EDI is about more than just awareness days: Inclusive Employers outlined to delegates why having a strategic approach to EDI is vital for its success. Carol Buchanan, head of inclusion qualifications at the company, said: “The very first thing organisations do when they’re thinking about doing inclusion work is… awareness raising.” She said they start with awareness days celebrating diversity without having a “why” or an approach that is “strategic”. “If it is the only thing that you’re doing, what happens really quickly is that the people who are interested and want to get involved, they’re the people who come to everything you do,” Buchanan continued. “Soon they start getting annoyed because you’re not actually changing anything in the organisation… and those who don’t understand it get annoyed as well because they wonder why you’re having this conversation. So it’s two steps back before you start moving forward.” She said a strategic approach would have a “vision”, which will tell you where you are trying to get to and why you are going there, a “strategy”, which will outline a roadmap of how you move forward in the next few years, and a “plan”, which will add detail to how the strategy will be delivered. #hr #cipd #edi #diversity