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The Employer Network on Equality and Inclusion (enei) has just announced that Trevor Phillips, renowned equality campaigner and former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Committee, will join its board. In an exclusive interview with Personnel Today, Phillips sets out what he wants to achieve.
Diversity needs to "stop being dumped on HR" and become a shared organisational issue, claims Phillips. If chief executives really want to see change, he says, they need to stop focusing on initiatives for initiatives’ sake, and embrace diversity because it is good for business and helps them serve their customers or citizens better.
No stranger to speaking his mind, Phillips touched on this point recently in an article for The Sunday Times. He called out some diversity campaigns for being too focused on "raucous name calling and denunciation", claiming they did not take into consideration people's real behaviours and motivations.
Creating a framework
The reason he wanted to get involved with the enei, he says, is to help create the right framework for organisations to improve diversity and inclusion: "You can’t make change happen simply by yelling at everybody that they need to do better. There's a point where you create the right framework, and people help each other and find ways of improving. To some extent, they improve because they are competing with their peers. Enei has a huge role to play in helping employers benchmark against comparators, and in helping them to find new ways of doing better."
Before joining the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) in 2003 and later the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Phillips worked in broadcasting for many years and also chaired the London Assembly. During his 10 years at the CRE and EHRC, much of the focus was on developing a legislative and policy framework for employers. He says: "When I left, I felt we'd done a decent job, but there’s a limit to what you can do through legislation and regulation, particularly in the private sector.
"We're at the stage now where Government and statutory bodies can play a really important role in explaining the law and enforcing it where necessary, but the truth is that most organisations want to be better at diversity and inclusion, they just don't know how."
One of the potential areas where
