Despite its roots as a BAME housing provider, it is not enough to rely on heritage when it comes to creating truly meaningful EDI practice, argues Saarah Bunglawala, diversity business partner at PA Housing
Asra Housing Association began as a BAME housing provider, with an initial purpose of providing homes and services for older Asian people (asra is a Hindi word for shelter). It later merged with Leicester Housing Association, becoming Asra Housing Group and then in 2017, joining Paragon Community Housing to form today’s Paragon Asra, or PA Housing.
We have clear roots from our legacy organisations, but this past purpose is not enough to rely on when moving forward and keeping pace with a vibrant, ever-changing modern world.
For us, equality, diversity, and inclusion are not just agenda items or words to pay lip-service to. Instead, we work to embed EDI across everything we do for colleagues and customers.
We believe the key to true inclusion and wellbeing is an all-encompassing approach and to never stand still – we know there is always more we can do to improve things for those we employ and provide homes and services for.
To successfully embed an inclusive approach, it is important to keep things interesting and ensure wellbeing and inclusion are at the forefront of colleagues’ minds.
This year, we took part in National Inclusion Week, themed The Power of Now. In true PA style, we made it our own and focussed on The Power of Unique, each day concentrating on a different topic, and using the week as an opportunity to encourage take-up for our disability staff group, celebrate uniqueness, and expand the sharing of ideas within our diverse network.
Fresh thinking
In 2019, we launched our award-winning Everybody is Unique campaign. Initially used to celebrate LGBTQ History Awareness month, we quickly realised the campaign sat so well with our approach to equality that we adopted it as an umbrella term for all our EDI activity.
Rather than just having a series of equality boxes to be ticked, ‘Everybody is Unique’ focusses on the individuality of our employees and the support they might need to feel happy and fulfilled at work, not only supporting the nine officially protected characteristics but truly celebrating individualism and making diversity and inclusion a natural part of our organisation.
“For us, equality, diversity, and inclusion are not just agenda items or words to pay lip-service to – we work to embed EDI across everything we do for colleagues and customers”
We also recently launched our 12-week sprint, aimed at delivering small but meaningful improvements for our employees and residents. One of the weeks focussed on ‘a culture to be proud of’ – all about working together to get our culture right for colleagues, who then provide an even greater service for residents.
Another looked at ‘being disability confident,’ an idea which came from talking with a resident. We know that 16% of the customers in our homes have a disability of some sort, and we used the 12-week sprint to better understand their needs and ensure we continually strive to provide inclusive and accessible services.
Getting personal
Once a part of the PA team, from joining us to leaving us and all throughout, employees can see the value we place in their uniqueness and wellbeing. At interviews, we ask, “what makes you unique?” We undertake ‘culture audit’ surveys to see what makes colleagues tick and what motivates them. And we ask why people leave, to monitor any EDI issues.
Looking beyond the diversity characteristics protected by law ensures an organisation has a truly diverse workforce. Mental health, neurodiversity, family situation, and more are considered and used to direct future recruitment and development activities at PA. Underrepresented groups are given insight into decision making, and we provide ‘mutual mentoring’ opportunities to share their experience with senior leaders.
We measure our leaders’ performance against relevant EDI-related criteria, provide diversity training to enable employees to become EDI leaders, and run an ethnicity career progression framework.
Ultimately, as housing associations providing services for, and employing, a vast number of individuals, it is important to not only ensure uniqueness and diversity are celebrated and protected within our own organisations, but to use our influence to positively enhance the EDI approach taken by our partners, and to strive to work with companies who echo our approach.
Image: Saarah Bunglawala, diversity business partner at PA Housing
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