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Corps Security has formally launched Corps Together, a comprehensive campaign to improve equality, diversity and inclusion engagement across the organisation. The programme, which began over a year ago, aims to create a culture where heritage and differences are valued and celebrated and build an organisation which treats inclusion as an expectation not an aspiration.
A group of volunteers, known as guardians, were recruited from within the business to take personal responsibility for the six protected characteristics: age, sex, religion, disability, gender and race.
The campaign includes the introduction of an ED&I charter which sets out the company level commitments to each Corps colleague and underpins the Corps value Everyone Matters. The senior team reviewed all Corps policies, procedures and recruitment processes to ensure ED&I best practice, introduced a Corps Together website, a short video and a quarterly magazine to engage people with the initiative together with a dedicated helpline/ email line to deal with any issues and panel support for HR issues or grievances so people feel supported if they’re raising a ED&I issue. There is also annual mandatory E&DI training for everyone in the business which is now undertaken using MOONHUB’s innovative virtual reality training platform.
The guardians created a calendar of key dates across the six protective characteristics including faith festivals, LGBTQ History Month, Pride month and Black History Month and organised celebratory events for some of these key dates as well as social media activity.
Corps’ annual Your Voice Matters colleague survey in summer 2021 demonstrated a growing understanding of ED&I issues thanks to the Corps Together initiative but with clear room for improvement. More than 60 per cent of people are aware of Corps Together, just over 40 per cent are aware of their guardian team members, almost 70 per cent feel Corps proactively promotes equality diversity and inclusion and a similar number feel they can approach Corps if they have an issue relating to equality, diversity and inclusion.
“These results show that even where people aren’t aware of Corps Together, the majority feel Corps actively promotes equality, diversity and inclusion,” said Seetan Varsani, director of major accounts and strategic development, who led the campaign. “We will measure and hope to see a year-on-year improvement in these scores.”
The guardians are also planning an annual ED&I awards scheme and want to use the official launch to get more engagement from site-based colleagues. “We want people to feel not just included but a sense of belonging,” added Varsani.
Corps is also exploring the adoption of ISO 30415 – the new business quality standard in ED&I – with the aim to achieve this in 2022.
“As a social enterprise, people are at our very heart. Corps Together demonstrates that we value each and every one of our more than 3,000 people and want to celebrate our diversity,” added Paul Lotter, managing director of Corps Security.
