Our ongoing commitment to Anti-Racism

Peridot is an inclusive employer, supportive of diversity, equity and inclusion. We succeed in helping hundreds of organisations every year to diversify their leadership teams and boards. We are currently exploring new ways of demonstrating the impact of our appointments. This is so we can better measure our social impact and contribution to societal challenges such as systemic racism.

As leadership recruiters and board advisors, we can influence change in the systems that perpetuate discrimination. It is our duty and responsibility to do so. We seek to be increasingly inclusive, as well as helping others to improve their practices.

Being actively anti-racist is more than working hard to find diverse candidates, adapting processes, or challenging our clients to overcome their biases. That is standard practice. We also have initiatives that support more Black, Asian and Ethnically Diverse people to reach their leadership potential and secure the platforms needed to influence lasting change.

Over the last year, we have made some progress towards our initiatives and look forward to progressing these further as we settle into a post-covid world. These initiatives include:

• Enabling young Black and Asian future leaders at the start of their career to see what is possible, navigate the challenges, and achieve their full potential through our Sponsor Programme for Young Leaders. This is an inclusive network of Black, Asian and Ethnically Diverse coaches who have committed to support young Black, Asian and Ethnically Diverse managers achieve their future leadership ambition. Our mentors share their lived experiences, inspire, and support the progression of this cohort of future leaders. This program is ready to soft-launch by the end of November 2021 and will gather momentum through 2022.
• Our research team is developing insights into the levels of Black, Asian and Ethnically Diverse representation in leadership and board roles in our key sectors. We have an ongoing research project to identify and scrutinise Black, Asian and Ethnically Diverse representation within the arts and culture sectors and will share our research widely when published. We intend the results to help organisations recruit more responsibly and ensure the right emphasis is placed on diversity and inclusion in the recruitment process. We aim to continuously update and share this knowledge in yearly reports from 2022. We will also begin research into other sectors.
• Our Further Education team have spent much of 2021 working in partnership with other industry leaders and the Black FE Leadership Group to shape a joint commitment to ensuring anti-racist and diverse recruitment practices are implemented across our activities in the Further Education sector. You will find a copy of our statement and the clear commitments we are making to the sector, our clients, our candidates and the wider FE workforce, leadership and governance communities here.

At Peridot Partners we recognise that we all have biases based on our life experience, social upbringing and education. It is important to be aware of these, continue to educate ourselves on diversity, equity and inclusion practice, and help others to break down barriers.  In 2019, all our staff undertook unconscious bias training and by the end of 2021 we will have run a new and extended programme for all staff.

Finally, whilst we are diverse and inclusive in so many ways, and are proud to employ Black, Asian, and ethnic minority staff, our staff team can still better reflect the diversity of our society. Since our initial statement, we have continued to diversify our workplace with most of our new recruits identifying as Black and Asian. We will continue to diversify our staff team and will model inclusive recruitment and workplace practices in the future.

Grant Taylor