Sky is on a mission to ensure its workforce is reflective of its audience, setting ambitious targets to improve diversity and inclusion. Ashleigh Webber reports.
DEI is one of the most important responsibilities within HR’s remit, and inclusive workplaces are often non-negotiable for candidates.
But the media has sometimes been difficult to get into for many groups, and has often been seen as a sector that individuals can only access with the right contacts and opportunities. Sky is seeking to change that, not only by creating opportunities for diverse groups to access careers in the media, engineering, tech or in leadership, but also by showcasing the challenges people from some groups face through the content it creates and the CSR initiatives it gets involved with.
Diversity and inclusion
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For Claudia Osei-Nsafoah, Sky’s chief people officer for the UK and Ireland and talent and D&I lead for Sky Group, it is important that Sky’s workforce is representative of the communities it serves and that its inclusive culture is represented in the image it portrays.
“The good thing about Sky is that it is so diverse in terms of what we do. It’s really important for us that what you see externally is reflected internally,” she tells Personnel Today.
“We’ve made bold commitments, but we’re also able to demonstrate that we’ve been successful in delivering those. But we need to make sure that [that success] is more broadly known.”
The organisation has been more overt about its work to improve DEI since she joined in 2020. It is seeking to improve ethnic, gender, disability and neurodiversity representation across its four employee personas – content and production (staff who work across Sky Studios, Sky News and Sky Sports), product and tech, corporate and commercial (marketing, finance, HR and legal departments), and customer services (retail staff, contact centre staff and engineers, who together make up half of Sky’s workforce).
Setting targets
“We’ve set targets and we’ve been really clear about our intentions to have a workforce that represents the broader society, but we’re also thinking about the content we make and ensuring it can resonate with a broader audience,” Osei-Nsafoah says.
Sky has set itself a bold target of ensuring 20% of its employees in the UK and Ireland are from Black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds by 2025, with at least a quarter of these to be Black. According to the 2021 Census data, 18% of the UK population is from an ethnic minority background.
Osei-Nsafoah says Sky has “made really good progress towards that target”, but there is still some way to go.
We’ve been really clear about our intentions to have a workforce that represents the broader society, but we’re also thinking about the content we make and ensuring it can resonate with a broader audience” – Claudia Osei-Nsafoah
“When we look at our below leadership population we’ve seen a real shift in our ability to get closer to those targets, but we still have a bit more work to do among the senior leadership population where attrition is really low. We’re a great place to work, so people in leadership don’t often leave.”
Sky also set a target to have 50/50 gender balance among leadership teams. It has hit this target in its senior leadership team and making progress among other leadership levels.
Tech opportunities for women
Its work does not stop at the highest rungs of the ladder. A few years ago it launched a drive towards having more female engineers and has initiatives for women in tech.
“Those roles do tend to be more male-dominated and we’re thinking about how we can try to address that in time via specific programmes and campaigns to try to target more diverse candidates,” she says.
Sky is opening up more opportunities for women via its Get into Tech initiative, a 15-week programme that aims to develop women’s software development, DevOps and site reliability engineering skills. Since its launch in 2017 more than 200 women have completed the programme, bringing female representation in its tech division up from 17% in 2014 to 26% today.
Sky aims for women to hold 30% of its tech positions by 2025.
External accountability
Sky wants to be seen as an employer and advocate for diverse talent, so in 2021 it launched its Diversity Advisory Council to “hold the mirror up” to the organisation to ensure it is shaping diversity agendas in the right way and taking accountability.
The council is made up nationally-recognised DEI leaders including the founders and leaders of UK Black Pride, the Valuable 500, MOBO Organisation, UK Youth, Making the Leap, and the Social Mobility Awards, among entrepreneurs and a crossbench member of the House of Lords.
Osei-Nsafoah says social mobility has historically been missing from Sky’s focus.
“When you speak to diverse talent in the business and externally, a lot of the time they mention that the barriers they experience isn’t about being an Asian woman or a Chinese man for example, it’s actually about social mobility and the barriers and attitudes towards them that they’ve faced,” she says.
“For us it was important to raise the profile of social mobility as an issue and making sure that we’re incorporating it into how we’re thinking about diversity and inclusion more broadly.”
Part of its activity to boost social mobility involves visiting schools close to Sky’s headquarters in Isleworth, west London, launching a two year assistant commissioners programme for people who would traditionally struggle to access that role, and offering more apprenticeship opportunities to grow its own talent.
It was important to raise the profile of social mobility as an issue and making sure that we’re incorporating it into how we’re thinking about diversity and inclusion more broadly.”
Fighting injustice
In 2020 Sky made a £30m commitment to fighting racial injustice. Not only is it seeking to do this internally by developing the right behaviours among hiring managers via an inclusive hiring tool, inclusive leadership training and D&I learning pathways on its Sky Learn L&D software, but also in the image it portrays to potential candidates.
Sky is using its ESG activity to demonstrate externally that it is a brand for everyone, including joining the Valuable 500 network to help end disability exclusion, the Kick it Out campaign which challenges discrimination in sport, and Sir Lewis Hamilton’s Mission 44 campaign that aims to improve outcomes for young people in underserved communities.
It has also committed to ensuing that Black on-screen talent have the right hairstylists and make-up artists for their needs.
Osei-Nsafoah says she wants to ensure everyone can like the belong at Sky, and this is also reflected its EVP.
“A lot of our focus is on flexibility, career opportunities, making people think less about linear roles and having more squiggly careers, having strong innovation pipeline – all of this helps tell the story about what it’s like to be part of the Sky family,” she says.
“Arguably you would say that inclusion comes before diversity – we can go out and get as many diverse candidates as we like, but if we don’t have inclusion at the heart of what we do then everything just falls down.”
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