National Inclusion Week 2023 (25th Sept – 1st Oct) celebrates and recognises inclusion in all its forms. It highlights the importance of inclusive practices, particularly within the workplace, to educate business leaders on their role in the quest for equality.

This year’s theme Take Action Make Impact is a call to action for every member of an organisation, from leaders to I&D professionals, both teams and individuals.

National Inclusion Week also offers an opportunity for staff to focus on and demonstrate commitment to inclusion to all those who are working outside an organisation, including clients and stakeholders. It acts as a platform and a catalyst for discussions around inclusion and diversity within the workplace and can be a great springboard for ideas.  

Having an inclusive environment helps people to fulfil their potential. In combination with diversity, an inclusive workplace will benefit from a 60% improvement in decision-making and a 19% increase in revenue compared to their competitors, reflecting the power of united teams.

Initiatives such as National Inclusion Week are significantly important in not just recognising and celebrating inclusion and diversity, but also in raising awareness and removing the barriers which are still standing in the way for specific groups of people. For instance, it is key in helping increase female representation within UK industry and further inspiring the younger female generation to follow a career in STEM.

We are seeing some encouraging signs – for instance, research in 2022 showed that 16.5% of those working in engineering are female, compared to 10.5% as reported in 2010. However, it is still insufficient; this growth also needs to be reflected across all areas of work where women are underrepresented.

As an older generation of engineers and manufacturers retire, there is high demand for skilled workers. Take the construction sector, where a national skills shortage has been exacerbated due to the pandemic and Brexit, with 217,000 new workers needed by 2025.

This shortage makes attracting more women into the profession even more important to help widen the pool of people to recruit to fill this skills gap. Not only will encouraging more women into a STEM career help to address this gap, it will also create stronger businesses with better and more rounded solutions to problems.

Improvements have also been made to recruit women to STEM roles in recent years, with 30% of core STEM roles expected to be filled by women by 2030.

‘Inclusivity’ is one of our main values at Ford & Stanley, reflected in our ‘Million Better Workdays’ mission and our senior client account team’s very own Rebecca Lee and Danielle Peach recently becoming accredited STEM ambassadors. It’s important to us to ensure that we’re doing all we can to create a happy, safe and healthy work environment through creating ‘better workdays’ for all of our people where we trust, value and respect each other and celebrate our diversity.