How to Embrace Diversity & Inclusion in the Workplace

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Please use the email address on the podcast description and we look forward to hearing from you. In this edition, we'll be hearing how to embrace diversity in the workplace, exploring the impact and integration of equality, diversity, and inclusion into different sectors of business and enterprise, as well as sharing practical advice and guidance for leaders. The three terms, equality, diversity, and inclusion are often placed together, but clearly cover three very different areas and nuance.

Equality is something all fair minded people, one would hope, would strive for in life as well as in work. But how do you make a competitive working environment equal and fair for all? Diversity picks up on this idea of fair representation in terms of, and this is not an exhaustive list, sex, gender, race, disability, religion, sexual orientation and socio economic background. What are the benefits of being such a broad church, but how do you stop that becoming just a tick box list?

The inclusion part, though, is key to making everyone feel listened to and part of the whole. The organisation acting as a warm and embracing environment for divergence of thought, and variations of humankind. It's a great aim to strive for, however, leaders have to take decisions and not everyone will feel that decision works for them.

Many organisations have a strong commitment to ED& I and potential employees look to align their values with those of the organisation in the recruitment process. However, is it truly possible to level the playing field at work with just too many conflicting angles to allow equality, diversity and inclusion to function effectively? We hear many business commentators saying equality, diversity and inclusion is simply the right thing to do.

What are the metrics for measuring if ED&I are actually good for business, and can that claim be backed up by evidence? There is much to discuss, from female representation in the workplace and gender pay gaps, to the ethnicity mix in the boardroom and why some groups in society are simply overlooked. Charged with putting all this into context and sharing with us best practice in everything equality, diversity and inclusion is the first ever ED&I lead at Aston Martin.

She has a fascinating background that includes hip hop dancing, time working in Ghana and New York, as well as earning a Master's in International Law at Oxford Brookes University. I'm delighted to welcome to OxTalks, Laura Ayoade. Laura, great to speak with you. Before we delve into ED&I head on, let's learn a little bit about you first of all, if we can. As I understand it, you were raised here in the county and still live locally.

Give us a quick potted life history about the hip hop, the teaching, the time overseas, and how that's ended up with you as ED& I lead at James Bond's car manufacturer of choice.

My interest through school was the civil rights, so I loved history. I loved doing kind of the black civil rights, and some of the kind of histories through that from slavery and the trajectory.

So I chose to transfer to London and do a hip hop dance degree especially so that I can kind of get into the culture behind it and obviously that comes from like a space of racial justice, first and foremost, so that's been where I've wanted to head in terms of my trajectory in terms of ED&I, particularly at the time, ED&I wasn't really a space, I suppose, so I couldn't kind of pinpoint what job I would do eventually.

But I stayed with that trajectory and worked out in the United States, in New York with a hip hop dance conservatory, danced in Broadway Dance Center for some time and danced over there kind of four years in the summers, and also in other spaces. So I went to Ghana for a month and did like African contemporary dance and like still stuck with that kind of racial justice trend of like all different cultural dancers. I then went on to do a range of master's degrees, because why not?

I did a double master's in international performance research and focused again on kind of hip hop as a core identity and understanding the performance, so the performativity of just all kinds of things from protest through to just general happenings and wrote my thesis on how the criminalisation of hip hop impacted black and ethnic minority people, including Latino people in New York City and looked at all kinds of things from the architecture of the city and all

sorts of stuff that went with that and then I did a master's in international human rights law because no one..

So, I looked at policy and I looked at law and I applied for both and I thought about what was best in terms of what I wanted to get out of it and I found that policy is great, but it can be changed and altered so many times by lots of different people, law is like your foundation, your legislation, it's harder to change. It's immense kind of in our society, like the foundations and the basics. So I did international human rights law because it, kind of led on from that racial justice piece.

We've covered lots of things from like globalisation and development, international humanitarian law, which I'm deeply interested in. So my kind of day to day interests would be things like Gaza and stuff like that right now, Ukraine and other spaces that are in war and genocide essentially.

So I did the human rights law so that I could kind of look into the humanitarian law pieces as well, which covers the four major crimes, crimes against humanity, war crimes, aggression and genocide and it was what interested me and I, I did my thesis again, related to hip hop and when I looked into intellectual property law and how people had the rights to protect their forms of cultural expression.

Unfortunately, globally, the only type of choreography protected is for stage and that puts its own issues because the people that are often afforded space on stage are not people of colour. So that kind of showed the racial injustices in those spaces. So I'll use, actually, Australia is a key example because Aboriginals are the only space afforded that protection by law for their forms of cultural identity and expression rather than on stage.

