Report summary
This report covers how we are meeting our obligations as a county council and as an employer, the profile of our workforce and how our approaches support equality, diversity and inclusion. In the last year we have:
- improved our data collection of the disability status of our employees
- added transgender and non-binary gender options to our diversity recording in the employee data system which will be reported in next year and will help us to identify any difference experienced by these groups
- calculated the ethnicity and disability pay gaps to help us understand any pay differentials between different groups
- developed tools to support employees across the workforce to access flexible working and to share information about their personal circumstances to increase opportunity for support, understanding and reasonable adjustments. These include:
- personal support passport
- day one right to flexible working
- increased awareness of the different needs of employees through additional information resources on our intranet and regular communications to employees from our staff network groups
- encouraged our employees to take part in awareness and celebration events, including Race Equality Week, Black History Month and Carers Rights Day
- signed up to the Social Care Race Equality Standard to identify differences for employees from ethnic minority backgrounds working in our Children’s Services and Adult Social Care and Community Wellbeing directorates
- planned to use the information from the Social Care Race Equality Standard to provide us with an area to pilot new ways to improve the experience of all employees from ethnic minority backgrounds and a method to monitor its success
- increased the number of services collecting and considering customer equality data