You’ve likely had plenty of emails about “ED” over the years.
Most of them probably ending up in your spam box, thanks to their spurious claims to improve virility.
But what about ED&I?
Thanks to my fascinating career, I’ve no choice but to keep up to date with what’s going on in the world of HR, and recently this “new” acronym has popped up.
I haven’t paid too much attention to it as we’ve been rather busy solving client issues, but a couple of weeks back, I quickly found the time when our competitors started pinging emails at our clients, saying that they all needed an ED&I policy.
Preferably the one they’d written.
Naturally, alarm bells were ringing in many of our clients’ heads – “We haven’t got it, we need it, what happens if we don’t get it?” and so on and so forth.
I hopped onto Google, quickly discovering that the initials stood for “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion”.
And then I relaxed.
Yes, all of these things need to be covered in your policies, but if you’re a Gap HR client, you already have them in your staff handbook.
All of our clients have an Equal Opportunities and Dignity at Work policy for their employees, which covers all the points in the ED&I wave.
Panic over – no need to do anything as far as policies are concerned.
That’s not the last word, though.
Because as we’ve rediscovered recently, a policy means nothing if you’re not willing to enforce it, not just on your employees, but on a company-wide basis.
Sadly it’s the case that we regularly see organisations refusing to take appropriate action on a sexual harassment or racism complaint against a manager (especially if it is a senior manager!) because: “Bob is a good guy, been with us for 15 years, always the first to buy a round at the Christmas party, was probably just a bit drunk, he didn’t really mean it”, rather than going through the correct disciplinary policy to ensure the duty of care that the business owes employees is provided.
By all means, make sure you have your ED&I policies up to date, but if you’re not willing to stand behind them when “Bob” makes one of his racist comments, you might just as well press delete.
P.S. And if you don’t have Gap HR policies and you do need an ED&I policy, we can help.