So I utilised that as my foundation for arguing the point, which was, yeah, it was interesting and I had two professors arguing over my thesis, one wanting to fail me and one wanting to give me a first, and I got the first, thankfully, which led me into kind of my ED& I career and I kind of loopholed in through it. I taught through my master's degrees to help pay for them because they're not cheap.

So I was teaching in secondary education mostly through performing arts and that kind of dance space in Oxford, so locally again and then went to work for a local company, Unipart, as their corporate and social responsibility lead. So working under the head of CSR, which happened during a monumental time in our kind of history, it was COVID pandemic.

I started there in March of 2020, five days before lockdown, and also followed on by Floyd, which happened in the May of 2020 and I don't think that murder would have been as significant as it was if we weren't had been locked down and watching it live on TV, which was horrific for so many people and very traumatic.

So that kind of led me into wanting to do more in that space and went on to work for Business in the Community, who are the biggest and largest, oldest responsible business network in the UK. Prince Charles at the time, now King Charles, was the founding member, and, we are essentially inclusion consultants, I suppose.

we are given a range of organisations to consult on best practice and including running the competitions like Time Stop 50 for Women, for example and helping grade those and set that up. So I was responsible for writing some of those questions a few years ago, and benchmarking that, which then saw me work alongside some of the greatest corporates and thought, maybe let's go in house for a bit and see what that's like from a different angle.

So went back in house, similar to Unipart, I suppose, automotive industry originally, and found Aston Martin, came up and they actually signed with Business and the Community at the same time as me taking a role with them, which was coincidental, I have no part in it. But yeah, I went on to Aston Martin purely because I felt that I could make a massive difference there. The racial injustice side is still really important to me.

It's something that, I kind of look at in my free time, I still work for Stand Up to Racism UK, still interested in some of the kind of activist groups, Roads Must Fall in Oxford is a big one. But obviously there's other elements to diversity and inclusion that are really key in business and Aston Martin has a range of focuses at the moment, so I felt that those focuses were something I could align with and work on.

So most of my close friends at the time were from an ethnically minoritised background, mostly Black, Black British, Black international as well and I watched incidences happen on a daily basis that were just not fair at all. Just different expectations on them than there were for me. How I definitely had like privileged opportunities in the same situations as them and I just, it didn't kind of sit well with me.

So, yeah, it was a series of events that made me feel like there was more to be done in that space.

What challenges or obstacles did you face early in your career and how did you overcome them to focus on ED&I?

It's obviously exploded and on the scene since Floyd and since other kind of things that have happened globally and UK as well and so I think navigating like a career in a specific space that's not maths English, those subjects that you get taught at school and I feel careers currently isn't, well it wasn't when I was at school, it wasn't very great in foreseeing other opportunities other than like become a teacher, become a doctor, those kind of things.

I think it's a lot better now and is improving. So I think that was a massive hurdle, hence why I probably did four degrees rather than just one to get to what I got to. I think also given that, obviously ED& I ranges and we'll probably go into a bit more of the protected characteristics and the things that it covers. My background is wholeheartedly in racial justice and obviously I am not a racial minority for the UK.

I am white British, Oxford born and bred, so my parents are my grandparents and so most of my great grandparents. So we're like blue through our veins. So it's hard sometimes navigating with people that don't feel like I am legitimate and backing that space, like I should be a person of colour and actually, I often talk about the fact that the systems of racism, especially in the UK, because our racism is more subtle than some of the spaces in the world, and it's very systematic and systemic.

Those systems were not set up by people of colour, they were set up by colonial spaces and people that look like me and in dismantling them, you're going to need everybody. It's like working for women's equality without involving men, it just doesn't work. Like, you have to have both sides. So I feel quite passionate about standing my ground in that space and supporting that space towards fairness.

somewhere, and that is the inclusion piece, it is the ultimate aim, right, to feel like you belong, to feel that it is your space, and it's hard to achieve. The diversity piece is what kind of comes first for me, like, it's getting a wide range of people, a variety of people in the space, to then make sure that they are included in that space, and through fairness and equality and also equity, which I'll talk about in relation to equality.

So diversity is just a range of people and obviously that will look different from different parts of the UK. If you're based in London, like the percentages are higher and more varied. So you should reflect the community that you serve.

Whereas in Oxford, where we are, like it's a little bit more mixed, than say, I don't know, somewhere out in the Cotswolds but it's not as mixed as London so you need to be kind of looking at the percentages of people that are there to make sure that you are kind of reflecting that and that would give you the diversity of the area.

was based in like Gaydon, like we are in Warwickshire, you would look the metrics for that area to hone in even more detail.

