Our commitments to tackling racism and anti-black behaviour, as well as enhancing ethnic diversity.
Ismail Amla, Chief Growth officer for Capita, shares our next stage of action around racism and anti-black behaviour.
Like many of you, I was shocked by what happened to George Floyd in the USA. It made us all in the leadership team at Capita think about actions that we should take as a business to tackle racism and anti-black behaviour, and enhance ethnic diversity.
- Stage 1 of that plan was taking a stand and publicly announcing our commitment to fight inequalities wherever they may be, which our CEO Jon Lewis endorsed and published.
- Stage 2 was to sit down and listen to our colleague's concerns and get their feedback on what they felt about anti-black behaviours and what could be done about them. We created an advisory group and spent time listening to over two and a half thousand employees to find out what their insights were.
- We’re now at the third stage of that process where we are committed to act.
We will continue to have conversations with all of our colleagues on an ongoing basis, but in the meantime we want commit to ACTIONS moving forward and we have created three initial clear steps:
Firstly
We will ensure there is an inclusive culture at Capita with zero tolerance to racism.
We will not tolerate any form of racism, harassment or bullying in this company and we will empower our colleagues to speak up knowing that their issues will be dealt with swiftly and appropriately.
We will also be transparent about our ethnicity data and ethnicity pay gap data and we will publish these in our annual reports.
Secondly
We will commit to a sustainable representation of ethnic diversity in the communities we operate in at all levels in the workplace.
We will start in the UK targeting at least 15% of colleagues coming from a BAME background and include a target of at least 5% black within that.
Additionally we will begin a new advocacy programme to help move BAME colleagues into senior management positions.
Thirdly
We are committed to raising awareness of racism in the workplace. We will introduce reverse mentoring, increasing the understanding of what black colleagues experience everyday and their view of the world.
And we will ensure that we will take our learnings and embed them not just with us but with our clients, suppliers and our communities.
This is just the start of change for our organisation. We know it’s not good enough to stop there. We will continue to challenge ourselves and our businesses and continue to listen.
Systemic racism affects everyone and every company but we will commit to continuing the struggle to make it a thing of the past.
