ENEI Awards: Land Registry wins the Representative Workforce Award 2015

Land Registry wins the Representative Workforce Award 2015 at the enei Awards 2015.

‘The enei Awards recognise the commitment of organisations in achieving diverse and inclusive workplaces and celebrates the teams and individuals who are really making a difference.

These leading organisations are proud to share their achievements and the best practices needed to provide insight for other organisations to develop unique responses to the challenges in their workplaces. It is clear from the award entries that the best organisations recognise both the benefits of a diverse and inclusive workforce and that continually raising the bar is the best way to compete in a Global and National marketplace.’

Foreword by Denise Keating – Cheif Exective, enei

Land Registry, a self-financing government department created in 1862, registers the ownership of land and property (more than 23 million titles) in England and Wales and employs c.4,400 people. Their priorities for 2014/15 is to be recognised as a world leader in the digital delivery of land registration services and in the management and re-use of land and property data.

Land Registry’s Declaration Campaign aims to increase response rates of the ethnic background of at least 98% and the religion or belief and sexual orientation of at least 80% of its workforce by December 2015. This is a strategic equality objective action designed to ensure the workforce profile, talent management, discipline, grievance and managing attendance processes can be audited across all diversity strands.

The drivers for collecting workforce data included building reputation, improving productivity, recruiting and retaining the best people, creating an inclusive workplace, providing specific adjustments/training or interventions, identifying inequalities and avoiding risk.

Diversity monitoring started in 2009. However, by 2012, only 21% of the workforce had declared their status which compared to 99% of employees recording their disability status and 95% recording their ethnicity.

To enable the business to reach the targets, the Declaration Campaign was launched (May 2012). The three year campaign has seen a 38% increase of declaration in these two categories to 59%.

To increase declaration rates actions included:
● e-mails from the HR Director encouraging employees to voluntarily
update their personal data
● A newsletter, news articles and targeted emails to staff who had
not declared
● local diversity champions used poster campaigns and FAQs on the intranet
● In 2015, a video emphasised confidentiality and the business benefits
of obtaining workforce data

The yearly Equality Information Report provides workforce profile information which assists diversity target monitoring in place for both SCS and feeder grades for women, minority ethnic and employees with disabilities.

Data collected is used anonymously to identify areas where there may be a disproportionate impact on certain groups and highlight differences between groups in terms of satisfaction, engagement and progression plus identify, tackle and prevent issues that would otherwise undermine
employee engagement and productivity.

For example, a perceived lack of career progression for under represented employees leading to the ‘Pathways Career Development Programme’ and line managers were trained in unconscious bias to enable them to rate individual performance fairly.

The success of the Campaign is seen as best practice in central Civil Service guidance.

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