Challenging Royal Mail’s long-standing culture meant making gender diversity a priority
The moment Liza Strong realised diversity had taken on a whole new meaning at Royal Mail Group came just a few months ago, when she asked a transgender champion to speak on a panel at an event for female employees, alongside the business’s CEO and a range of distinguished authors and experts. “I wondered if we were ready,” says Strong (left), the group head of organisational talent and diversity. “But people loved it. She was the one who got all the questions afterwards.”
There have been other key signals too, including Royal Mail taking part in the Pride Festival in London for the first time, and a postbox at the Mount Pleasant sorting office in the capital being painted in rainbow colours.
But shifting the conversation around gender has arguably been the most important part of a broader cultural change initiated by CEO Moya Greene during a time of transformation for the business – as it celebrates its 500th anniversary, it has completed its move from government to private ownership, and has worked hard to create a new culture and embrace technology.
With the new “positive and professional” environment that entailed, it had simply become unacceptable for women to feel unwelcome, Strong believes: “Among the frontline, we had a history of bullying and harassment in ways that were quite subtle. If you have a delivery office staffed by a group of people who’ve worked together for 20 years – and we do have a long-tenure mindset – there’s a banter and an ease of interaction that comes from years of familiarity. When you introduce one or two women, or people of difference, that becomes really challenging.”
There was also the issue of sheer scale. Royal Mail employs around 149,000 people delivering to more than 29 million addresses. Two years ago, just 14 per cent of its employees were female, and raising that by just 2 per cent in the intervening period has required a huge effort. “Our CEO believes that employing more women will change the culture,” says Strong, whose HR career has taken in spells at EE and International Power. “When you bring women into a delivery office or a mail sorting plant, it changes the feeling around the place. And a big part of my role is making sure diversity is integrated into talent management practices, and deployed as a lever for culture change.”
That has meant examining what happens at a local level, concentrating on the very specific issues that hold women back. Strong points to the issues of access to female toilets (which sometimes had to be locked if men were using them), uniforms (which were often “unflattering”) and unprofessional language at work as just a few examples.
Practical initiatives have helped solve some of these quirks, as has ensuring women are visible in every part of the workforce. But broader change has required organisational intervention. “We’ve looked at every point in the employee life cycle,” says Strong. “How we attract women, how we keep them, and what makes it difficult for them environmentally.”
Within two months of starting with the company, all frontline women are given an opportunity to take part in an ‘onboarding interview’ aimed at identifying any difficulties they are experiencing, and any reasons they might want to leave the business. All senior managers have taken part in unconscious bias training and hiring managers are required to complete an unconscious bias e-learning module as part of wider interviewing training. Assessor panels are expected to be ‘balanced’ in diversity terms, even if they can’t contain women.
Royal Mail is also pioneering balanced shortlisting, where any shortlist for frontline roles must have an equal gender split. “It’s not common practice, but one we can make a very good case for,” says Strong. All senior succession pipelines have diversity targets across gender and ethnicity, and all cohorts of graduates and new managers must also meet targets. Even suppliers are being “worked very hard” to improve their record on gender equality.
Most importantly, senior men – rather than being seen as bystanders in this period of change – are actively encouraged to champion diversity. “When I first started dealing with diversity, I studiously constructed a business case to talk to managers commercially about why it would make Royal Mail stronger and more innovative to have a more diverse workforce,” says Strong. “It served a purpose up to a point. But once you have hardcore operators becoming ardent advocates, other managers take notice and listen to them.
“For example, we filmed a delivery director saying that having women in his delivery office is the best thing that’s ever happened. It’s changed the culture completely, and the level of conflict and dispute has dropped. I want people like that to be the face of diversity, not me. HR might set up the structures, but the operators own it.”
Strong’s work has been championed by Danny Kalman and Stephen Frost, who have detailed it in their new book, Inclusive Talent Management. And for Frost – head of diversity at the London 2012 Olympics – Royal Mail’s subtle, ongoing work to redefine what it means to be an employee has encouraged people to think about diversity in a more natural, less divisive way than some traditional approaches.
The numbers bear testament to impressive initial progress. Female successors have now been identified for half of all critical roles and eight of 38 regional mail centres are currently managed by women. Female engagement scores are up 2 per cent year on year, and pride and culture are rated particularly highly.
Strong admits not everything is perfect yet – “making these sort of changes in a large organisation is a five-year initiative” – but the culture has shifted significantly. And those who can’t or won’t get on board, she says, will notice the difference: “It’ll start to feel uncomfortable for those who aren’t up for change. Some changes are subtle and organic, but diversity changes and creating change for an inclusive culture are a certainty, not a negotiable. It’s for the good of the business and everyone in it.”