Diversity and Inclusion

We advise clients on a wide range of complex people issues, including in regulated environments. We facilitate peer-to-peer forums on culture and diversity and inclusion (D&I) to enable discussion around emerging issues and challenges, and our market-leading employment teams advise clients on all issues relating to D&I.

Looking to establish a comprehensive D&I framework within your organisation? Our Diversity & Inclusion Toolkit provides cost-effective, practical, and user-friendly templates and guidance.

For clients who are already quite advanced in their D&I journeys, or those who have specific needs in order to progress their D&I strategy, we offer the following advisory services:

D&I audit

Our D&I audit assists organisations with assessing their current D&I position across a range of issues and future actions to be taken, whether that is to achieve progressive goals or to set ambitious new standards. Through the audit, we help organisation analyse their current position in terms of:

• D&I data collection
• employee engagement
• leadership, board and shareholder composition
• employee population
• recruitment
• pay and progression
• policies and strategies
• external engagement and
• culture

We prepare reports and heatmap summaries for presentation to senior leadership and provide targeted recommendations which meet your organisation’s ambitions.

D&I surveys

A key first step in any D&I strategy is to understand the composition of your workforce. We can assist with the planning and drafting of D&I employee surveys. We can also advise on associated data protection and privacy issues, prepare employee communications, and analyse any associated legal risks.

Advanced policies

For organisations with stretching D&I goals, innovative employment policies will be integral to strategy. We advise on drafting and implementing market-leading policies, including menopause policies, trans-inclusivity in the workplace, allyship in the workplace and fertility treatment policies.

Data protection issues

In order to meaningfully track progress, organisations need to be collecting appropriate data but doing so within the constraints of local data protection legislation. Our data protection specialists can provide advice on the complex data protection and privacy issues associated with collecting, processing and managing D&I data and can help prepare data protection impact statements.

Visualising D&I data

We have an in-house legal design team, who can analyse and present D&I data in innovative and engaging ways for taskforces, leadership teams, boards and investors, etc.
One of the tools Wavelength offers is accessibility testing – a document review tool which tests up to 30 data points (eg colour contrast, visual accessibility, language) to determine how accessible your documents are.

International expertise

We operate in 21 jurisdictions worldwide and work closely with local law firms in jurisdictions beyond that. We understand that our clients may also operate in international landscapes and therefore require localised advice on D&I. We can consult with our experts globally to ensure your D&I strategy is both compliant with local laws and culturally appropriate.

Positive action advice

With organisations increasingly looking to take positive action to meet their D&I goals, we can provide training and advice on how employers can navigate the fine line between lawful positive action and unlawful positive discrimination. We can assist clients with planning and implementing proposed measures in the context of the legal framework under the Equality Act 2010.

Time with our Responsible Business team

Aside from our legal expertise, we can offer a 1:1 workshop with our Responsible Business team in which you can discuss your organisation’s strategy directly with the team that is behind our own. We also have a dedicated non-legal client insights specialist whose expertise involves understanding the D&I horizon and identifying issues for which our legal experts can develop client solutions.

Governance

External stakeholders, including regulators and investors, are demonstrating a continued focus on culture and diversity and their intersection with governance. We can support your organisation’s data analysis for board oversight and accountability.

Pay

We offer bespoke advice on your organisation’s remuneration situation including compliance with equal pay legislation, European Banking Authority guidelines, gender pay gap reporting regulations and ethnicity and other pay gap reporting. We can provide support on how to present this information, internally and externally.

Training

Our team can run training sessions, either virtually or in-person, on D&I legal and compliance risk areas such as positive action, equal pay, harassment and discrimination, culture and conduct, respect at work, as well as individually tailored sessions.

Legal engineering and Wavelength

Wavelength works with clients to help them analyse and draw meaningful insights from HR data. Time with our data scientists and legal engineers to clean and analyse your data can be very impactful. We typically structure existing HR data and create interactive visualisations to form comprehensive D&I dashboards. We tailor the analysis to uncover useful visuals and insightful dashboard information to show how much ‘drill down data’ is needed and why. These insights can be used to report to stakeholders, track progress, surface trends and to support wrap around strategic and legal advice.

Ready to chat?

Get in touch with us today via any one of our key contacts below.