We will integrate equality, diversity and inclusion into all management processes

An integrated approach requires the responsibility for change to be distributed throughout the organisation. While the creation of the post of Assistant Provost (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion), along with the and the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Forum will provide a new prominence and focus for equality, diversity and inclusion matters within the College leadership, we need to create an organisational culture in which consideration of equality, diversity and inclusion is central to all decision-making processes.

To that end, and building on Imperial Expectations and actions arising from the Institutional Culture Report, we will develop effective mechanisms for embedding consideration into how management and decision-making processes at all levels impact our commitment to be truly diverse and inclusive.

Actions

College leadership

We will ensure that all members of the College senior leadership are fully equipped to lead on equality, diversity and inclusion matters by including specific training on how to recognise and address issues of equality, diversity and inclusion as part of the President’s and Provost’s boards refresher leadership development programme.

We will refresh the membership of the College Council as terms are completed with the aim of reflecting the diversity of present and future stakeholders – staff, students and partners – whom we expect to be drawn from all across the UK and the world. We are confident of being able to do this while maintaining the breadth and quality of expertise of the Council membership. This will enable the Council to ‘lead from the front’ on equality, diversity and inclusion issues.

Management skills

We will accentuate the value we place on people-management skills across Imperial by developing processes to ensure that anyone taking on significant management responsibilities (including responsibilities for student supervision) receives appropriate training. This training will enhance awareness of equality, diversity and inclusion issues and provide staff with the capabilities to address them effectively.

Talent development

We will review how we identify and nurture talent from under-represented groups and, where necessary, create mechanisms to ensure these are effective – including mentoring programmes targeted at staff from under-represented groups and reverse-mentoring opportunities for managers to better understand minority perspectives. Ultimately this will help to provide the necessary diversification of leadership positions at departmental, faculty and college level.

Recruitment

We will extend the ‘Know Your Pool’ approach to cover all protected characteristics in staff recruitment processes. We expect this approach to generate shortlists that properly reflect the diversity of talent available to us and to accelerate the process of making our staff profile more representative of the populations from which people are recruited.

Procurement and services

We will widen the influence of our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion by ensuring that it forms part of our relationships with suppliers, sub-contractors and commercial customers (e.g. organisations that hire our facilities). For example, in engaging with outside users of our facilities (e.g. conference organisers), we will highlight the importance to us of attention to equality, diversity and inclusion issues in their event planning.

Research

We will incorporate consideration of equality, diversity and inclusion in the design of research projects that have a direct impact on people.

While recognising that the choice of research topic has to be freely made by academics and researchers, we wish to stimulate efforts to align our research with our mission to be inclusive. In line with developing best practice, this will ensure that research outputs from Imperial that impact people (e.g. medical treatments, products of engineering or policy work) address the different needs that arise because of diversity in the population. This will help to make our research more relevant and impactful.

But we can go even further and look for opportunities to directly address some of the needs of under-represented groups within Imperial (e.g. technologies to help disabled people). Development of these capabilities should in turn facilitate recruitment of more diverse students and researchers to Imperial.