CEIS Group’s EDI journey

Making a Scotland a better place to live and work is our mission, and that includes making our society a more inclusive place. In order to do that we need to lead by example. That’s why we’ve been working on making our business more inclusive.

We sat down with Executive Operations Manager Jo Seagrave to talk about our EDI journey, how it began, why it’s important and about what we’ve learned on the journey so far.

What Is Your Role?

I’m the Executive Operations Manager for CEIS Group. I’ve worked at CEIS since 2014, first managing internal CEIS communications and programme events, and more recently as operations manager for the Group. I also manage events on behalf of clients who don’t have internal event management capacity or in recent times who are new to organising digital events.  I am also responsible for the Group marketing.

How Did CEIS’ EDI Journey Begin?

Our EDI journey began in 2020 when we took initial steps to make our communications more accessible. This included small things like making sure we use ‘Alt text’ on all images posted through social media and on our website. Alt text is the written content that screen readers read aloud to users with visual impairments or that appears if an image fails to load.

In 2021, our former CEO Ian Mitchell engaged with Inclusion Scotland to discuss supporting their internship programme aimed at providing opportunities for disabled people. We agreed a post in the Events and Marketing team would be a good option.

I worked with Naomi Waite who was the Employment Officer at the time. Naomi worked with me to review our entire recruitment and selection process to maximise accessibility. I found it eye-opening because it demonstrated to me  how making small changes can make a huge difference.

Little changes we had to make were:

• Open the application window for longer (4 weeks)
• Use tailored recruitment channels to target people from protected characteristics e.g. Inclusion Scotland, Black Professionals Scotland and Good Moves
• Provide a contact person for application questions
• Offer video or audio applications as an alternative to written applications
• Adapt some of the language in our job spec to be simpler and more concise
• Consider what skills and qualifications were truly essential for the role e.g. is it really necessary for someone to hold a driving license or have good verbal communication skills in particular roles or can they use public transport or effectively communicate using other means such as written; and
• Advise reasonable adjustments would be made such as providing interview questions ahead of time.

Once we offered the position to the most suitable candidate, the next step was to look at our induction process. We held a meeting with the candidate ahead of them starting to understand what support we could provide to help them effectively carry out the role. This involved understanding if they had any learning style preferences, physical, mental or technological access requirements, caring responsibilities etc.

This was also when we discovered ‘Access to Work‘, a government funded grant that disabled people can apply for to support with communication costs for interviews or specialist equipment, software and training to support them in their job.

The team at Inclusion Scotland were superb and provided me with a lot of support, guidance and reassurance throughout the whole process. I can’t recommend their programme and support highly enough.

Employerability Training

The internship was a huge success for us – so much so that our intern left early to accept a full time job.

Building on this experience, we signed up to Inclusion Scotland’s ‘Employerability’ training to further improve the recruitment and retention of disabled employees.  The training provided useful resources and guidance, including this toolkit: https://inclusionscotland.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Real-Inclusion-Employerability-Toolkit-1.pdf.

EQIA Training

Around the same time, a group of colleagues also participated in Equality Impact Assessment (EQIA) training which is a process designed to ensure no unlawful discrimination against people with protected characteristics.

After this training, we established a working group of three employees to conduct EQIA screenings of all our internal policies and procedures. These policies are then reviewed by a subgroup, before being sent to Board to be approved.

Accessible Events and Communications

In 2022, we began planning the Social Enterprise Policy & Practice Conference, which we themed Inclusion and Diversity. Topics included:

• ‘Building an inclusive economy’
• ‘Inclusive Working Practices’
• ‘Identifying and Overcoming Barriers for Inclusion’.

I reached out to the Scottish Union of Supported Employment (SUSE) who run an annual conference to look at how we could make our conference accessible.

This turned out to be a very fruitful and timely connection as the team told me about Apt – a Public Social Partnership (PSP) funded by the Scottish Government aimed at reducing the Disability Employment Gap for which they are the lead partner and which we later signed up to.

At the end of 2022, the marketing team also attended the Accessibility for Managers and Leaders webinar and participated in a free website accessibility audit. This was via the ‘Accessibility for All’ project funded by the Scottish Government to raise awareness and provide guidance on how to make workplaces and the internet more inclusive and accessible.

This webinar helped us understand how to make our communications more accessible and taking part in the audit was hugely beneficial. Passion4Social conducted our audit. Their team were great to work with, talking us through the reports and supporting us with changes. This led us to making instantaneous changes to our website to rectify the following issues:

• Not enough contrast to clearly read links on the pages
• Sub-menus not seen by keyboards
• Text size too small
• Phone numbers not linked for quick dial

We are in the process of making further changes and adding an accessibility statement to our website.

Apt

Following an introduction to Amrit Kaur at SUSE, we quickly signed up to Apt.  This provided funded support to become a more accessible employer.

Our first step was a comprehensive assessment conducted by our assigned Apt partner, Enable works. They provided a list of recommendations, including:

• Disability awareness training for staff
• Applying for Disability Confident accreditation (Level 1)
• Support with developing easy read documents
• Updating our policies with a glossary of terms describing definitions of disability, mental health, neurodiversity etc

Since undergoing the assessment we have:

• Conducted an internal diversity profile of staff
• Organised staff training to increase awareness of disability and reasonable adjustments
• Achieved Disability Confident accreditation (Level 1)
• Participated in an accessibility review of our premises
• Reviewed our digital recruitment processes and strategies
• Completed Easy Read training

What Are the Next Steps?

We were fortunate to access funded services to support us in understanding and implementing actions to become a more inclusive employer. With our funding coming to an end, the next step for us is to create a roadmap for us to continue this important work.

As part of this plan, we’ll need to look at how to roll our learning out across our Group of companies, considering business commitments, staff capacity and costs.

We also want to share and celebrate what we are doing and continue to learn from others.

One key thing I’ve taken away is this: whilst we made changes to our recruitment and selection process after the Employerability training this wasn’t enough!

It was all very well stating on our applications that we welcomed applications from diverse candidates, however not talking about what we’re doing and our imagery, communications and website not reflecting this, meant that any potential candidates may have been put off from applying.

Whilst we may have stated on our application forms and recruitment adverts that we welcomed applications from diverse candidates, we weren’t implementing the required practice which made these applications, or our website, accessible.

In the end, this could have resulted in putting people off from applying. Ultimately, you can’t just talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk!

What Advice Would You Give to People Looking at Starting Their EDI Journey and Diversifying Their Workforce?

If you’re looking to start your EDI journey, here are some of the tips I’ve learned:

• There are lots of programmes, agencies, support, networks and events you can tap into mentioned above, particularly in the social enterprise sector – we’re a pretty supportive and collaborative bunch. Reach out to fellow organisations to see where they are on their journey, and how you can support each other. Also, don’t be scared to get it wrong. People would rather see you get something wrong but at least see you’re trying. We can learn from our mistakes. Just get the ball rolling.
• Share your challenges and achievements (like in this blog post!). This helps drive internal and external engagement and hopefully encourages others to share what they’re doing, no matter how big or small. There will always be something useful others can takeaway.

EDI is a huge topic and there’s so much you can do. However, it’s important to understand what is reasonable for you to do.

We have certainly benefited from starting our EDI journey and taking steps to making our organisation more inclusive and accessible. So much so, the most recent hire into the Events and Marketing team, Hannah Roussel advised they never felt comfortable disclosing their disability in previous job applications but felt assured and comfortable disclosing it when applying for the job with us. This made my heart sing!