Civil Service Live Network: Meeting the new diversity targets

Suzannah Brecknell
381 days ago

The Civil Service recently set some new diversity targets aiming to achieve the following by 2013 (with a stretch target of doing so by 2011):

     39% of the Senior Civil Service to be women (35.6% at September 2010).
     34% of top management posts to be held by women (29.2% at September 2010).
     5% of the Senior Civil Service to be minority ethnic staff (4.3% of the known population at September 2010).
      5% of the Senior Civil Service to be disabled people (3.3% of the known population at September 2010).

We'll be writing about these targets in a future issue of Civil Service World, but I wondered what you think of them. Which ones will be hardest to achive and why? And what one thing do you think the civil service could do to help departments achieve these targets?

Joanna Rowland-Stuart

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Joanna Rowland-Stuart
381 days ago

It would be nice to see these targets met by 2013, but doing it by 2011 is going to be a real stretch.

Gender: The fact is that to get sufficient people (of any gender) into senior posts in any organisation will rely on having a sufficiently large pool of trained, experienced and enthusiastic staff of that gender at the lower grades who can advance. This means that a rigourous inspection of existing training and promotions processes (centring around outcomes more than the actual mechanics) needs to be done. If the TEE pool is not large enough, then find out why and remedy it.

Ethnicity: The same applies as for women. Also, one needs to look at whether certain departments have over and under representation of EM personnel in specific grades, compared to others, and establish why.

Disability: Work needs to be done regarding increasing the number of disabled staff declaring their disability. I find it sad that only 3.3% feel confident enough in their employer to be able to declare their disability, when the true number will be closer to 12%.

In all the above, actively involving the unions and staff groups is essential.

Peter Trayner

Peter Trayner
381 days ago

These 'targets' would be far more achievable if the proper career structure was put back in place. Far too many people who are better at talking/boasting get jobs whereas 'doers' remain in the background. Political Correctness has gone too far.

For Disabled people it is far too often a case of 'I don't think they could manage the stairs' rather than 'wow! what a good person how can we help them so we get the best'!!

For Ethnicity - I havent, myself, noticed the problem but I would advocate removal of the Ethnicity questionaire and all questions relating to it. In fact, most Ethnics would say 'leave us alone - we don't want all this attention'!

For Diversity - you cannot base a promotion or job applicant merely on the grounds of ' they've not done this before lets give them a go' or ' we haven't enough of so-and-so people so we better consider them only'!

If you want to fill the upper ranks with worthwhile people then get those who can do the job according to the people around them regardless of who they are.

(Hiopefully this posting will work better than the last two I have tried)!

Suzannah Brecknell

Suzannah Brecknell
379 days ago

Thanks both of you for commenting.

I agree that 2011 will be a real stretch, unless perhaps departments have been using their re-structuring process to try and improve the diversity profile of certain teams (though I'm not sure, given my lack of HR training, how this might work legally). And of course there is a risk that the downsizing/restructuring which almost all departments are undertaking will actually make diversity worse.

Do you think there would be any particular reasons as to why the TEE pools for women and EM groups would be lower? Are we starting to talk about wider societal reasons rather than simply CS training and promotion?

Peter Trayner

Peter Trayner
379 days ago

Regrettably I feel that Human Nature (or management selfishness) will be a huge telling factor in this.

I very much doubt if 'Women' will really have a major problem - looking at the Civil Service overall females are widely and well represented. (I am quite open to being proved wrong on this point).

Ethnic minority are not so well reperesented but we have to be careful of the reasons. It is a very silly thing to do to simply fill a position on an 'origin' basis. People selected for any post must be worth the post and able to do the job.I am by no means saying that Ethnic Minorities cannot do whatever - merely that we must not bow to pressure for the wrong reasons.

Disability is a far more dangerous area - while I would never go down this road therre are people who would consider the additionale needs of a disabled person to be both costly and unnecessary. A disabled person runs a far greater risk of being 'removed' (for being too much trouble) than either of the other two groups mentioned above.

Targets are all very well and in some cases (very few) actually beneficial. Far too often they are either used as an excuse or slavishly followed without recourse to reason. I am a firm believer in the 'natural' order of things and if the person can do the job then so be it. If they can't then they should not be chosen whether they are a member of any particular group or not.

