Need

Integrating two cultures after a recent merger and signing up to the 30% club commitments, gave a leading investment firm the ideal opportunity to look at how they were building their culture for the future.

To help them identify what areas to prioritise, to take action on, and particularly to support greater gender parity so asked us to run workshops on understanding unconscious bias and its impact.

Solution

We designed a 3-stage process with their HR team to raise awareness about bias and the impact it can have, and to identify what actions to take to mitigate its effect:

We ran facilitated, punchy workshops for all staff, starting with the Senior leadership team. These looked at what bias is, what our own biases may be, and how they can affect our decision making and communication at work
We then ran follow up sessions several weeks later, for all managers to identify what actions to take, in light of their new awareness and understanding. We encouraged them to debrief ideas with their teams in between the sessions
We supported the firm to focus on different strands of decision-making – recruitment, promotion and development, investment decisions – to identify what changes could be taken to ensure all are transparent and fair

Result

Over 80 people participated in the workshops
Senior team has followed up with updates at all staff meetings and themes have been picked up at the company conference, in order to keep the topic live
They are reviewing recruitment processes including blind CVs, scoring at interviews and broadening the sourcing of new staff
HR Director commented that “The workshops have really helped to galvanise everyone to open up their thinking and to challenge the way we do things. Focal Point ensured that the sessions and guidance have been highly practical throughout and the working groups are an ideal way to keep the momentum going.”