So you'd go into detail there to, like, show that your metrics match or vice versa, if you were looking at like, race, for example, and that was much more, varied in London, you would use, like, the UK overall metrics first, and then you would go, actually, ours are going to be slightly lower than that, and this is the reason, because we sit in this space, and that's not our space.

So yeah, I think it's fairly easy to kind of show those metrics are available through ONS surveys and things like that. Yeah, I don't think it's too difficult to do.

So making sure that they have what they need to start off in the right position in their place and make sure they're heard at the same level as everybody else and there's a massive difference in that. There's so many benefits to it because if you think about having a room of 10 people that all grew up in Oxford and all grew up with the same kind of schooling or went to the same space, had the same friends and the same ideas and same education.

When they're problem solving, they're probably going to come out with opportunities that are quite like each other. So you might get one or two problem solving ideas out of them.

But if you put in a range of people and split that 10 people in lots of different ways through race and gender and all of the different kind of characteristics you can come with, then it's proven that you will probably come out with a range of ideas much more than you would than targeting a group of people that are quite the same.

So of course that can bring more productivity to a business, it gives greater innovation and thought process and diversity of thought in general to be able to create better solutions to problems, especially if you're trying to be more innovative and grow and change things. You're going to need more thought in this space than just the usual.

It depends on the metrics that you place on the business and how achievable those are and we can talk a little bit about one of the key metrics that's been put out from Aston and how achievable that is, because that is a problematic space at the moment and for various reasons, which I can pinpoint to and ED& I changes daily, like the makeup of our country changes daily.

When you have migration and things from war and stuff like that, refugees and asylum seekers, everything changes, so you're going to have to kind of continuously move that benchmark, but I do think that we can get to a space where we reach like a pinnacle where everybody's at least feeling like they belong, because that is the key issue really.

It's like you can throw a bunch of people together that are from all different backgrounds, but unless you put in place all of the things that make them feel like they belong and make them included, then you're not really reaching the ideal inclusion perspective on it. It's the same as if you build a new housing estate, right? You don't put in the amenities, you don't put in the schooling, like, where are they going to go? What are they going to do?

Like, there's so many things that they need to flourish, otherwise they're not going to flourish well.

Like, the project successful and what that success measure looks like is different for each organisation. So for us, it's building a car and making something kind of fantastic and new and how successful that is. You can see when it goes to market and whether they sell out. We have really unique spaces where we, I think for the 110 year anniversary, we did 110 cars. They were sold before they were made, like those are like successes. The inclusion piece is a little bit more nuanced.

So it's listening to your people mostly, thinking about that everyday experience and actually wanting to hear how their experience is, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Like understanding what's working and what's not working, what to keep and what to change, how to grow as an organisation and there's lots of different things that come out of so many different spaces in terms of that experience and for everybody it will be different, like you could have ten people in the room that are the same and that experience will still be different, but when you enable much more diversity that is going to get more complicated and complex

in terms of making sure that you have everything in place to make them feel included, but it's a constant continuous listening cycle of like hearing, accepting feedback, giving feedback and just making sure that they have a place for that.

Recruitment processes should be rigorous, they should follow a range of things from like understanding who that person is and whether they are the right add, not cultural fit, but a cultural add to the business because fit makes you all the same, right? Like you're just fitting into the same to complete the kind of norm that's there, and it should be adding to that.

But yeah, they should be thinking about competency base and skills base, not just who the person is, whether they support the same football team as you or whatever it is that becomes biased in that space.

That's why a lot of organisations will run things like unconscious bias training for recruitment and recruiting managers, because then they can constantly be aware of what their biases are and then challenge them in a space of recruitment, because they should not be making the decisions for the hires, it should be based on merit.

What I miss is the kind of justice space and charity space and like driving real global change. but that's something I'm sure I'll get back to one day, but at Aston, I think it's interesting because there's so many things to work on there and there's great spaces of impact to be made. So it completely drove me to going there. I was thinking, okay, what is the business like? What's it made up of? Okay. It's like 82 percent white men.

That's stark in itself, considering we sit near Birmingham and Coventry, like they're massive hubs of diversity, right? So what are we lacking and what is happening in terms of the higher? So we do have an external commitment of achieving 30 percent women in leadership by 2030. We're at 17 percent right now and it seems quite far off, actually and that's not an Aston Martin issue, that's an automotive industry issue.

There are currently around 22 percent women in the kind of engineering manufacturing space to pull from. So if there isn't a pool of talent, you can't pull from somewhere else, like it doesn't exist, right? So it's thinking about, okay, where does that talent come from?

