Striving for ethnicity diversity in the workplace

In the last couple of years many global organisations have committed to increasing the representation of ethnically diverse colleagues in their businesses, especially at a leadership level.  In this FT article it's encouraging to see that good progress is being made in the Big Four accounting firms in the US, with Deloitte coming out on top with 42% of it's 80,000 strong workforce identifying their race as other than white.

At AMS, we are also committed to increasing the ethnicity representation of our global leadership community.  In the summer of 2020 we committed to doubling the representation by the end of 2021 (which we achieved) and we then re-committed to doubling again by the end of 2023, which we are on track to achieve.

It's always interesting to understand what organisations are committing to doing differently in order to effect change.  At AMS, we have implemented the following:

• Adopted the Rooney Rule when hiring externally, ensuring that we have at least one ethnically diverse candidate on our shortlists
• Signed up to the CBI Change the Race ratio campaign in the UK - as part of this we produced our first ethnicity pay gap report this year.
• Implemented a reverse mentoring programme as way of helping our leaders to better understand the needs of our under-represented talent
• Introduced a development programme to support our under-represented talent
• Soon to be rolling out a new sponsorship programme

I'd like to understand what you are doing to effect change in your organisations.  It's good to see progress being made, but we all collectively need to remain focused on striving for greater ethnicity equity in our organisations.