Diversity at The Information Lab – an update from us

It’s been a little under a year since we made a public statement on race and equality. In June last year we committed to update and evolve many of our work practices in recruitment, events, and staff training to improve the way the company tackles inequality. This is a journey that doesn’t end after 12 months, or 3 years, or by any fixed date; we will work in a continuous improvement manner, incorporating ideas from our team, and from external parties that help us achieve this commitment.  

So what have we done so far? We identified that there were some immediate changes we could make. For example, through a review of our hiring process and training on understanding and removing bias, we re-engineered our recruitment tools to use a more anonymised and standardised scoring system. We also expanded our recruitment partners, particularly focussing on diverse job boards and communities, to actively attract talent that is more representative of our diverse society. We introduced steps to anonymously capture demographic data for all applicants early on to measure progress of improving diversity and be able to adjust where we do not see the results we want.

I am proud of the fact that so many in our team have shown a real passion around the topic of diversity and continue to bring ideas, feedback and thoughtful discussion through our regular Diversity Roundtable meetings. I’m also encouraged by the participation in other events the team has organised, where we have invited thought leaders in diversity to present and discuss with us in their areas of expertise. The Roundtables are chaired by a member, or members of the leadership team and gives everyone a chance to contribute to the discussion, or to simply learn more about what we’re doing and why. We have enjoyed applying our analytical and process automation skills to ideas that have been brought to these meetings such as an ‘observances bot’ which raises awareness and then promotes discussion of culturally and religiously important dates on our internal chat platform, and vizzing survey results allowing us to understand diversity sentiment in our existing teams.

As we enter the second half of 2021, we’ll be able to further analyse the data we’ve been collecting and scrutinise whether our approaches to some of the core outcomes are as we expect – are we supporting diversity and inclusion in the way we said we would and does the data support this? We’ll publish a report on our findings in the months to come. We’ll continue our journey of change and awareness with further guest speakers, training, and open discussion approaches on all diversity considerations. We absolutely recognise that a more diverse team makes us a better company and we are as driven as ever to achieve this.

The Information Lab Management Team