What gets them into those spaces and actually it's thinking about schools and children often make up their minds around their potential careers or at least the subjects that they want to study by the age of 11 and so it's capturing them before that to think about, okay, could you see yourself in science?

Like, is that something that could interest you or technology or, and actually taking it out of the classroom and thinking about, okay, cause science is just like your everyday subjects in school become like quite samey, right? But there's so much more to science than just the classroom. So taking Aston Martin to them in a way that's manageable for them to kind of get their teeth into and think, okay, could I do this as a career?

It's filmed with all of our people, they come in and film it with a script and think about what we want to do as a project. So for us, it's the building of a car and they, the children have to work in groups across a four week period to kind of create this car. First, it's like the design piece, what do you want it to look like? How cool is it going to be?

And within that, they think about lots of different specifics from engineering, from like aerodynamics, how are you going to make it go faster? What mechanism are you going to use to make it propel forward? And then they kind of get all the bits and pieces from around the classroom, old toilet rolls and boxes to make this car and design it and essentially their teacher takes them through it.

It's a recorded piece, but it can go to any school in the country because it's recorded and far reaching through Ducktu. So we choose to get into the classroom and into the brains of like children from age five to ten early through that opportunity so they can see, okay, this was really cool. What do I need to do? What do I need to study to get to those spaces? So that was a really good partnership for us. We've also come up with a new STEM strategy and thinking about our outreach.

It sits in the learning and development team as well as kind of my space, but looking at lots of opportunities to collaborate with universities, with other secondary schools locally and further afield. But we focus on local just to be kind of, very corporate responsibility and social responsibility, but also we do have a three days in the office kind of set period at the moment.

We're working through our agile working policy at the moment, but we still will require people on site because of the nature of the business. So it's unfair to ask someone from like Edinburgh to come and work for us unless they want to relocate and then that's their choice.

We're like focused on our local areas first and then there's lots of other pieces that go into like awareness days and working with our inclusion network and other inclusion events that happen nationally and globally that we can focus on to kind of drive some of the awareness and the change. One of the pieces we did in 2023, I have to think of the year that it happened, it was International Women's Day.

We opened our Newport Pagnell space to women and girls across the country to come and experience our heritage site, it's incredible.

If you ever want to visit Aston, that's the site to go to because they have all of the old cars, the King's car service there, all of the kind of traditional pieces, the things that just is so lovely about Aston in terms of its history, really and we opened up that space for tours and talks and panel events with the F1 team came to, they bought the Alonzo car at the time, and we had our DBX safety car, like lots of kind of opportunity to actually get inside and feel the product

and be part of our discussion in that space, which I think is also key because people will never really understand what it's like to work in a space unless they can see it, feel it, be part of it. So opening our doors a little bit more is really important in kind of gaining interest and building impact in that space.

It's run by passionate individuals in the organisation that care about inclusivity and making sure that we celebrate everybody always and that's grown organically from one formal inclusion network to a six piece strand. So we still have the overarching inclusion network with their chair, who's amazing, Matthew Harriet Randall, incredible person who just drives that forward.

But we then have these six strands that focus on I Am Gender, so thinking about all things gender and we have various, like, success and impactful stories from that space in particular that I've worked on. We have I Am Well, which focuses on anything wellbeing. I Am Able, which is anything ability and disability, including neurodivergence, so dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD type things.

We have I Am Pride, which is our LGBTQ plus network, which partners really closely with Racing Pride and runs all things kind of I Am Pride month and beyond. We have I Am Embrace, which focuses on race, ethnicity, religion, no religion, belief and other sort of that space and we have I am armed forces, it's our newest one. So the automotive sector hires disproportionate rates of veterans. So we have quite a lot of veterans because of their skill sets, they really fit well with car manufacturing.

So we set up that one two months ago because of the need from the business and those can continue to grow organically, possibly into protected characteristics, possibly beyond inter social mobility, parents and carers and those kind of things and we're building our champions base out at the moment because we're aware that the production floor can't sit at a laptop, can't join meetings as and when is necessary and so we're looking at how we get champions into

those spaces and also our regions, right, because we're international, making sure that everybody is involved in a space and have a representative to go to to hear about some of the kind of awareness days and pieces that we're doing. So this month is Black History Month, next month will be Movember.

So some key dates in the diary that we celebrate and ensure people are included in and then it's all the other stuff of like, we, I think we are one of the only big automotive brands that gives every single employee healthcare at all levels, no matter what level you sit at, you have access to private healthcare.

