EDI Case Study resource 2025
Spotlight on the awareness calendar
“You can get lost in celebrating everything, people get awareness fatigue”
Acacium Group has shifted from celebrating as much as possible on the cultural calendar, with lots of awareness days, to identifying key priorities for the year based on staff data. This has led the company to focus on Black History Month and Pride this year and do those celebrations properly and meaningfully. “One idea for smaller organisations is that when staff join, ask them what holidays they celebrate, or which awareness days they think are most important to mark. You can create a cultural calendar based on your staff and employees, celebrating the true diversity of your workforce rather than following an internet calendar.”
In a similar way, the Private Equity firm has identified three key, relevant themes for the year and mapped the awareness calendar to that. This includes International Women’s Day, as the company is prioritising a better gender balance, Mental Health Week which is relevant to a high performance environment and touches on a wide range of different groups, and UK National Inclusion Week, giving space for a focus on inclusive leadership training in the broadest sense – which the firm sees the need to build in the same way as it builds other core professional skills.
At the Mining Remediation Authority, the employee networks chose which days they want to celebrate, so this means there are 3-5 celebrated throughout the year to various degrees and in ways that the networks think is appropriate. The People Team also support keys dates from a wider organisational perspective, such as National Inclusion Week. The CEO will also mention any other awareness days happening in the regular CEO all colleague calls, just to note them and this sometimes prompts colleagues to write a blog if that awareness day is relevant to them. The Mining Remediation Authority has a very open culture about sharing stories, so colleagues will write a blog about a specific day or week that is relevant to them and their experiences if they want to.
At a medium size law firm, they identify the key celebrations based on their own staff – for example Pride Month is really important, World Mental Health Day and South Asian Heritage Month. There is an open culture so employees will sometimes highlight particular occasions and share their own story. Key to doing this well, according to them, is to make sure it’s more than just an email banner for virtue signalling. It has to be an authentic celebration – and they find network input valuable in planning and leading internal events. For example, as part of South Asian Heritage Month this year the South Asian Employee Network organised an online conversational event around this year’s theme ‘Free to be me’ involving two Partners where The President of Lawyers in Local Government (the professional membership body) shared South Asian family recipes and organised a South Asian Virtual Cook-Along event.
EMS Healthcare found the biggest driver of their colleague celebrations was ‘letting go of control and letting people run with it’. Since the colleague committee now propose what they want the organisation to celebrate, people will proactively go to the EDI champion and suggest things, without HR or communications having to lead it. Creating permission to celebrate has been really powerful.
“If you have something you are celebrating at home, let us all celebrate with you”