EDI Case Study resource 2025
Key Findings – Focus on what works
Takeaways
- The evidence suggests many traditional EDI approaches and interventions have very little impact
- More change can be delivered for less organisational energy by taking the time to work out what works for your organisation
- Prioritising and focusing on particular interventions, then pausing, reviewing and learning from them and improving them is the best approach
- If things are not working, don’t do them just because it feels like everyone is doing them
Many organisations reported that they had started with a ‘do as much as possible approach’ which included interventions including a full awareness calendar, a suite of employee resource groups (e.g. a race equality network, women’s network or LGBTQ+ group), an EDI strategy, vision, mission and/or framework, a broad range of recruitment practices and training for managers, development programmes targeted at specific groups, external consultants, and more.
However, after a while it became clear that this was proving expensive (and too resource intensive for smaller organisations), time consuming for staff and managers, and there was a feeling that the organisation was losing valuable commercial time – or that focus was dropping from the EDI initiatives over time. Ironically, some organisations found that doing too much was particularly impactful for their employees from underrepresented groups – who were not only part of the employee resource groups, but also called upon to ensure a representative picture at recruitment events, in interviews and to share their experiences at awareness days – drawing them away from their day job and impacting on their own productivity and progression.
“We call it the female partner tax, you are drawn into stuff because representation is important, but because there are fewer of us, it takes up our time and detracts from the day job, possibly impacting on progression”
All organisations we spoke to said that they were happy to invest that time and money if it was making a difference – but that they had started to wonder if the ‘do everything’ approach was actually doing anything to fix the issue. This was strongly reflected in the 2024 Inclusion at Work Panel findings which indicated that there was “high workplace spending on EDI initiatives but poor results and low understanding of what works, and doesn’t.”
“We were doing everything. Now we’re focusing on what works”
Acacium Group, an IHPN member (~5000 staff, £1.4bn) has recently made the shift to an evidence-based approach focused on fewer interventions that it knows will actually shift the dial.
“We’ve been on a journey. At one point in time, there was no awareness, no cultural days, no conversations about equality or inclusion. But we started a few years ago and since then, we’ve had a lot of diversity and inclusion content, including a full cultural awareness calendar, multiple inclusion groups, lots of training. But it became very time consuming – we noticed staff getting disengaged, and people feeling like the business was losing too much commercial time. At one point, it felt like there was something every day.
We’ve now shifted our approach to be evidence based – we are no less committed to change, but are now hyper-focused on things that work. For example:
- We identified that leadership communications, particularly from the CEO, had 10 times as many views as HR or DEI led communications. When we post something from a business leader that feels authentic, it gives permission for staff to engage and lands with people.
- Following this discovery, each leader in our business is hosting a different panel for Black History Month. This has been key in emphasising that it is a collective problem and we all need to have the conversations
- We are focusing on conversations and open dialogue. We are also prepared to try things and accept they don’t work for us at the moment. Reverse mentoring was one example – we realised that those who signed up were largely already aware. It worked best for people who were already open to a different way of thinking.
- We shifted our talent programme – it is no longer targeted at ethnicity but more broadly at underrepresented talent and staff are able to self-identify as underrepresented to access the programme. Our year-long underrepresented talent programme is a coached programme designed by the participants – the first cohort is 12 people. It focuses on personal development, barriers, growth mindset, leadership, influencing and communication skills. The participants emphasised that they don’t want automatic promotions – it’s not about their characteristics but about their skills and experience and a toolkit that can support them to get there.
- We’ve broadened our forums to include those that have influence or ideas on how to solve the problem, rather than just those who are experiencing the challenges – so including men in the women in tech forum for example.
- We’ve done a lot of training, but we’ve also learnt a lot from our training about what works well. It’s not about the training content, but about the discussion it prompts. The practical, hands-on learning goes much further than the theoretical and awareness-based training. We had to make a lot of changes after our initial pilot of our DEI Impact training – so always pilot your training first to see how it lands. We’ve also seen how the conversation has shifted year on year from refreshing the training – it feels like slow progress, but the progress is discernible.
- We’ve realised our managers are the ones who will make decisions and act in the way that will most impact our diversity – so we can now focus on equipping those managers with the right skills to build inclusive talent and get the best person for the job (regardless of characteristics). There are 190 managers on our inclusive leadership training. That includes understanding the ways in which traditional recruitment practices favour certain types of people – so if we want the best, most inclusive workforce, that includes understanding how to set questions to bring out the best in everyone, sending questions in advance, understanding neurodiversity.
- We’ve realised how important data is to the mission – we are spending a huge amount of resource on initiatives and need to ensure we know what is working and isn’t working. We’ve done a big push on encouraging people to disclose their EDI data, and collecting it during the recruitment process. We want to see how successful we are being. We have realised we need to accept we won’t have perfect data, but we need enough data to know when we are shifting the dial.
It’s working. We know that lots of actions have added up over the five years and we are starting to see them pay dividends. Our candidate pool is becoming more diverse and we are able to reduce the ‘drop off points’ for different groups in the interview process – understanding where our recruitment process was not working for certain people. We recently reduced our headcount by 8%, but our BAME talent only reduced by 4%.
“If I was a small organisation, I would do one thing at a time, and focus on the feedback loop – act, assess, improve. Try one webinar, talk or chat – one feedback session a year, but pause and stop and talk and think about it properly”
Useful resource: Focusing on what works for workplace diversity.