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The Council is committed to creating a workplace culture where all people feel valued, included and able to be their best at work, and we recognise the benefits that a diverse workforce with different values, beliefs, experience, and backgrounds brings to us as an organisation.

Embedding fairness, equality, dignity and respect in the culture, where staff feel supported and confident to report prejudiced behaviour will be key to delivering this framework.

We want to attract and retain a diverse workforce that reflects, and can respond to, the diverse needs of the citizens of Edinburgh. We recognise that our current workforce does not reflect the diversity of the city, having a higher proportion of women, and lower proportion of BME groups and people with disabilities and all of these groups more predominant at lower grades (see Appendix 1).

Key to a diverse and inclusive workplace are a culture which enables prejudice-based behaviours from colleagues or citizens to be confidently challenged, and a comprehensive and holistic support for wellbeing – physical, mental and financial.

Two specific outcomes have been identified for this four-year framework:

• a more inclusive working environment is experienced by colleagues who share protected characteristics and colleagues are supported by an inclusive workplace culture and feel confident to challenge prejudice-based behaviours
• colleagues are supported by a holistic and preventative approach to financial, mental and physical wellbeing.

The general duties progressed through these actions are: eliminate discrimination, advance equality and foster good relations.

Mainstream actions

• Increase the visibility of colleagues with protected characteristics to enhance understanding, tolerance and to embed an inclusive approach across the workforce by supporting existing colleague networks and support new networks to be established as required
• Raise awareness of prejudice-related incidents in the workplace and how to report and record these
• Raise awareness among citizens that prejudiced or discriminatory behaviour towards staff is unacceptable
• Strengthen the response to staff who experience prejudice or discrimination, ensuring that support is in place and that incidents are recorded in a way which supports effective action
• Take a collective approach to responsibilities for maintaining good.health and wellbeing, with a focus on support, prevention and transparency
• Ensure flexible work arrangements, centred around trust that promote a healthy work-life-balance
• Promote and educate colleagues about occupational health services and Employee Assistance Programme
• Provide a variety of employee benefit schemes to improve the physical, financial and mental wellbeing of our workforce
• Continue to develop a robust approach to gathering data to enable analysis and reporting of the protected characteristics of the workforce, including pay, so that gaps between groups such as disability and ethnic group can be determined and monitored
• Report annually on the ethnicity and disability pay gap and use the data gathered to target resources in order to reduce the ethnicity and disability pay gap.

Performance

Progress on the implementation of the new framework will fully align fully with the Diversity and Inclusion Strategy and plan, including attraction and retention of staff.

Appendix 1 shows the Equalities, Diversity and Inclusion Workforce dashboard for December 2020, including a profile of staff gradings by protected characteristic group.