Those are really good for feeling included because there's no disparity in terms of, oh, you're like not at the grade to achieve it yet, so that everybody has that and then just kind of the general kind of fostering of inclusive spaces, such as opportunities to hear them and their experience. We run a series of roundtables, including with our CEO, he listens to some.

We've just got a new CEO, as you'll probably be aware, but both our new and old CEOs have already engaged with roundtable opportunities and yeah, just listening and hearing us and engaging on some of those pieces. So I think that helps foster the inclusion piece.

Secondly, it's understanding that because we have heard from, especially from production that don't access the space as easy and understand its full potential, that I don't fit into any of those boxes. The word comes up that I'm normal, I don't really fit into that. Like, where do I go? Like, what's for me? And I kind of counter that, that every single person in the business has at the least three protected characteristics at any one time.

Every single person does in the country, so everybody has a sex, they're either male, female, born. Everybody has a race, no matter whether that's a majority race or a minority race and everybody has an age. So they are three protected characteristics under the Equality Act.

So you have those three and for that reason, the network is there for you because they are about protected characteristics and beyond and if there is a group that you foresee being in that space that's not currently there, we can make it, it continues to organically grow and we want to make sure that there's space for everybody.

But equally, we'd expect that you as an employee would want everyone to come to work to feel included and you might have a person in your team that's LGBTQ+ and is not feeling supported and doesn't really know where to go and by you being engaged with I Am Pride, or at least with the network overall, you can be very sure around where to signpost them and support them. So it's about being in it together and supporting each other because you work with people every day.

You all have families, you all have people around you that possibly will fit into a different box to you and make sure that we can kind of include them and then it's thinking about the intersectionality as well of that because you aren't just a gay woman, you are a woman as well, you will have an age, you'll have a race, like, so...

The reality is, if you have a characteristic that fits into a space that's not included as much at the moment, and there are significant ones in the UK, then you already start at a disadvantage.

So we know women in the UK, particularly, and probably globally, we talk about this glass ceiling in the workplace of reaching certain heights and not being able to get beyond that and I mean, Aston's a perfect example of that, we have a C suite that is all men, we were called out for it a couple of years ago.

We are one of the only five organisations in the UK still at that stage and we are working to change that and consider that and so when you layer that with the intersectional approaches, so if you're a woman, you have that glass ceiling. If you're a black woman, it's considered a glass ceiling and then a cement ceiling.

So you've got a lot more to get through because of your sex is an issue to begin with and then you've got your race on top that you're systemically disadvantaged up because of kind of colonial era kind of setup of the UK and how it works currently and also just bias and injustice and kind of ignorance as well as prejudice, right? Like there's layers and layers of it.

So it's important to realise those spaces aren't achieving from an equal playing field and this is where we talk about equity, right?

Like they come in and they feel equal, but if you're given the same opportunity as a white woman and you're a black woman, you're probably not going to achieve in the same way because you've already got something else layered on top of you and we need to understand that we disproportionately have bias towards black women versus white women, there are different things that happen in the recruitment space and opportunity space for those people.

So if you ignore it and say we're just going to group you together because you know you're both women and we should treat you fairly like and equally, it's not really equal. It's the same as giving somebody who's hard of hearing an opportunity to listen to this podcast without an adjustment for them to be able to hear it properly, as giving someone who couldn't hear fully, like, you're saying, well, you both got ears, so, you know, we'll put you in the same box.

It's not fair and it's not starting from the place that each person needs it to make it equal. You need to put that adjustment in and able to get them to start from the same playing field. So we can't ignore it, it has to be raised and it has to be separated and understood to measure it and grow impact on it and make it more inclusive so that then hopefully we don't have to kind of call those spaces out and separate them.

Like, a product that goes over our website to make it easier to read it and then when you're applying to understand that actually their written English might not be perfect.

It might have spelling mistakes because they're dyslexic and then when they get into the interview room, allowing adjustments for that and then thinking about what adjustments might be needed for them to do their job successfully if they're successful in achieving the role and that happens in lots of different spaces, you'll see it in the US with university entry and like the ethnically diverse people of colour like being allowed specific spaces because of data

that's proven and backed up the fact that they do not get the same opportunities. So there's loads of reasons behind it and lots of data to support it.

So first and foremost, listening to the current experiences of your people, thinking about retention, it's listening to exit interviews first and foremost, but also if you can get them, stay interviews. People that could be at risk of flight, but you could save them through a stay interview and understand what is not working for them, what is not like as inclusive for them and why they would want to leave your place of business to go to another is really key.

