Our Levelling the Playing Field strategic partners, the Black Training and Enterprise Group (BTEG), have produced an Inclusive Employers Toolkit to help businesses increase the recruitment, retention and progression of young black men.
With many of Levelling the Playing Field’s Local Delivery Partners focused on employment outcomes for their participants, focus on increasing diversity and reducing inequality in the workplace is of great relevance to our project.
Although the toolkit focuses primarily on employment of black males in the construction and digital technology industries in London, its principles can be applied across all under-represented groups, employment sectors and geographical locations.
The toolkit’s findings are based on BTEG research conducted over two years with 46 employers across London and 200 young black men engaging in discussions, focus groups and consultations about their experiences of seeking good quality construction and digital sector jobs, and the actions they believe would lead to fairer outcomes.
“The toolkit empowers employers with a practical resource which they can use to stimulate meaningful change in their organisations,” BTEG Chief Executive, Jeremy Crook OBE, told us.
“We’ve taken the learning from extensive research and produced something which will hopefully lead to a change in behaviours and shift in attitudes for companies who engage with the initiative.”
BTEG is a national charity which champions fairness, challenges discrimination and pioneers innovative solutions to empower black, Asian and minority ethnic communities through education, employment and enterprise.
Their activities involve working with Government, business, public services, black, Asian and ethnic minority organisations and the media. The Inclusive Employers Toolkit is just one of many projects that helps promote equality in many areas.
The toolkit is intended for use by senior leaders in companies of all sizes. It contains a series of actions they should take to review the representation of young black men within their workforce and practical steps to address any under-representation. The actions are easy to follow and sequential; the early ones lay the foundations which subsequent actions build on. Jeremy says: “Earlier this year I chaired a workshop on the Department for Education’s 5 Cities programme which promotes apprenticeships among under-represented groups in Greater Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, London and Leicester.
“Local partners highlighted the need for practical guidance for employers on how to embed diversity and inclusion in their organisations because there is still a lot of word-of-mouth recruitment.
"We looked for good practice case studies focused on young black men but there aren’t many in the toolkit because there aren’t many existing examples to choose from. That’s why we need it in the first place. The GLA want to add good practice examples as employers start to implement the toolkit.”
The research behind the toolkit was commissioned by the Greater London Authority (GLA) to advance the work of the Mayor of London’s Workforce Integration Network (WIN), which aims to improve pathways to employment amongst under-represented groups in technology and construction.
In the toolkit, the Mayor, Sadiq Khan, comments: “Please do work with us by adopting this guidance in your organisation, no matter its size. I want businesses to be bold and actively engage with this challenge. Do not shy away from the difficult but crucial internal conversations and find out what you can do to recruit, and retain, young black men in your workforce.”