To summarise - I feel that restructuring/resizing will be used as an excuse to remove anyone who causes the management too much trouble for whatever reason. If people took more time to consider suitability and less time on Political Correctness then the service would begin to be worth its name.

Michael ONeill

Michael ONeill
379 days ago

Well I (an ageing white married male, though not a member of any secret male society) attended the first AGM of the Home Office Women 's (HOW) network support group yesterday, at Blackburne House in Liverpool (refreshingly not London for a change). I was actually invited by HOW, which I took to be a great honour. I didn't know what to expect, but ended up being a very active participant in what was a hugely worthwhile day (I hate that PC cliché 'inspiring', but it might apply here).

I don't pull my punches when I get involved with these things, though I do try and throw them so as to give the trainee a chance to duck, or to give an effective reply. I want them to get better at making their case: I do not set out to try and KO them.

Diversity is a tricky subject. Some of what has been said below cannot be completely ignored: people need to be fit to fill the posts they are put into. However, if all we do is pick from the ranks of the oven-ready-talented, then we only perpetuate the privilege that exists in certain diversity 'sectors', because it is they that have ostensibly had the best opportunity to pick up skills and experience by osmosis, and through networking. Similarly, we are all diverse, even within a diversity group, and that must not be forgotten as it is the central point of diversity in so far is it is relevant to successful evolution.

But if we are to build organisations that better reflect, and connect with, the diversity of our population (or market, if you are a marketer, which I once was) then we have to be prepared to take a hit on short term organisational effectiveness while we make the necessary investment. Notwithstanding all that, we should be identifying those with a genuine hunger to learn, improve their skills, to understand the true nature of the responsibilities that come with increasingly senior positions. I would look for signs of proactiveness and potential (that is, talent requiring investment) amongst both individuals and diversity groups (on which score I found the mood at the HOW event was very encouraging). I would not mollycoddle (sorry, I love old fashioned idioms) these individuals/groups; but then I have found that their distinguishing feature is often that they don't expect or want to be treated thus anyway. And I would make it clear that whatever I did, I was doing out of support for them and because I believed it was in their long term interest that I behaved thus. And I would be eagle eyed in dealing with what I identified as prejudice.

By such means, I believe we might improve the numbers of under-represented groups in (the senior management of) our organisations.

I am always concerned though that new networks bring new opportunities for opportunists (a truism, but you get my point I hope), but that others (as usual) get overlooked. I would be looking out for the quiet ones, those less skilled at (or with less opportunity for) networking. Their importance of their (moderating) presence is too often overlooked in the enthusiastic clamour to gain personal promotion by using the advantages (or the membership badge) of a network that is benefiting from a following wind.

Similarly (and especially given the relatively appalling - to use an oxymoron - performance of FTSE 100 companies in appointing 'other than the usual' to their boards) I worry about how ambitions to achieve a more balanced representation of various groups (I'm going to drop 'ordinary working parents' in here for your consideration) may be impacted on as outsourcing brings more commercially driven organisations into the picture in order to (wishfully?) obtain better value for money for the taxpayer (many of whom are of course public servants - go figure).

A final word on 'Disability':

By far the biggest proportion of disabled people comprises those who have acquired a disability in the process of living their lives. This may be from chronic physical illness (type 2 diabetes, for example). It may be long-term industrial injury (repetitive strain such as back injury or joint damage), for which we as a society should feel some sense of responsibility. Perhaps most importantly, it may be mental illness (typically the trio of anxiety, depression, and OCD: obsessive compulsive disorder). Acquired mental illness is recognised as being strongly linked to stress (a key cause of which is losing control over one's own home/working life, such as may happen in periods of great change and uncertainty, or in jobs involving a highly prescriptive approach to work). HR departments and senior management are now very concerned about the indicators of this in organisations (indicators are typically long term sickness, poor performance, a rise in grievances and allegations of bullying). I can speak as someone who has travelled this road when I say that we need to be working especially hard to rehabilitate those who - often through no fault of their own - become unwell and have lost trust, concentration, focus and any sense of joy about (their working) life. To make an analogy: we can only make our clothes from the cloth that is available, and with the supply of fresh new material dwindling (our hard wearing of it has worn it out), we need to understand how we can mend our old clothes and make them useable again. Reconciliation, reconstruction, restoration and recycling is where our focus needs increasingly to be.