But then there's like all the other fundamentals first and foremost like data. Data drives like how you build your diversity and understand what you already have and what you're missing. So collecting that is really important and different businesses start from different spaces. You probably all collect gender because you have a gender pay gap to do by law.

Most people are starting to collect ethnicity data because soon, hopefully, the FST data pay gap will also come into play, but it's going beyond that. Like, I would expect protected characteristics as a whole collected.

We know that we collect age because we have to give dates of birth and proof to work in the UK, for example, nationality comes under the race part, so you'd have that, but thinking beyond that, like, thinking about social mobility status is a key one for a lot of businesses at the moment, and thinking about collecting whether that person is of a specific kind of, I hate the word class, because we're supposed to be away from it, but like, a part of society that

they currently sit in, and that can be collected in so many different ways from free school meals to what job your parents held when you were at school, typical situations, ONS are really good for thinking about where you start from in those questions, but collecting all that data and getting a picture of what your business actually looks like, because we know what gets measured, gets done and you can't have impact on something that you don't know about.

So first and foremost, collect your data and measure it and then measure it in terms of where you sit in the country. Think about are you leveling up to the space that you're in or are you falling short of that and how do you think about gaining that ground and making sure that it's representative and then I suppose one of the biggest pieces is the recruitment piece. So thinking about how people access your business and enter it and how they leave it is really key.

So making sure that there are allowances and adjustments for people that need to enable you to get into the business. Thinking about how you're portrayed on the outside, like what imagery is put out about you, what conversations and talks and, ideas are put out about the business.

I know for Aston, if you Google it, it probably comes up with Cars and James Bond, it's not a lot about our people and actually that needs to grow and that's something we're working on right now is like our people stories and what we share about our people because we have some fantastic ones from messages sewn into the leather that's sewn into your unique car that you've designed from the sewers so that if you tear it apart in 10 years time you can see like messages from it,

like it's so nice, those details that come in a personalised car, it's really cool. So I think about like that piece and like how you attract people and then retaining them as like the inner cultural work, how you build better culture, how you make people feel included and that's h uge.

There's appealing to the minds, which works really well with C Suite because they want data and they want like analytics and feeding that to them and you can pull that. There's so many reports, McKinsey and other spaces that tell you about the value of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

But then there's a feeling to hearts like thinking about who they are as a person and what drives them and like why would they ever want to come to work to make people feel excluded and I think getting them on ED& I training or unconscious bias training or whatever it is. I mean, unconscious bias training was big during 2020 2021. I think we've moved on from that, but if you haven't even done that, as a baseline to work from.

So getting them involved and checking their own bias, checking where they come from and where they're starting from in their own situation and really appealing to just their inner person of like, do you really want to come to work and make somebody feel excluded? Probably not.

So it's a great opportunity for them to collaborate, to connect, to share their inspiring stories, a real platform and opportunity. So that's great, we've also had webinars and workshops in things like neurodiversity in the workplace for some of our business leaders, diversity and leadership training, all these different things and it's definitely something that our businesses are asking for more of and we like to tailor our offer that way.

So yeah, it's a real positive feeling at these events and something we're looking to do more of.

So a lot of them, they don't get to give it that time that I think they'd really like to, they don't get to work on their EDI priorities and putting that into action. So, it's definitely not something that we're seeing all the time, but as I said, we tailor our offer to what businesses are looking for, responding to our business support tool, so there's definitely a hunger there to some extent.

So our No Limits programme that the OxLEP skills team works on, we work with Aspire and Sophia in the county to try and support those that are furthest from employment or are struggling to enter employment by offering support so they can receive up to 30 hours of one to one support alongside interview training, CV skills, application skills, just to support those who are struggling to enter the employment through things like, we work with ethnic minority communities, we

work with those who clinically extremely vulnerable those who struggle as a result of the digital divide, food poverty, and just working alongside them to give them what they need, whether that's access to digital tools or a laptop, transport, those skills that I mentioned earlier. So it's, something that we're definitely very aware of at OxLEP and we're definitely putting things into place to do what we can to support those and businesses in the county to understand a bit more about it as well.

So embarking on like a free webinar or podcast or whatever it is around diversity and inclusion would give you the thought process as an owner of a business or as somebody leading that business to consider when you're making decisions around like new hires and things like that. It's really easy and quick to pull data around the diversity in the area of Oxford and thinking about what your company should look like.

So it would probably take you a few hours just to figure out that and then hopefully it would just grow organically because actually if you get it right at the foundation level, the outlook of your business will be broader anyway because you're already kind of including everyone. It will become more appealing to more people very quickly. It will become talked about and hopefully more successful because of that.

