By Tim Whitworth | 1 June 2012
In an era of spending cuts and staff redundancies, it is more important than ever to ensure that your organisation is not discriminating in theory or practice. Tim Whitworth explains how
You could be forgiven for thinking that advice on managing diversity in the public sector workplace could safely be confined to the history books. After all, the UK has well established legislation, enshrined in the Equalities Act 2010.
Yet diversity is far from ‘done and dusted’ when it comes to female, ethnic minority and disabled staff becoming senior leaders and managers. In the NHS, for example, ethnic minority staff continue to be under-represented at senior manager level (8%, compared to 12% of the working-age population) despite higher levels of representation at junior medical grades. They are also less likely to gain promotion than white staff.
Female, ethnic minority and disabled staff are also disproportionately affected by public spending cuts.
Yet in an era of shrinking workforces, you need the staff you have left to be as high-performing as possible. So it is crucial to draw on as wide a pool of talent as is available. A more diverse talent pool also means staff can cater to the needs of different populations, particularly when services for those most vulnerable are financially stretched.
Managing diversity in the public sector workplace is not rocket science. It means creating an organisational culture in which discussing difference is not a taboo, where practical steps are taken to create opportunities that cater to a wide range of staff, and – perhaps most fundamentally – where data and insight about diversity lead to real strategic and management change.
Here are ten tips for successful management.
1. Identify and explore your organisational culture
Organisational culture encompasses the everyday practices, stories, myths and behaviours that give a workplace its character. It also indicates whether you’re managing diversity well. So understanding your own organisation’s culture and the impact it has on diversity is a crucial first step. Sit down with your workforce teams and encourage conversations about what it’s like to work there: encourage staff to talk openly about the experience of being different. Asking staff themselves or someone from outside to facilitate these conversations and report back anonymously can allow people to be frank.
2. Create early awareness of the challenges
If you don’t know what’s happening on the ground, how can you act? Managing diversity means picking up on issues early. Have you got robust and transparent systems that ensure the voices of various staff, elected members and service users are heard and incorporated before policy changes are decided? Investing time in building up routine structures and processes for listening will reduce the risk of you having to tackle crises later, such as discrimination claims.
3. Take an inclusive approach
Developing organisational policies and strategies is most effective when it’s genuinely collaborative. That means taking input from the full range of your staff – innovation can be crowd-sourced. Adopting an outcome-led approach can really help. This means setting high-level organisational goals and allowing individual departments and teams the flexibility to decide how best to meet them.
4. Be realistic about what can be achieved
Over-promotion and tokenism serve no-one’s interest and can create a negative culture – managing diversity doesn’t mean sacrificing a sense of broader fairness. It’s much better to be honest about the situation and be clear about what you’re doing to improve it. This can include ensuring that there are good role models and advocates throughout the organisation, including at the most senior tiers.
5. Build a wider recruitment pool
Your annual intake of new employees can be a great way of increasing diversity, both quickly and over time. You might want to think about creating volunteering opportunities and internships for a range of potential future employees by working with organisations that have good links into communities. And look for examples of how these experiences have benefited service users and services.
6. Use and understand the data that is collected
More data than ever are collected today but there is a lack of people with skills to interpret and use the information to benefit services. Aim to improve how data are analysed and presented to make them easily accessible and to keep diversity on the agenda. This can help members, officers and the community to really understand what the data are telling us and so ask good follow-up questions.
7. Make impact assessment real
The best public sector bodies use the equality impact assessment process not as a box-ticking exercise but as a way for top teams and managers to make real decisions. Incorporating equality and diversity into the mainstream of your organisation’s decision-making makes good business sense. As well as reinforcing the views and knowledge of a diverse workforce, such an approach can protect the organisation from costly judicial reviews.
8. Coach, don’t preach
Poor diversity practice can often stem from lack of confidence of middle and junior managers. Take a coaching and supportive approach to improving managers’ capacity, rather than immediately going for a more adversarial or punitive model. While serious breaches of diversity protocols obviously do need to be taken seriously, the less you can avoid heavy-handed tactics, the more your managers are likely to feel confident in sharing their concerns and issues.
9. Really listen to customers and service users
Now more than ever, public services need to listen to the experience of users, to ensure that limited resources hit their target. Have you considered how and in what way you can use your diverse workforce in these processes? A large supermarket chain OPM worked with recently made an explicit point of adapting recruitment processes to ensure that staff in their stores reflected, as far as possible, the communities in which they were based.
10. Take an appreciative approach
Appreciative Inquiry is a way of encouraging participants to reflect and build on what works. It is particularly helpful if you are looking for shifts in behaviours and in times of significant change and low morale. By identifying and celebrating ‘the best of’ you can value individuals and build a positive culture for change.
Tim Whitworth is a senior fellow at the Office for Public Management. He works with managers and senior leaders across the public sector, most recently with equality and diversity advisers in local authorities in London. www.opm.co.uk
This article first appeared in the June issue of Public Finance
