Marking National Inclusion Week

This blog comes from Ceri Hodgkinson, People Director for Bristol Waste Company.

 

This year’s theme for National Inclusion Week is “Build Trust. Navigate Change”.

At Bristol Waste, trust is built through our actions. It means treating each other with dignity and respect, listening to different perspectives, creating opportunities for everyone to succeed, and ensuring that every colleague feels valued and included. Over the last year, we’ve taken several important steps to strengthen inclusion across Bristol Waste. Some of the key actions we’ve delivered include:

• Dignity at Work training across the workforce, including awareness of the duty to prevent sexual harassment.
• Embedding EDI principles into our induction programme and leadership development.
• Refreshing our family-friendly policies, including support relating to fertility treatment, miscarriage and parental leave.
• Launching Hive to improve access to wellbeing support, benefits and information.
• Creating new routes into employment through partnerships with organisations such as Ashley Community Housing (ACH), HMP Bristol and Project 1625.
• Delivering pension, financial wellbeing and support sessions across our sites.
• Continuing to invest in wellbeing support, including our Employee Assistance Programme, Mental Health First Aiders and Chaplaincy Service.

Our commitments

We’re also proud to have recently signed the Just Transition Declaration, helping to ensure that as our industry evolves and we move towards a greener future, we do so in a way that is fair for our colleagues, communities and the city we serve.

We are also working towards signing the Armed Forces Covenant. Signing it will be our commitment to stand behind colleagues with a military connection, and there will be more on this soon.

Moments that matter

Throughout the year, we continue to recognise and celebrate the diversity of our workforce through events and awareness campaigns that matter to our colleagues and communities, including Bristol Pride, International Women’s Day, Neurodiversity Celebration Week and Black History Month.

Looking ahead

We’re committed to building on this progress. In the coming year, we’ll continue to focus on increasing representation, strengthening our partnerships to attract talent from underrepresented groups, improving how we celebrate diversity across the business, and providing further EDI and recruitment training for managers.

Consulting with our colleagues

Building an inclusive workplace isn’t something policies do on their own. It depends on all of us at Bristol Waste Company. Our annual Colleague Engagement Survey will run this autumn and is one of the ways we’re listening to our hard working teams.