So I think if they were to do two things is figure out the diversity of the area and like what your company makeup should look like and secondly, just get yourself on a free webinar on ED& I and just get some kind of thought process behind diversity and inclusion and what it should mean to your business.

It's just having that shared space to actually talk about it and, Oh, I've not prioritised that, but actually, if you're saying it's easier, then maybe it's something I can implement now as well. So yeah, I think it's definitely vital that our business community keeps talking and we keep giving them that platform to do so.

So it's like a small scale version of that and it's been always successful, the more you can learn, the more you can share, the better. What is problematic is when people gatekeep stuff, and you can't share it, and it's actually, well we're all just striving for the same success, why not kind of share in that and hope for the best for everybody?

I'm a green kind of person, or maybe a pink lady somewhere in the middle, but um, I don't really like red apples, but a lot of people do, including Google. They have a bias around red apples because they look like more appealing, snow white, and all that kind of background, right? And that bias helps you make decisions on which apples you're going to buy.

If you didn't have a bias at all, it would take you forever to go to your food shop, as an example, because you wouldn't have any preferences over the food you're going to buy, it'd just take you hours. And so those biases are really helpful in life. Bias gets us through life, bias helps us make decisions, so they're not all bad.

What is a problem is when you're in business and those biases that you have towards people or groups of people start helping you make decisions about those people and so that's where I would challenge it, which is why I think Harvard Bias Test is really good because you can be aware of like your preference.

It tells you your preferences towards specific groups, like who you would leverage and I mean, mine is possibly fairly obvious to me, like mine was a preference towards people of color and elevating them because I've worked in racial justice, right? That's normal. So that's a bias, that's positive in terms of, like, I would positively discriminate towards those people and obviously that's not allowed.

So I have to think about dialing that back down to bring it back in line with others and then there's people that you would positively discriminate against in a negative descrimination where I wouldn't put them forward as much, for example and then that helps you be aware of it when you're hiring.

So if you're faced with any of those people that you would be positive or negative towards, you can be like, okay, I need to like stamp that out and like look at the merit and kind of maybe get somebody else in the room to support me on this so that I don't make a biased decision. I think that's where it matters is when you're making decisions based on your bias towards people.

So, for Oxford, it's probably one man, one woman, possibly a non binary or trans base, and range of ethnicities and possibly disabilities, for example.

Perhaps you run a company or organisation that's looking for some specific help or simply a need to steer to the most appropriate business advice available. Why not try the OxLEP Business Support Tool? OxLEP Business Support Tool: OxLEP's Business Support Tool is here to help your company. Whether you're just starting out, growing, or ready to take on a new business challenge.

If you're looking for the latest advice and support, complete our business support tool today and get set to receive a bespoke action plan for your organisation. Head to OxLEPbusiness. co. uk to find out more. Let's speak more with Laura Ayoade, the first ever ED& I lead at Aston Martin, and Leona Weston from OxLEP.

Laura, let's look ahead if we can. What's your vision of the future of ED& I within the automotive industry and how do you plan to contribute to it?

I think there has been a period of it becoming quite a fad or a thing to focus on at the moment, especially kind of post 2020 and it's becoming a bit of a shift because there's lots of people in diversity and inclusion that, that kind of work in the space but have like a HR background for example that I actually find conflicting because HR is very kind of policy and process driven and ED& I has a lot more kind of heart to it and empathy from my perspective and

thinking about how people actually feel rather than just following a policy or process so it's changing definitely and people are thinking about whether they want to keep it in house, they want the outsourced consultancy and also, I think just because of the economic crisis, some people think it's nice to have, but actually it's when they need it most is when people are under pressure because it's when you become less inclusive.

So you've seen businesses outsource or just not have one at all, which is quite scary for the world of ED& I. But for the automotive industry, it's interesting that there are collective goals. We have the Automotive 30 Club that is achieving 30 percent women in the business areas by 2030, hopefully, or before if possible. We also have SMMT.

They're focusing right now on collection of data for diversity and inclusion, and thinking about how they work as a collective and overarching kind of space that supports all automotives and manufacturers into becoming more inclusive and more diverse. So there's some really key initiatives within the industry that are really striving and driving it forward. So I am hopeful that all businesses within automotive will be working towards at least gender equality within the kind of next five years.

I know that's a key metric that a lot of people are placing on themselves and then hopefully a start to kind of look ahead beyond just gender and thinking about the other protected characteristics. Of course, with everybody that comes into business, there is that intersectionality. So you will bring kind of disabled, you'll bring ethnically diverse people, you'll bring lots of different people into space by hitting a gender metric by default.

