Imagine how dull life would be if everyone was the same. Our differences are the things that make us special and that's why we want to do everything we can to be an inclusive and diverse bunch here at innocent. A big part of that is creating an environment where we value and encourage different ideas and views, so that people at innocent can turn up and thrive, each of us adding to our culture, not fitting into it. Our team is always growing and as we continue to get bigger, we're determined to be a business that represents people from all walks of life.

what we've been doing

In 2018, a group of us kicked off a project to learn as much as we could about inclusion and diversity and what that meant for us here at innocent. To do that, we got inputs from everyone at innocent and experts from outside. We then recommended an approach for how we could make innocent a more diverse place to work. From that recommendation, we came up with the five principles below that we've committed ourselves to. Each principle has its own toolkit of things we do and will do to make it a reality and we've also created a maturity assessment (a fancy term for measuring how much of it we are doing) to decide which tools we implement in each office.

1. keeping our doors open, every step of the way* 

This means making sure that anyone who wants to work with us is given the same fair chance as anyone else. It also means handling the promotion and development stages of their career in the same way. It’s one of the reasons why our recruitment team is in-house and always on the lookout for new ways we can hire people from different walks of life.

*apart from at night – they’re locked then

2. giving everyone a voice and the chance to make things happen

We’ll always make sure that everyone’s opinions, questions and issues are heard, and we all have access to the right training to help us understand each other. This way, everyone can help shape their own diverse place to work – because we can’t be an inclusive business unless every single person has a say.

3. having leaders who are champions of inclusivity

The people up top have to be just as committed to this as everyone else, if not more. They should always be honest and open about everything they’re doing to help, meaning any decisions they make can be challenged by anyone across the business. That’s why everyone gets the chance to grill them at quarterly Q&A meetings. We've also set up a shadow board – a group of people from across innocent with a range of perspectives and backgrounds who’ll shadow our board to make sure decisions made at a senior level are always inclusive.

4. giving everyone access to all the tools they need

Whether they’re on the way or already here, we’ll keep on coming up with new ways to make everyone feel at home. That’s why we offer loads of great stuff like parental leave, flexible working, mental health support and the opportunity to join our affinity groups. These tools might look a bit different across our offices, but the plan is for everyone to get what they need out of them.

5. measuring, learning and sharing

We’ll always keep track of how inclusive and diverse all this work is making us. But if we’re not looking over the innocent walls to see what everyone else is doing, then it means we’re not opening ourselves up to new ideas. To help us grow, we'll always make sure we're listening to people who know what they’re talking about and share our progress as we go. 

what we'll do next

We've got off to a good start but this is just the beginning.

Thanks to all the work we've done so far, we've found out there's some great stuff we're already doing (like our conscious inclusion training), stuff that's happening in some offices but not others (like using specialised job boards to increase diversity of candidates) and some things we still need to put in place (like gathering diversity data at different stages of the recruitment process). 

The next step is to make sure we're doing all the great stuff we can across all our offices. To keep us on track, we've come up with an annual cycle that helps us plot our plans then carry them out. For example, every October we'll send out an I&D survey and every November we'll use the results to map out our plans for the year ahead. We'll then spend December allocating resources and start implementing stuff in January. In June of each year, we'll share how we're getting on in our 'good all round' report. You can read our 2019 report over here.