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Mears signs up to the Inclusive Culture Pledge 2020

At Mears, we understand that having an inclusive culture is important as it helps us deliver better services and care to our customers, build great partnerships and recruit and retain a more diverse staff. As part of our continued commitment to embed an inclusive and diverse culture, we are proud to have signed up to the Inclusive Culture Pledge 2020 with the EW Group.

Diversity and inclusion are a foundation stone for our values, a fundamental part of our day-to-day work and key to our continued business success. Since April 2019, we have implemented a number of actions to further reduce the risk of pay inequality in the organisation.

These include:

  • The centralised recruitment team established to improve compliance with agreed standards and procedures.
  • Annual pay change arrangements introduced to minimise ad-hoc pay changes.
  • A new Pay and Bonus policy will provide additional clarity on pay governance.
  • Job Evaluation and external pay benchmarking is being carried out to ensure that pay and grading decisions are fair and transparent.
  • Unconscious bias training has been delivered to senior managers to support appropriate recruitment and promotion outcomes.
  • Succession planning process for senior and middle managers is underway to create talent pools and provide additional development opportunities, including senior management mentoring, to identified successors.
  • People Plans are being developed for Business Units which will address agreed targets for balanced workforce composition and issues and concerns in the workplace which will enhance attraction and retention.
  • Continuing to encourage all colleagues to update their personal info on our HR system, to enable better monitoring and management of all employee life cycle events and use of the data to inform business decisions.
  • Encouraging more women into senior management roles across the Group, more women into front-line operational roles and more men into carer roles.
  • We have embraced legislation and good practice to secure the best candidates are appointed into roles, regardless of their gender or other factors covered by the Equality Act.

Throughout the year, our colleagues will receive specialist support in the following areas: Gender Pay Gap, Inclusive Leadership, Inclusive Recruitment, Cultural Intelligence, Measuring Success and Accessible Communications.