One year on from the date of George Floyd’s death, it is important to honour his memory and the memory of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and many more Black lives taken too soon because of racial injustice.
Change comes in many forms, but one thing is always constant: when change is sustainable, it expands beyond words into action and accountability. We all have the capacity to change and at Tate & Lyle we are committed to making change happen.
Guided by our purpose, Improving Lives for Generations, we are taking actionable steps toward tackling racial inequity, while supporting individuals to take personal action too.
We’ve chosen to focus on five areas:
- Leadership: We created a new team of experts focused on Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (ED&I), hiring our first ED&I Leader with accountability to our Board and Executive team. This team is developing strategy, policies and programmes to create a truly inclusive and diverse culture and workforce.
- Talent: We are working to ensure the diversity of our workforce reflects the local communities we call home. We are committed to measuring and reporting our progress and to expanding our current representation goals.
- Culture: We encourage all our colleagues to join our Ally training. This programme creates allies, people who use their influence to support those who experience unequal treatment in their workplaces and communities. A new series of conversations called Virtual Cafes and employee surveys have created safe spaces for conversation and questions with the goal of ensuring each colleague can be seen and heard.
- Representation: Colleagues created a new Black Employee Network (BEN). Our BEN team works with our Executive Committee, HR and the new ED&I team to prioritise support and solidarity, advance inclusion, and cultivate a sense of belonging at Tate & Lyle, launching a company-wide Juneteenth event hosted by our CEO Nick Hampton and arranging community outreach on Martin Luther King Day. Other employee groups include our Professional Women’s Network and LGBTQ+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer) group.
- Personal development: To democratise learning throughout our organisation, we launched LinkedIn Learning with 16,000 courses in seven languages. We are building Equity, Diversity & Inclusion learning pathways to enable deeper learning on this topic. Since August, we have seen strong engagement with 650+ employees spending ~90 minutes per month on the platform.
Our BEN founding leaders were recognised by colleagues in our 2020 Heroes Awards for going above and beyond to support their colleagues, communities, and customers.
We are proud to share our Board’s recognition as #1 within the FTSE250 for ethnically diverse Boards of Directors with 4 of our 11 Directors (35%) identifying as ethnically diverse (reference: Korn Ferry 2021 UK Consumer Diversity Index).
We believe in the power and potential of collective progress on Equity, Diversity & Inclusion and are committed to change. We look forward to sharing more updates over time.
Article by Lauren Von Stackelberg, Chief Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Officer