BITCI Launches its Second Inclusive Workplace Report
On 27th April 2023 Business in the Community Ireland (BITCI) released the second Elevate Pledge Annual Report. The Elevate Pledge was launched in 2021 to challenge and support businesses to build more inclusive workplaces.
The BITCI report presents key findings on data collected from 60 companies spanning 11 sectors and with a collective workforce of over 150,000 people. Diversity profiling is not a trivial task and there are challenges to this, chief among them a reliance on voluntary disclosure of employees. The Report shows that when employers create data driven actions, they see real progress on the diversity profile of their workforce.
There is evidence of robust performance on gender, with female representation at senior and executive levels in Elevate signatory companies higher at 40% which is higher than the national average of 29.7%. This is an impressive statistic, particularly as the overall female representation in the Elevate workforce is at 41%, compared to a national average of 47%. 15% of Elevate signatories have a female CEO against a national average of 13%.
There is an increase in the number of businesses measuring the diversity of their workforce.
The number of Elevate signatories providing data on Disability and Ethnicity doubled compared to last year’s report. However, Disclosure rates for these indicators are still quite low at 11% and 10% respectively. The data indicates that minority groups continue to be under-represented in the workforce. Less than 1% of employees disclosed a disability, when a rate of 7% would be expected, and only 1.7% disclosed an ethnicity other than white, compared to an expectation of 15%.
Tomás Sercovich, CEO, Business in the Community Ireland commented on the report results: “We continue to see a major gap between skills and people shortages in business and jobseekers that are left behind in our society. We simply cannot afford to lose talent. Business must embrace inclusion strategically, not as the right thing to do, but as a fundamental agenda of change. Inclusion is an imperative for all in society and business has the tools and the mindset to make this happen.”
The stigma around membership of the Traveller Community remains high with only three Elevate employees identifying as Traveller. To reflect Irish society, it would be expected that there would be 60 Travellers from the sample disclosed and 600 across the entire Elevate workforce of 150,000 employees. Coupled with the knowledge that unemployment rates within the Traveller community have been at 80% for 30 years – 13 times that of the general population, it is indisputable that more work needs to be done to change this picture.
As businesses mature on their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) agenda, they are linking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to performance management. One third of signatories have reported linking Executive performance measurement to DE&I KPIs with more than 15% linking performance measurement to DE&I KPIs for all colleagues.
In relation to socio-economic inclusion, 7 out of 60 signatories reported data, with 41 employers stating they pay the living wage, while 19 reported that they expect contractors to pay living wages.
In an ongoing effort to combat this inequality, BITCI operates a series of employment programmes aimed at increasing workforce representation of refugees and asylum seekers, people with health issues and disabilities, women distanced from the workplace and members of the Traveller Community. These initiatives support jobseekers to gain and sustain meaningful employment over the long term. Participants receive job coaching tailored to their individual needs in order to build and implement an achievable training and job seeking plan.
Almost 60% of signatories have partnerships with DEIS schools and local communities, participating in educational programmes including those led by BITCI. Early interventions at primary and post-primary level are key to breaking cycles of disadvantage. BITCI believes that these highly impactful interventions will also have a knock-on effect in addressing inclusion in the workplace for today’s students.
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