Being a place of true belonging where everyone, regardless of background, feels empowered not just to build a career but is able to thrive and grow is central to who we are at Midland Heart. Over the last few years, we’ve genuinely taken the time to sit down and listen to people’s experience of working with us. We want to fully understand how our colleagues feel and to make sure that our Diversity & Inclusion action plans reflect who we are as an organisation, are meaningful and will have lasting positive impact.
As a result of these conversations we have, alongside our colleague-led Inclusion Networks, implemented targeted development programmes for black and female colleagues, increased our maternity and adoption pay levels and launched a race, racism and stereotypes training for all colleagues.
These actions, and many others, have supported us to reduce our Gender Pay Gap, increase the number of black colleagues in leadership roles and position us in the UKs top 25 most inclusive places to work two years in a row.
But we know that becoming a true place of belonging is not something that you can tick off as a job done. We have to keep making improvements that are authentic and relevant.
That is why we have today voluntarily announced our Ethnicity Pay Gap. Whilst there is no legal requirement to publish our Ethnicity Pay Gap it’s one of the commitments we made to our colleagues because we believe it is the right thing to do.
Our Ethnicity Pay Gap is a significant measure of how effective our actions around race have been. Going forward the information in this report will help us to understand what improvements we’ve made, help us make better decisions and shape the priorities for our diversity agenda.
I’m proud to say that our Ethnicity Pay Gap currently shows that we have a good representation of Black and Minority Ethnic colleagues compared to our customers and our geography.
Our mean Ethnicity Pay Gap is 10.80% and our median Ethnicity Pay Gap is 8.03%. Whilst these figures are a good starting position, we’re not complacent and are working hard to put measures in place to reduce this pay gap further.
This data will now inform and shape the work we do in partnership with our colleague-led race and ethnicity inclusion network, Unity. We will hold meetings to share all of the information and data we have collected, reach out to colleagues across the organisation for feedback and thoughts before drawing up actions plans for the year ahead.
In the meantime, you can find our first Ethnicity Pay Gap report here.
