Women in Financial Services
Men for Inclusion - Retaining Talent
Mark.Freed / 17 Feb 2022
Men for Inclusion are bringing together men who already understand the benefits of diversity and want to accelerate towards a more inclusive world and workplace. Together we can learn and co-operate with each other through our events and workshops. Together we can be agents of change supporting our colleagues who face greater challenges due to being members of under represented groups.
We host a bi-weekly 'Inclusionist Interaction' Zoom sessions, which are an opportunity for you to meet up with other members of the community, collaborate and share experiences. The Men for Inclusion team are always on hand to bring topics to the table and moderate the discussion.
Below, we have written a recap on our last session where we discussed the highs and lows of recruitment.
Retaining Talent:
We talked about the hard barriers and need for initiatives like flexible working, parental leave, job shares, returner schemes, child care etc...and more importantly, about the softer often unseen barriers to women succeeding and flourishing in their careers. You can see a visual representation of this in the image below. Credit to Jen de Vries.
The examples discussed moving upwards from the centre of the illustration:
- Validation: We can help women feel validated by ensuring that they are credited and recognised for their expertise/ideas and they are given a platform to share/have their say without interruption.
- Develop Skills and Capacity: We should not make assumptions about a women’s career, desire to take on a task, ability – we should ask them. We should also ensure that office housework, less high profile tasks etc are distributed equally – and ask women not to volunteer for them!
- Build Networks: We should recognise that male/male social (informal and formal) bonds are a relative advantage and ensure that we are inclusive.
- Further Opportunity and Promotability: We should ensure that our promotion processes are fair and equitable. Capability and merit are judged on to the same standards and we are not making assumptions about a persons desire for promotion.
If we do these things and more then we will stop our colleagues falling down the spiral.
Recruiting Talent:
We discussed the pro’s and con’s of unitising AI and Competency based techniques in the interview process. We also discussed the relative attractiveness of promoting the solutions to the hard barriers (as above) vs the culture in the recruitment process. Hiring by referrals and from the Old Boys Club.
The point was made about how high a priority seeking diverse candidates is in a recruitment process that is driven by ‘time to hire’ and ‘cost of hire’. Do we need to turn recruitment process on their head? When, for most roles in our industry, 80% of the talent pool is male and the 20% are more loyal, less likely to want to expose themselves to the poor lived experience of the recruitment process and being more inclined to respond to an appropriate tap on the shoulder from a friend – advertising the roles on a website and LinkedIn – because it is quick and cheap – will not provide a balanced short list.
If this topic sparked an interest with you, please don't hesitate to get involved with Men for Inclusion, or reach out directly to myself for an informal conversation mark.freed@e2w.co
This list of events is always being updated, so please check back regularly to see what’s coming next. We hope to see you at an event soon.
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