Increasing diversity in the electrical sector

The UK workforce is more diverse than ever. According to Diversity UK, ethnic minorities make up 12% of the working age population. They are under-represented in construction and the electrical sector. The most recent Glenigan Construction Industry Performance Report showed that the mean workforce within construction companies was only 3% black or minority ethnic, and that the proportion of women in the construction workforce is only 13%. For manual trades, this drops alarmingly: according to the group Women on the Tools, just 1% of people working in manual trade are female.

By focusing recruitment and retention of staff on homogenous groups, employers are significantly reducing their talent pool and missing out on a huge proportion of the skilled workforce. The Building and Engineering Services Association (BESA) and the Electrical Contactors’ Association (ECA) are joining forces with London South Bank University to host a seminar on the business benefits that contractors can realise from having a workforce from a diverse range of backgrounds.

The seminar is mainly aimed at smaller sized firms of contractors, who make up the majority of both BESA’s and ECA’s members. The aim is to persuade contractors of the business benefits of taking a proactive approach to increase the diversity of their workforce. Benefits include:

• a means of addressing skills shortages (which may be compounded by Brexit)
• bringing different views and perspectives to the way in which a company does business
• meeting the requirements of some tenders, particularly public sector.

Fail to address diversity in your company and you could lose business. Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) are high priority topics within the construction, engineering and housing industries, with government agencies such as Highways England and HS2 identifying EDI in a variety of requirements for organisations looking to submit bids for contracts.

These include the need for organisations to show evidence of having good EDI policies and practices, but also a commitment to continued improvement around EDI. “The construction sector is going through an exciting phase, where it sees EDI as core disciplines,” comments Solat Chaudhry, chief executive at the National Centre for Diversity. “We are happy to be helping to shape how the sector works in relation to EDI.”

The National Centre for Diversity has worked with several large and small construction and engineering organisations, including electrical engineer NG Bailey, Interserve, Vinci Construction UK, Cruden Group and Carillion. It will be bringing those experiences to the London Build 2016 Expo, which is being held at Olympia, London on 26-27 October 2016. Solat Chaudhry will be joining two other expert panellists from Balfour Beatty and Thames Tideway Tunnel in a panel discussion titled ‘Building a Sustainable Bridge for the Skills Gap’. Chaudhry will be focusing on how organisations can continue to unlock talent through employee diversity and equality programmes across the construction industry.

Women on the Tools intends to keep campaigning until 50% of tradespeople are women. “Socially and economically for the future, it is essential that there are many more women working on the tools,” it says. “In order to create that future we need help to tackle the considerable obstacles women face in entering and making a living in the building trades.” In order to achieve this, the group intends to:

• work with building trades and construction industry employers to help them recruit and retain many more tradeswomen as a response to the current serious skills shortage, in order to achieve a better gender balance between their employees working on the tools
• provide advice and guidance to teachers in schools and colleges; to employers in the construction and building trades; and through targeted campaigns designed to influence parents as well as policy-makers
• work with a range of partners to grow the national network of tradeswomen, so that women working on the tools around the UK can be in touch with each other, in touch with the Women on the Tools group, and in touch with people who want to engage with them.

Recent figures indicate that less than one in every thousand electrical contractors is female. The NICEIC’s Jobs for the Girls initiative aims to do something about this, with a series of networking events, campaign work and ambassador programme. “Learning a trade offers women the opportunity to develop a skill for life that enables them to work on their own or within a team, and more importantly allows them flexible working hours that can revolve around home or family commitments,” says Emma Clancy, chief executive officer of NICEIC. “Through our Jobs for the Girls campaign, NICEIC has actively encouraged more women into the electrical industry.”

Electrical engineer NG Bailey was recently awarded Investors in Diversity status and is now working towards Leaders in Diversity status. “We believe diverse workforces make organisations better at what they deliver for their customers,” says the company. Solat Chaudhry agrees: “We know that diversity is a key driver of innovation. Research has shown this to be the case time and time again. A report from McKinsey shows that gender-diverse companies are 14% more likely to perform better than non-diverse companies, with ethnically diverse companies 35% more likely to perform better. This is common sense too: the more varied a group’s collective experiences and backgrounds are, the wider their knowledge base will inevitably become.”