Change is never easy. It requires introspection, conversation, listening, and learning. For many of us, this summer ignited a season of change that challenged our perceptions of racism, privilege, diversity, and equality.
At MindGym, we recognized the need to evolve our own culture and practices and be a true benchmark for inclusion and diversity. As well as making us an even better place to work, we know it better equips us to support our clients in their journey.
We’re taking action on several fronts, and we’re proud to share the progress we’ve made.
What we’re doing for our clients:
- Upgrading our content: We’ve established an advisory group, including coaches and our specialist advisory business partners, to bring even more diverse views and experiences into the development of our products. With input from these groups, we’ve developed two new sessions in the DE&I space and are now reviewing and upgrading our existing core content. We’re training our creative team to ensure our imagery, examples, and language are always inclusive.
- Providing assessment tools: We’ve developed an assessment tool that can help clients assess where they are in their DE&I journey and therefore inform how we can best help them move forwards and create real change. We will also leverage our existing diagnostic tools, including JX, in other areas, to identify where we can support our clients.
- Inspiring action: Our highly skilled business psychologists are writing blog posts, running webinars, hosting roundtables, and offering free demos of our new DE&I content. We engage with existing and new clients to ‘meet them where they are’ and help them and their employees on their inclusion and diversity journey.
What we’re doing internally:
- Listening to our teams: We are hosting listening sessions for our colleagues and also gathering data through our anonymous colleague survey. These efforts enable us to gather insights and experiences and learn how we can improve as a place to work.
- Driving change through our DEI Steering Committee: We launched a DEI SteerCo led by a senior member of our team and sponsored by our Director of People. The DEI SteerCo is made up of carefully selected and diverse colleagues, representing all levels of the organization. They shape our internal DEI action plan and oversee its implementation – holding all of us to account. They are the guardians of our goal to increase diversity, and they direct the evolution of our culture as we become the most inclusive place we can be.
- Diversifying our team and our coach network: We’re evaluating our hiring practices to diversify candidate attraction and selection. This evaluation includes collecting data to ensure we understand the diversity of our existing colleagues and coaches and those we are attracting. We will upskill hiring managers in inclusive hiring practices.
- Diversifying our Board and Academic Board: We’re actively recruiting and assessing diverse candidates for both our Company Board and Academic Board. This ensures that as we continue to scale as a business, we gain a wide range of perspectives and insights.
- Supporting the career development of underrepresented groups: We’re reviewing all of our people policies and practices and will systematically upgrade them to drive inclusion and equity. We’re specifically launching new programmes to sponsor the development of underrepresented groups in our business actively. Our Senior team is active in this crucial piece of work.
- Learning together: We believe in our content. Our colleagues and managers are taking an extensive learning journey of our own DE&I content. These sessions are an integral part of refining our culture, and we’re having brilliantly challenging conversations as a result.
- Supporting our coach network: We’ve heard our coaches during coach listening sessions. We understand that delivering sessions on sensitive topics like allyship and privilege requires an extra level of skill and support. We are helping our coaches in this space and have developed specific training in this area.
