ESG 23 Final Single pages - Flipbook - Page 40
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DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION
Being part of a vibrant, globally diverse community, we
know that tremendous value is gained from people’s
di昀昀erences. An inclusive and inviting culture that
recognises and celebrates diversity enables people to
reach their maximum potential and be their best. This is
fundamental to RWS, and critical to our success.
Research has shown that when colleagues experience
a diverse, welcoming company it is a key driver of
organisational outperformance. When companies
invite every colleague into the innovation process, they
generate more high-quality ideas, implement better
and faster, beat sales targets and outperform their
competition.
Given the unquestionable impact diversity, equity and
inclusion has on people, the business and society at
large, we place signi昀椀cant focus on speci昀椀c pillars of
activity based on the Group's Diversity, Equity and
Inclusion Policy. Each pillar of activity has its own
Employee Resource Group (ERG) to provide feedback
into the Group diversity, equity and inclusion plans, and
guide initiatives that are bespoke to their pillar. Each
ERG has an Executive Team member as a sponsor and
an HR leader, and a dedicated learning and development
team member supporting it to ensure appropriate
organisational prioritisation and in昀氀uence. Health and
well-being is a separate ERG with its own programme
supporting all colleagues as well as the DEI initiatives.
Our ERGs are:
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Culture
Ethnicity
LGBTQ+
Persons with disabilities
Women at RWS
The purpose of these groups is to identify strategies
for meeting the collective interests identi昀椀ed by each
group, thereby driving engagement and increasing the
representation, voice, contribution and in昀氀uence of that
group over time.
In terms of communication and education, each group
has planned slots for raising awareness and promoting
more than 25 globally recognised awareness events over
the course of the year on the RWS Hub, for example;
Gay PRIDE, Diwali, Breast cancer awareness month,
Native American Heritage month, and World Dyslexia
Awareness day. Each ERG also has its own educational
content channel on MyLX, our global learning platform.
In FY23 we extended our central e昀昀orts, launching
the RWS Diversity Council whose purpose is to guide
and support RWS in creating a diverse and inclusive
organisation that closely re昀氀ects the societies in which
we work. The primary role of the council is to connect the
work of all the diversity and inclusion resource groups
into a broader business-driven results-oriented strategy.
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RWS Holdings plc — ESG Report 2023 SOCIAL
To bring all DEI activities together better, we also
introduced the RWS Diversity Festival for the 昀椀rst time in
May 2023. This comprised two weeks of events promoting
the bene昀椀ts of inclusion to the organisation and driving
speci昀椀c inclusion education and training to interested
groups. We were pleased that more than 270 colleagues
attended live events during the festival and more than
800 viewed the highlights afterwards.
We are particularly pleased with our new Language PAL
programme which encourages colleagues to reach out for
help and support from co-workers with good experience
of the topic or skill they are developing. New language
practice has been particularly popular with colleagues and
this year we had 170 matches where colleagues connected
with a native speaking co-worker to practice their new
chosen language. This comes with the additional bene昀椀t
of grass-roots cultural education and connection within
the organisation which is particularly helpful given the
nature of what we do as a business.
In a similar vein, we are developing a '昀椀nd your people'
theme across the business, intended to activate small
self-sustaining interest groups where colleagues see value
in coming together to support one another around that
common interest.
We continue our central e昀昀orts to collect accurate
demographic/inclusion data across our entire workforce
as this allows us to better identify any signi昀椀cant areas
of under-representation for targeted action. Our
demographics survey was promoted during the Diversity
