Business in the Community Ireland: ELEVATE, the Inclusive Workplace Pledge

46 of Ireland’s largest companies have publicly committed to improving inclusivity and diversity in their workplaces by signing up to ELEVATE, the Business in the Community Ireland (BITCI) inclusive workplace pledge.

Amongst them are A&L Goodbody, Accenture, Actavo, AIB Group, Allianz; Aviva General Insurance, Aviva Life & Pensions, Bank of Ireland Group, Bidvest Noonan, BT, Central Bank of Ireland, Coillte, Compass Group Ireland, Cook Medical Ireland Ltd., Cork Chamber, Deloitte, DHL Supply Chain, Diageo Ireland, Dublin Bus, eir, EirGrid plc, Energia, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Fujitsu Ireland, Gas Networks Ireland, HEINEKEN Ireland, HSBC Ireland, Iarnród Éireann, Irish Cement Limited, Irish Water, Janssen Sciences Ireland UC, Janssen Pharmaceutical Sciences UC, Marks & Spencer (Ireland) Ltd, Maveric Contractors, Mercury Engineering, Momentum Support, Musgrave Group, Ornua, Permanent TSB, Roadstone Ltd., RSA Group, Sky Ireland, Sodexo, Ireland, SSE Ireland, Tesco Ireland, Veolia and William Fry.

Specifically, signatories must:

Provide a diversity profile data of their own workforce starting with their senior management team.
Take at least one action to improve inclusion within their own workforce and publish this action and the expected outcome.
Measure the impact of actions and be accountable for progress made/or not and report on same.

“The global pandemic and movements such as #BlackLivesMatter have shone a spotlight on the major inequality in our society. Companies have a fundamental role to play and know that they have to do more. We are at the foothills of realising truly inclusive workplaces, but the power of a collective response from BITCI members and learning from each other will lead to continuous improvement as we have seen previously with our Low Carbon Pledge.”
- Tomás Sercovich, CEO, Business in the Community Ireland (BITCI)

The vision of the ELEVATE Pledge is to build a workforce reflective of society, starting now. The Pledge, which must be signed by the CEO, asks companies to commit to profiling their diversity and to take action to embed inclusion. BITCI will publish a progress report on an annual basis with the first report due in mid-2022.

BITCI recently commissioned Deloitte to assist with the research for a new report – Diversity and Inclusion in Focus – which highlights the inequalities in society and the barriers to inclusion. The BITCI Report found that compared to the general population:

A person with a disability is four and a half times more likely to be unemployed.
A black person is six times more likely to be unemployed.
A Traveller 13 times more likely to be unemployed.

As part of the Diversity and Inclusion in Focus report, Deloitte ran a series of focus groups in early 2021 involving participants from employment support NGOs and businesses. Some of the following situations were disclosed:

Being told by recruiters to change their names to make them more acceptable to Irish employers.
Employers and recruiters not understanding the visa process.
Frustration that their education and skills, being non-Irish, were neither recognised nor appreciated.
Being in low paid jobs that in no ways reflected their experience,
Being asked to apply for a job that they were competently doing but not passing the standardised aptitude test.

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