Diversity, equity and inclusion in any organisation makes good business sense. Over the past few years, Crawford in the UK has implemented several initiatives to promote greater diversity and inclusivity across our UK business. This year, we have won Insurance Business 5-Star Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award and the top prize for Diversity and Inclusion at the UK Customer Service Awards. These entries focused on Crawford’s unique approach to breaking down industry barriers and improving social mobility through our talent acquisition model. We believe that the industry will benefit from more companies adopting this approach and we wanted to raise the profile of our programs.
Research shows that people from wealthier backgrounds are 80 percent more likely to have a professional job than their working-class peers. We feel it is down to industry leaders to help change the course for young people across the country.
So, we have changed how and where we source the next generation of talent, creating a much wider scope that is further improving the diversity of our population include:
- Offering greater flexibility – Our Smarter Working Policy means we can advertise more remote or home-based roles than ever before, opening doors to a broader talent pool from any location, encouraging movement between roles and supporting better work/life balance.
- Broadening early talent programs – offering apprenticeships and accessible graduate programs for people from any background - seeking potential rather than qualifications.
- Working with our communities – Offering personalised coaching through the Future Frontiers program.
Each program delivers tangible benefits. To illustrate, our recent SMART program delivered recruitment cost savings of circa £18k. In addition, halting salary inflation saves another £18-£20k/annum – and we are now responding to clients faster with a strengthened, specialist team.
To measure inclusion, we introduced four new cultural development items in our global 2021 Employee Pulse Survey. We were pleased to see 85 percent of the respondents indicated that they do not experience bias due to their personal identity (17 percent over the professional services insurance norm).
Many firms are still looking at diversity through simple gender balance perspectives. Crawford has made great strides towards gender quality and our attention has moved much more towards a greater challenge of achieving a truly diverse workforce, and becoming the inclusive environment that we set out to build. The insurance industry does lag behind many other areas in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion, and therefore we have much to do as we champion change. By changing how and where we recruit the next generation of talent, this is truly changing both our perspectives and the nature of conversations in our business.