But then they need to measure up those and see if they're kind of achieving their best practice. So the hope is that it will be there. The 30 percent women in particular, especially at leadership level, I'm not sure if we'll get there given the 22 percent currently in the market. But to me, that's not a failure. Like if we're working towards it and we increase, I mean, we've increased already from 14 to 17 percent over the two years I've been there.

If we increase up to the 22%, we can at least say that we're on a journey, we've done the work, we've achieved parity with the industry and what's available to us and we're tapping into that pipeline and now we're going back to schools to educate young girls into thinking about a career with automotive or manufacturing and engineering and encouraging them into more STEM subjects so that they can consider a life that might be slightly different to their everyday subjects at school.

So I think when we hit 2030, whether we hit 30 percent or not, an improvement is an improvement, right? And like, we should measure that and track that and say, well done, but let's think about how we continue to build diverse pipeline for all and take it as a business responsibility that it's not just schools to sit down and work on. It's for all of us to encourage young girls into STEM.

I wish that people would have a specific set of tools that they need to be able to achieve within the industry to make sure they are legitimate in their purpose and what they're achieving because if you come from a very different background and have no expertise in it, but you have something that kind of aligns, because of course we need to work with HR professionals. Like, if I didn't have my HR business partners, I couldn't do half my job.

They're really important and they're intrinsic to my work. But watching them deliver my ED& I training sometimes pulls up issues because they're like, I don't really get that, like that doesn't sit with me. I don't understand.

Like that doesn't make sense and so it highlights the differences between me and them because I wholeheartedly have based my life in like an ED& I space and I'm willing to do the work and it's kind of because it is a passion area, like my downtime is like picking up on the political issues and the contextual situations that are happening.

We are an apolitical organisation at Aston Martin, but I'm quite a political person in terms of those are the things that matter to me, like I would love to be working towards peace in the Middle East and some spaces like that because of course that's not inclusive at all and I think that's where my worry is, enabling and empowering people to do EDI jobs that are not fully qualified.

I don't know if that's the right word, but like fully embedded in it and understand the kind of tiny details and nuances because if you have someone doing the job that doesn't really know those spaces, it's dangerous. These are people's lives, like my job, impacts people's lives every day and it has the potential to destroy those lives as well and it's the same in teaching, right?

Like, it's why it follows through from my teaching experience, because if I choose to ignore a child in the classroom, I completely impact their entire career. I'll probably be remembered as that teacher that made them feel differently. We all have those, and that's really important to me.

So, I think it's really important that ED& I professionals continue to do the work and to, spend time on themselves and updating themselves with the contextual and the political situations that are happening around them because they impact how people show up every day.

Like one of the best experiences I had was working for business in the community because I consulted over 30 organisations that were all very different from each other, from governmental organisations to sports organisations, to banking organisations, and it gave me a breadth of experience in terms of what it looked like in house for each different department and individual case from corporate to SMEs and so on.

So I would definitely say like that experience is really key and if you can get it, take it with both hands and roll with it because I think that can give you a breadth of information and also it forces you, right, to build your own knowledge. You have to come up prepared, you have to know your stuff. Like, if you're going to be talking to a governmental space, you're going to need to know what's going on in the government.

If you're talking to an international space, you're going to need to know their space a little bit, so you're going to have to do a bit of research and I think that research thing is key, like, you're going to be forever a student in ED& I, so be prepared to continue learning.

So, continuously listening and listening to understand rather than to respond is key.

Huge thanks to Laura Ayoade, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Lead at Aston Martin. A big thank you also to OxLEPs Leona Weston and thank you for listening to OxTalks. There are a growing number of editions of OxTalks available from where you normally get your podcasts. Check out some of the previous editions, including Oxford University Innovation's Andrea Stewart on how to find the right business support for spin outs and start ups.

You can hear from James Clarke, the Managing Director of Hook Norton Brewery, with a guide to keeping up with changing times in business. And don't miss Grae Laws, Managing Director of Beyond Touch, and Guy Gadney, CEO at Charisma.ai, with some top tips for using AI in your business. Every episode is well worth a listen. Please spread the word, tell your friends or colleagues about us, and if you feel so inclined, leave us a review.

You can share your thoughts and suggestions on our social channels, and you can email your questions for inclusion in future editions too. The address is on the podcast description. Business support in Oxfordshire is very close at hand. OxLEP is at your service. The OxLEP business support tool can signpost you to expert help in a matter of minutes. Why not take a look? Find it on our website, Oxfordshirelep. com. But for now, from the whole OxLEP team, and from me, Howard Bentham, it's goodbye.