BBC D&I lead Toby Mildon says organisations must work harder to enshrine diversity and inclusivity into daily practice
Ahead of his session at the CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition next month, Toby Mildon, D&I lead at the BBC, explains why companies need to do more to translate their promises into action.
Diversity and inclusion is a common business ‘buzzphrase’; why are so many organisations committing to it?
The buzz around the D&I agenda is great – if companies take it seriously. Diversity can sometimes be used for publicity, and promoted for all the wrong reasons. If an organisation talks about their diversity and inclusion it positions them in a favourable light within the marketplace, but businesses do need to invest in taking practical, tangible action on the whole D&I agenda.
What can companies do to ensure they are working towards a more diverse recruitment process and culture?
The BBC’s philosophy is to hardwire diversity and inclusion into the way it does business. You don’t need to go through expensive cultural change programmes: just try to embed D&I practices into the way you practise business every day – like you do for health and safety, for example. Examine all the components of the business around hiring, retaining and developing people, and how you work with suppliers and a supply chain to ensure D&I is embedded into the fabric of your organisation.
What are the main benefits of committing to a diverse workforce?
In the most basic sense, being diverse gets you greater results – whatever ‘results’ look like for your organisation. Creativity is important to the BBC, but for a law firm it could be winning cases. The risk is that when a lot of organisations talk about diversity they are talking about the big areas such as gender, ethnicity, disability and sexuality – but it’s far more layered than that. Real D&I is all about leveraging lived experience: the education you had, the family background you grew up with, whether you moved around the country or the world or stayed in one place. All these things make up an individual’s lived experience, which can only enrich a workplace.
How can organisations tackle unconscious bias when allocating work assignments?
Managers lean on biases – after all, it’s human nature – because they just want to get the job done (and are usually under pressure to do so), so they end up going to the same people, and those who are not approached rarely get the opportunity to show they can do the job. A common way to tackle unconscious bias is to raise awareness of it, and a lot of companies are running unconscious bias training. But that has quite a short shelf life; when you go through courses and training, you often forget what you are taught within six months if the training is not reinforced. It’s really important that businesses find ways of being able to tackle systemic bias as well.
One thing we have experimented with at the BBC is blind skills auditioning – it’s like The Voice talent show but for recruitment. We scrapped the use of CVs and set all candidates a challenge instead, to prove they have the ‘deal breaker’ skills for that job. The manager examines the quality of work supplied by the candidate without knowing anything else about them. Only when a manager deems a candidate’s work worthy of an interview do we reveal their identity. We have seen a dramatic increase in the diversity of candidates shortlisted for interview since piloting this system.
Toby Mildon is speaking at ‘Diversity and Innovation: an approach for the 21st century workplace’ at the CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition on 9 November