Verco celebrates Diversity Awareness Month
October is Diversity Awareness Month, an opportunity to speak about the importance of diversity and wellbeing, which are essential to a team’s success. In this article, Helen Reed sheds some light on what Verco is doing to encourage inclusion this month and beyond.
At Verco, our people are at the heart of our organisation. In my role as People and Wellbeing Director, I aim to ensure the employee experience is a positive one. I see firsthand the importance of diversity and celebrating uniqueness.
Diversity Awareness Month is dedicated to celebrating and increasing awareness about different cultures, ethnicities, heritages, abilities, experiences and more. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the importance and positive impact of diversity, as well as the challenges we face when striving for inclusion.
An effective team needs varied perspectives, innovative thinking, and strong collaboration. The more it reflects the diversity of the real world and feels inclusive and welcoming to everyone, the more positively our employees feel about working and connecting with others.
At Verco, we strongly believe diversity is a strength that needs to be embraced. As a people-facing organisation, it is integral to what we do. However, we can always increase awareness, understanding, and collaboration. Though we celebrate diversity awareness in October, it's something we constantly need to be championing.
This month and beyond...
This month’s activities focus on fostering education, empathy, engagement and action around diversity. They include:
A knowledge share by John Hutchinson, a Learning Disability Nurse, exploring how to create a supportive work environment for our neurodivergent colleagues.
Training pathways on understanding unconscious bias, LGBTQ+ inclusion, psychological safety, neurodiversity, dyslexia, faith, belief and non-belief.
Internal news articles sharing information about Diversity Awareness Month, Black History Month and more.
Internal, colleague-led spotlights on personal experiences. The first one will cover dyslexia.
In terms of what we’re doing outside of Diversity Awareness Month, we are currently developing a Verco Support Toolkit to support all our team members. This will outline the help available for those who struggle with noisy working environments, isolated working, distractions and more. It will highlight existing policies, available tech solutions and specialist advice, helping everyone feel cared for and supported during their time at work. We hope it will benefit the whole team by allowing them to function at their best, and/or educating them on how to support their colleagues.
For more on Verco’s mission and team, click here.