The fight for gender equality in the workplace is far from over. While women have made great progress in breaking down barriers and advancing in their careers, there is still a significant gender gap that needs to be addressed. It is my pleasure to discuss the changes we have implemented at EssenceMediacom to promote gender equality and inclusivity in the workplace. By highlighting the value that these steps bring, we hope to inspire other companies to take similar actions and create a more equitable and supportive work environment for all employees.

Active Allyship

Eliminating microaggressions and promoting active allyship are crucial building blocks for creating an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive. But it’s not just about what we can do as individuals but also how we work together to bridge the gender pay gap and foster growth for all. Being able to identify and address microaggression and inappropriate behaviour is central to this, but it can be daunting to take the first step. We’ve looked to make this easier by offering training for our current and future employees to give them confidence to act if situations arise. Voicing these concerns can be difficult, so we’ve tried to ensure that employees have access to safe spaces where they can hold open and honest conversations. 

Pioneering Policies

Having a clear set of policies to back up our values and turn them into actions is essential for creating a balanced working environment, especially when it comes to supporting employees with children. Every situation is different, and many aspects of parenting from transitioning back to the workplace to finding a healthy work-life balance can present their own challenges. That’s why we have extended our support to cover a range of scenarios, including surrogacy, fertility, carers, premature birth and neonatal care, breastfeeding, and pregnancy loss, and offer parental bereavement leave. 

As a step towards closing the gender gap in the workforce, EssenceMediacom, in collaboration with The Uninvisibility Project and The WPP network, launched a returners programme for mid-life women in 2021. The programme is designed to promote a better representation of mid-life and experienced women, who are either new to the industry or aiming to return after a long-term break. 

Prioritising Parents - Parental Leave and Progression 

Historically, many women have felt parental leave has led them to fall behind in the workplace. This has encouraged us to apply a policy for sharing vacancies and opportunities with those on parental leave, which has resulted in us actively promoting women on maternity leave. 

With more mothers expressing that ‘growing shame of how they are managing the impossible balancing act’, we are aware that juggling this can be very stressful. This is why we’ve chosen to offer enhanced pay and policies to support maternity and shared parental leave to all eligible employees. We’ve also looked for ways to further enhance this support, for example, by providing paid time off to support women returning to the workplace after parental leave.

Community and Support

A survey by Debenhams Ottaway, in collaboration with the Hertfordshire branch of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), showed that only 25% of businesses have a menopause policy. Of this proportion, 75% felt that it had had a positive impact. With 1 in 10 women leaving work due to menopause symptoms, it is of the utmost importance to ensure all management, irrespective of gender or age, are educated on how to have empathetic and informed conversations around menopause. We address this by supporting women experiencing perimenopause and menopausal symptoms, and also offer performance coaching to ensure everyone feels they can navigate the transition successfully and are encouraged to stay in the workplace even when symptoms arise. 

In addition to being more likely to lose their jobs during the pandemic, research suggests that during the recent wave of job cuts, women of colour were also more likely to lose their jobs than their white peers. To find a way to proactively mitigate this, we introduced Elevate, a leadership development sponsorship experience for black women. This aims to provide personal and professional development to enhance leadership capabilities and grow their skillset.

We find that programmes like this are an effective way of promoting female leadership and fostering a culture that actively seeks to tackle some of the challenges that hold women back in the workplace. We’ve also introduced a three-part Fast Forward Accelerate programme which is designed to help female leaders achieve more of their professional goals. It targets the unique challenges faced by underrepresented groups, offering constructive tools, so that they can thrive in the face of any workplace challenge.

Ensuring that our talented women can have progressive careers in the company is a priority for us. That’s why support has to cover the entire career pathway, especially at the point where we start to see a reduction in female representation in the industry. The peer-to-peer support programme enables women to share their experiences and lean on each other for advice, support and guidance.

There are also some simple, practical steps we can take to build a diverse and gender-balanced workforce. For example, we ensure a 50:50 candidate list for any senior positions, to eliminate any possibility of women being overlooked when recruiting for these roles.

Safe Spaces

Finally, we know that transparency and trust are crucial in the upkeep of a healthy work environment. As part of our community spaces, we provide a forum for open discussions on a variety of topics, giving staff the opportunity to exchange experiences, advice, or insights with each other. We have run community spaces for working parents, parents of children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) and neurodiversity, and sessions focusing on children’s mental health. These are an opportunity to join a community and benefit from an ongoing support network.

These examples are just some of the steps we’ve taken in our efforts to build a more inclusive and gender-balanced work environment. It is an ongoing process, and we are constantly developing and benchmarking these policies to ensure that EssenceMediacom can continue to provide an environment where everyone has the support and opportunities they need to thrive.