PROGRESS HIGHLIGHTS
Introducing Our Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Manager
We now have our Diversity, Inclusion and Equity manager; Karys Coker (pronouns she/her). If you’re curious, or just want to put a face to a name, her Linkedin profile is here. As part of her role, she’ll be running the community updates and fielding and questions or suggestions you may have, you can reach her at: diversity@everpress.com.
Building Partnerships
An inclusive workplace culture requires multiple perspectives. That means we’re putting a big focus on building partnerships, the first of which is with the D&I consultancy Hustle Crew. Our partnership with Hustle Crew is multifaceted:
- While we’re learning we want to give back. To this end we’re launching a content series that will see our community share their insights on working in the creative industries with the Hustle Crew community. To kick this off, the Hustle Crew community have put their questions to four members of our creative community; these insights will be rolled out as interviews on The Block.
- Likewise, Hustle Crew will be using their expertise to answer questions from our community and team about D&I in the creative industries, to be answered in an IGTV video series. Questions can be submitted here!
- And we’re running the Hustle Crew x Everpress pop up store too, to spotlight designs by Black and Brown creatives. Nikki Adebiyi, Estelle Ebenga Hénot, Birungi Kawooya and Matthew Steven Pierce, were selected for this, and their designs will launch in November.
Internal Changes
We are now in the process of finalising our employee handbook with sections devoted to diversity and inclusion and to wellness too. Foremost this is about outlining to all of our employees what inclusion means at Everpress, and letting employees know what we expect from them and what they can expect from us.
FINDINGS FROM OUR EQUALITY MONITORING SURVEY
As part of our commitment to transparency we’re outlining the results of our survey in full, and what steps we’ll be taking in accordance too. We’ve had this in place since September 2019, but this time round we expanded the categories that we measured in order to get a fuller picture of our team.
Gender Identity
56.8% of our workforce identify as female, a 3% increase from three months prior and a 26% increase over six months. Alongside this 5.4% of Everpress identify as non binary and 37.8% identify as male.
As part of our roadmap we’re running a full calendar of workshops, and the first one, which focused on identity and gender, has already taken place. It enabled employees to explore the difference between sex and gender, and to have honest conversations about their understanding and experiences too. Alongside this, we have reviewed all our job descriptions to ensure that we are using as little gendered language as possible, to help make sure that all applicants feel welcome to apply for roles at Everpress.
Race and Ethnicity
Our workforce is predominantly white, with 67.7% identifying as white, 13.5% as mixed, 8.1% as Black, 5.4% as Asian, 2.7% as belonging to another ethnic group and 2.7% preferring not to say. Over the last three months we have seen an increase of 30% in the amount of BAME employees at Everpress, and an increase of 60% over the last six months.
In order to improve diversity we are now implementing a blind CV review process. This will include steps like removing any details from CVs which might indicate things like the applicant’s gender or social class. Companies that implement processes like this generally find that they meet with more diverse applicants and make more offers to applicants from underrepresented groups. We know that we possess an implicit bias and that it is not good enough to rely just on good intentions so we want to implement extra measures like these into our recruitment processes.
Socio-Economic Background
Everyone was asked to decide their socio-economic background, with 67.7% of our workforce saying they came from a higher one, 24.3% identifying as being from a lower one, 5.4% registering as unsure and 2.7% not wanting to disclose.
We’ve taken a two-pronged approach to address the fact that the majority of our workforce has grown up with an element of privilege. Firstly, one of our ongoing workshops will be a Hustle Crew-led session, “Understanding Bias”, on the 16th October.
The second part of this centres around how we can give back to our community, and as such we have partnered with two colleges in Hackney to create internship opportunities for the students. We want to ensure that as well as actively seeking candidates from lower socio-economic backgrounds that we are also doing our part to ensure that the people who come from these backgrounds are equipped with the resources they need to enter our industry.
NEXT STEPS
We’re going to keep building on the findings from the equality monitoring survey, and evaluating trends we collect from the quarterly survey. We’re also going to begin to measure satisfaction so we can understand how different underrepresented groups feel about their working culture.
Going forward our strategy has a threefold focus on:
- Transparency and Honesty: Ensuring we keep our diversity findings public, and continue to update our community and team so that we can be held accountable.
- Belonging: One of our foremost priorities is, and will continue to be, ensuring every member of our workforce feels that they belong at Everpress.
- Giving: It’s vital to give back to the community we are a part of, both locally and more broadly in an industry sense. We’ll continue working on partnerships and initiatives to achieve this.
Long term have a three, six and twelve month agenda. Over the next three months we want to focus on education and empowerment, and we’ve put a lot of our immediate focus into rolling out workshops. Over the next six months we will be collecting more data so that we can observe trends and better understand our workplace. Within the next 12 months we want to have 50% of the workforce contributing to the diversity and inclusion agenda. This will be multifaceted, and will include steps like contributing to Everpress mentorship programs, or joining our internal diversity and inclusion committee.
We are committed to building a culture that serves all of our employees, prioritises their safety and works to serve the interests of our wider community. We want to continue to be transparent and as part of this we are always open to feedback. If you have any questions or suggestions you can email us: diversity@everpress.com.
