethnicity and culture
- LGBTQ+
- Gender and family
- Disability
All of these are underpinned by inclusion and wellbeing.
Ethnicity and Culture
We encourage our people to use Workplace to share all of their cultural celebrations with our global business. In Singapore and across our EMEA region, we’ve held ‘Ramadan Day’, which invites our non-Muslim colleagues to fast for a day shortly before the end of Ramadan, and to then celebrate Eid al-Fitr. Our teams in India celebrate the eve of Dussehra with an ‘ethnic wear’ competition, which asks colleagues to share their heritage through wearing their native dress.
We host ‘cultural conversations’ to create safe spaces for all employees globally to discuss and share not only their personal experiences as a method of education and cultural learning for others across the organisation, but as a way to contribute to our overall ED&I mission to drive change. These have included conversations on BLM, Stop Asian Hate, Pride, as well as other key areas and topics relating to ethnicity and culture.
In 2021 we furthered our commitment to inclusivity for all by signing up to the Halo Code - which, although a UK commitment, we have rolled out as a global principle across our business.
LGBTQ+
2021 has seen the launch of our LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group (ERG), an opportunity for colleagues across the globe to join a network and community of people providing peer support and a true sense of belonging. The ERG works with our ED&I council, HR and leadership team to support and drive meaningful changes by not only increasing awareness but also through the review of processes and policies across the business, harnessing the perspective of those from the community.
Gender & Family Friendly
Creating an environment where women are able to progress is critical to our business alongside a focus on ensuring that all genders are supported to be able to achieve at work whilst balancing their commitments to family and outside the workplaces.
Celebrating International Women's Day (IWD)
For several years, we have marked International Women’s Day with popular in-person events, webinars and social campaigns. We continue to champion women’s rights in the workplace and our CEO, Norma Gillespie, is a vocal advocate for female leadership.
Being bold about discussing some of the areas that impact women in our business is important to us. Launching our Menopause Policy & Guidance as well as hosting a cultural conversation with women in our business who shared their experiences of going through the Menopause and its impact on them at work are all part of striving to support those going through these experiences as well as educating all of us.
Disability
Recognising and celebrating the differences and talents of all people include those living with disabilities is core to our business.
We have been a Disability Confident Committed Employer since 2018.
As a Valuable 500 committed organisation, we are committed to:
- Holding an annual ‘disability in the workplace week’ where we will work with local organisations across the globe to offer CV writing and interview training skills for local people with disabilities
- We will put a renewed focus on our commitment to being Clear Assured
- We will regularly share our commitment on our website, across our social channels and through our PR outreach activities
- We commit to speeding up the process of implementing workplace adjustments for people with disabilities
- Celebrations of International Disability Awareness Month, World Autism Day as well as hosted conversations with employees across the business are key to supporting our continued goals of driving education and awareness of the experiences of disabled people within our business.
In 2021, our discussion on Men’s Mental Health saw a number of men from across the business share in the experiences with warmth and heartfelt openness on the really critical subject of mental health.
Wellbeing
Across our four areas of ED&I focus, inclusion and wellbeing are at the heart of what we do.
A central tool for this is the utilisation of our cultural conversation sessions called ‘RS Connect’, which sees our people come together to discuss and share topics and insights from their perspectives.
In addition, we during 2020/2021 we held a number of cultural ‘cook-along’ sessions, sharing insights into different cuisines from different cultures.
Driving ED&I with our clients
Working with our clients to not only support but shape and drive their ED&I strategy is a passion of ours. This is achieved through a number of different methods.
