What LiveWest's Diversity and Inclusion Strategy looks like six months in

In October 2021 we launched our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategy, showing our commitment to creating a fair and inclusive community for both our colleagues and customers. 

Our EDI strategy sets out how we will achieve our goal of making LiveWest a fully inclusive organisation, which listens and responds to the views of everyone.

Six months on from our strategy's launch, we have already achieved a lot:

Board recruitment

We have recently recruited seven new Board and Committee members, which will help strengthen and diversify our Board. We have increased the number of women on our Boards and Committees by 7%, BAME people by 16% and people from the LGBTQ+ community by 10%.

 

New EDI section on our website and new diverse imagery

We have refreshed the EDI page of our website so that our customers and potential new colleagues can see all the work that we are doing to make us an Inclusive Employer. 

We have created new imagery to use in our communications, as it is important to us that people feel represented when they look at our website.

We have plans to continue improving our EDI page and the diversity of our images.

 

We are a Sunflower member

In October 2021, we became a sunflower organisation to support the confidence, growth and strength shown by people with hidden disabilities.  We have created LiveWest sunflower lanyards so our colleagues do not have to wear two.

 

Improved training and inclusion workshops for our colleagues 

Over the last few months, our Executive team and Board both attended an inclusion focused workshop run in partnership with Inclusive Employers. Our aim is to have all our Line Managers take part in this course by the end of 2022/23.

In February 2022, we introduced training to our customer service teams to better support customers with poor mental health and to promote disability awareness.

 

Supporting our colleagues

Names are an important part of people’s identity and heritage. When names are mispronounced it can be really hurtful and we want to do our best to prevent this at LiveWest. Our colleagues now have the option to share name pronunciations in their email signatures, as well as the option to add gender pronouns to their email signature. 

 

Celebrating diversity

Throughout March 2022 we changed our logo and shared stories from our colleagues and customers to raise awareness of disabilities and long-term health conditions. We also shared our wide range of accessibility services available to our customers. 

We also celebrated International Women’s Day and Mental Health First Aid’s ‘My Whole Self’ campaign.

Pride month is coming up in June and we are already organising exciting plans to celebrate as a business.