Case Study - Yorkshire Housing

Background

Championing Diversity was a West Yorkshire wide programme offered to employers to help them develop their management of diversity. This included an assessment of the company’s progress to date and extensive help over 18 months to move them in the direction they wanted to be in the future.

The Organisation

Shaping the companies into ‘Champions of Diversity’ in their industry, the programme worked with Nadhia Hussain, Head of Housing Services at Yorkshire Housing to develop their approach to diversity. Yorkshire Housing manages more than 16,500 homes across Yorkshire. They aim to be one of the best providers of homes and support, and care about what they do by demonstrating core values of Respect, Reliability and Enthusiasm in everything they do.

Impact "The driver has been useful in identifying our areas of weakness and areas of strength"

What did we do?

• Arranged Equality and Diversity training for all of our staff and this will take into account the feedback from the driver process. The roll out of Equality & Diversity training to all staff (700+) will start early in 2010. We were previously going to provide this for certain groups of staff only but we are convinced of the importance of everyone buying into the same core value of respect right across our association. • Developed a 'Managers’ Learning Path' to help managers display behaviours that are consistent with our values, one of which is 'respect'. We believe this will help to tackle some of the feedback that was identified in the driver process.

What did we learn?

The work helped establish a baseline in our organisation of the level of understanding and commitment required in relation to Equality and Diversity issues. This will help us to strengthen our approach and embed the values in our organisation in order to better serve customers and to be an employer of choice.