From all the above, you can guess that to ask for something as fundamentally important as all this to happen by 2011, or even 2013, is (in my opinion) to misunderstand the nature of the problem (as politicians, ambitious to synchronise success wth their 5 year election cycle may be wont to do). We must ‘do this thing’, and obviously we should have an ambition to want to get on and make it happen, but we MUST recognise that doing it right ascends completely in importance over doing it to some (cynically driven?) target.

Please accept my apologies for the rather long essay

PS - Not sure why Peter Traynor's post appears X number of times (can the blog be de-duplicated?)

Joanna Rowland-Stuart

Joanna Rowland-Stuart
377 days ago

Hello Suzanne

I'm writing from the context of having been an Equality and Diversity (and Inclusion) Adviser in public service (Learning and Skills Council and now Skills Funding Agency) over the last nine years.

One of the things I explored as part of my Postgraduate Diploma course in Managing Diversity in the Workplace was why certain diversity "strands" were under-represented in certain levels of the workplace and over-represented in others.

Women are well represented throughout the Civil Service and particularly in my own Agency, but under-represented at senior managerial level. Most administrative (Band 1) and EO (Band 2) level-equivalent staff in our Agency (we use a different grade system) are women, especially in Administrative grades (80%). At HEO (Band 3 and 4) level-equivalent the numbers are equal, and at SEO (Band 5) and above most managers are male.

http://readingroom.skillsfundingagency.bis.gov.uk/sfa/SFA-Single_Equality_Scheme_Consultation-Word_Version-June_10.doc

· The percentage of women in senior manager posts (band 4 or above) was 50.2 per cent. This is a significant improvement on the 2002 baseline of 43.8 per cent but slightly short of the 2010 goal of 51 per cent.

· The percentage of men in the lowest pay grade (band 1) was 20 per cent. This is a slight improvement on the 2002 baseline of 19 per cent, but some distance from the 2010 goal of 28 per cent.

· The percentage of the workforce from an ethnic minority background was 14.2 per cent. This is significantly higher than both the 2002 baseline of 7.2 per cent and the 2010 goal of 9.1 per cent.

· The percentage of employees from an ethnic minority background in manager posts (band 3 or above) was 9.2 per cent. This is also significantly higher than both the 2002 baseline of 3.8 per cent and the 2010 goal of 7.6 per cent.

· The percentage of employees who declared themselves to have a disability was 4.18 per cent. The 2002 baseline was 3.37 per cent and the 2010 target was 6.7 per cent.

I suspect this is partly a result of most staff here having been initially recruited to the Learning and Skills Council from educational institutions and predecessor organisations such as the Technology Enterprise Councils (which were themselves set up with staff from mostly educational backgrounds).

The lack of women in senior roles is, in my view, the result of:

Ø Many women having to take career breaks to have children or reduce their hours because they have caring responsibilities.

Ø The trend over the nine years I have been here towards the organisation running itself as a business, rather than a service – this brings its own baggage which can act as a deterrent.

Ø The similar trend in work levels – higher workloads and fewer staff mean more stress.

Ø When we ran an Introduction to Management course (from the CMI), we had an even gender split of candidates (most of whom were Band 3). Some Band 2 progressed to Band 3 as a result of the course, and likewise Band 3 to 4. However most Band 1 do not progress beyond Band 2.

Ø The organisation has been moving towards having most posts in Bands 3 and above, with the number of Band 1 posts (which once made up 25% of the organisation) falling sharply.

I have no doubt that the same applies across the Civil Service as a whole, and that there are significantly fewer women in SEO and more senior roles, for many of the same reasons.

As for disability – well the figures speak for themselves. In BIS, 13% of staff have declared a disability. Here, only 4% have. This may well be due to the organisation being seen as a business. People may feel that declaring a disability may restrict their career prospects, even though the organisation is a disability-friendly employer and has an excellent overall track record in supporting disabled members of staff.

For ethnicity, we’re currently over-represented compared to national average statistics, but most ethnic minority staff are in bands 1-3. This is probably a result of our head office being in Coventry (where at least half of our staff are based).