Five ways we’re making Blurred more inclusive

By Karen Noctor, Principal Consultant

When it comes to DE&I there is always more to do.

A few weeks ago, our team were lucky enough to spend a day with Elizabeth Bananuka, founder of BME PR Pros and Blueprint, to talk about diversity and inclusion. This training was one of many sessions we’ve completed as part of our full Blueprint status which we achieved last year.

While sessions like these are challenging and cover difficult subject matter, it was refreshing to take a step back from the day to day of probing our clients and their businesses and turn the mirror on ourselves. As well as taking time to reflect on what we’d learnt, there was an overwhelming sense of commitment and dedication from everyone involved and a true feeling of collective responsibility.

Elizabeth challenged us to adopt five new things as a result of this training. Here’s what we’ll be doing…

1. Internships

Our internships focus on supporting those from ethnic minority backgrounds and financially deprived groups. We hold longstanding relationships with Morpeth School (a local high school near to our office) to help with the development and progression of their pupils, as well as with a NEETs charity, Joined Up Thinking

We will continue to deepen our relationship with Morpeth, volunteering to hold talks and career sessions with pupils. We’re also working on building our internship alumni programme further - inviting current, future and past Blurred interns to join a specially created WhatsApp group for ongoing support, camaraderie, and advice. We’re also considering how we could host an alumni event.

2. Female Health

Women’s health is already embedded within our company benefits through a grief policy which covers miscarriage, a menopause policy and support for employees going through fertility treatment, including financially.

We are now creating a more comprehensive women’s health policy, taking a holistic look at all the ways in which female health issues can affect working lives - from hormone imbalances to endometriosis. We are consulting leaders in the field to apply best practice and hopefully inspire further change in our industry and beyond.

3. Evolving our regular DEI check ins

We are committed to regular learning sessions on all different DE&I topics within our industry and beyond. These sessions can be intense, emotional and challenging for everyone. And we’ve realised it’s not just about making time for it, it’s about doing it in the right way.

We are now reviewing the ways in which we tackle difficult topics around DE&I. Part of this is making sure we’re having face to face conversations in the office but also starting to move to smaller groups to have more engaging discussions. We recognise that often these conversations don’t work as well in one big team so we’re going to evolve the way we do things and use a lot of the positive learnings from the format of our Blueprint training day.

4. Fireside content

We hold fortnightly ‘fireside’ learning sessions where an internal speaker (or sometimes an external speaker) discusses a particular topic or ESG subject matter. While these can cover the most technical elements of the ‘E’ in ESG, we also make sure we find time to delve into really important ‘S’ topics too. Previous speakers have covered topics such as transgender and non-binary issues, cognitive diversity and delivering creativity in an ethnically diverse and inclusive way.

We want to evolve our fireside content to include more personal stories from our team including discussions on miscarriage, neurodiversity, menopause etc. While our fireside chats are primarily for knowledge sharing and learning, we want them to enrich as well as educate and focusing on personal experiences will help to do this.

5. Demystifying ESG and Purpose

We are proud to have a company made up of people from all different backgrounds and experiences, but we’re all part of a business with a common aim; to deliver work with depth, that helps tackle some of the world’s biggest issues, driving positive impact for people and planet.

When thinking about inclusive recruitment we wondered if Blurred may come across differently from the outside to what it is on the inside. We are a serious business talking about serious issues but that doesn’t mean we don’t spend far too long talking about the latest episode of Succession, Love Island or Selling Sunset (…the list goes on!)

Our individual journeys to Blurred are all very different so we’ll review our social content calendar to try and include more personal stories about our team and where we’ve come from. We hope this will allow us to bring in people who might not have previously thought Blurred was a place for them.

Internally, we’ll start holding more regular open hours with different members of the team so we all have a chance to learn from each other, share helpful information and sit and talk to people we might not work with every day. We’ll also look at ways to make things like Teams conversations as accessible as possible for the ESG beginners amongst us.

A huge thankyou to Elizabeth and her team at BME PR Pros and Blueprint who have been instrumental in making sure we keep challenging ourselves in the pursuit of a fair and equal world.