An Update on The HudsonBec Group’s Commitments to Change — December 2020

Almost 6 months ago to the day we published our list of commitments to change across the whole of the HudsonBec Group. Since then, we have been working hard to ensure tangible, considered action followed our words. Not just for the short term — but for as long as the group exists.

Our update back in September across all 11 of our commitments was our initial report, and as promised we want to continue to publicly update every quarter to let everyone know how we’re progressing as an organisation.

As we said last time — we’re pleased to see the whole workforce take these commitments very seriously, led by our DEI team (which now has representation from over half of the employees in the business), with three incredibly dedicated leads; Marianne, Charlie and Will alongside Jessie our HR lead and Will and I as directors.

If you’re keen to understand full detail on any of the below — please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Hiring

As we’ve said previously, our biggest challenge as a group has been the diversity of our own internal team. Despite good intentions in improving our process and systems in previous years, we hadn’t been doing enough impactful work to change what we saw in our teams, and I’m pleased to say that we have started to see that change in the last 6 months.

• This has been down to an uplift in recruitment across the group, from a positive start to our financial year. Fuelled by some hard work improving our recruitment processes, we have advertised four full-time positions (two of which were fixed-term contracts), and have on average had 44% Black, Asian and minority Ethnic applicants at first and second interview. An improvement, but still short of the 60% target we set ourselves. We also found getting to this target more challenging when recruiting for more senior roles, and we need to look at our strategies to make sure our applicant base is well represented, regardless of the seniority of role. An action for us in this next quarter, and there is lots more work to be done here.
• As part of our recruitment changes, we have scrapped a layer of our interview process that we felt could have confirmed unconscious biases, and replaced it with an informal chat where the candidate can ask us questions. This is there purely for the candidates’ benefit. To make them feel welcome in our workplace and listen to any thoughts they have before they start — away from a formal, assessed part of the interview. This was the direct result of a company-wide inclusivity survey within the last three months, and shows the openness and devotion of our internal team to help make change from the ground up.
• Finally, we’ve also committed to 5 entry-level, 6 month placements through the government kickstart scheme — and are working closely with Create Jobs to recruit for the programme, which will start in the Spring.

Output

The output of the businesses in the group have also moved in line with our new targets; making sure we use our platforms and reach to impact the industry day in, day out.

It’s Nice That:

• We set a target of 50% of all creatives and writers commissioned and speakers programmed in 2020/21 to be Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic talent. In Q1 we are tracking at 53%.
• We have continued to donate banner advertising space to organisations working to make the industry more diverse ; and have refined our approach to offer space to two organisations every single month — and have offered well over 1 million impressions so far.
• We launched our first ever ‘supporters’ platform on It’s Nice That this month; Extra Nice — and as part of the Extra Nice Fund we’re putting 10% of all Extra Nice fees into bringing to life a creative project focused on increasing diversity in our industry every single year.

Anyways Creative:

• We set targets to increase focus on ensuring projects and project teams include further representation of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic talent. We have had a successful first quarter on this and are on track to meet our targets for the year.

Lecture in Progress:

• The team have continued to maintain over 50% representation of creatives from underrepresented backgrounds, including balanced representation of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic talent. They also are actively working to increase coverage of creatives based in underrepresented parts of the UK, creatives of all genders and creatives with disabilities.

If You Could Jobs:.

• We set a target of 40% of all creatives contributing to editorial content must be Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic talent. We have spent the last 3 months getting systems and processes in place due to a small team and new team members and we’ll be reporting on this in the next update in March.

Learning and Education

We committed to not only educating ourselves as a minimum, but also engaging and helping the creative community too and have continued to find ways to do this over the past three months;

• We have set up an initiative offering our expertise to organisations that we feel are doing positive work in the DEI space around the creative industries. Helping organisations to do what they do, even better, by donating our time to them for free.
• We partnered with The Photography Foundation to run a workshop by four of our internal team for their current cohort of 18–20 year olds to explain what different job roles exist at a creative group like ours. This will also provide a foundation of a workshop structure that we can replicate for other organisations looking to learn, and will endeavor to do more of these sessions in the coming year.
• We had the first meeting of our Anti-Racism book club groups. All of which sparked with some open and honest conversation on topics we would otherwise have not been speaking about internally as much as we should.
• We committed to introduce mandatory Unconscious Bias training for the group which we did through The Other Box back in September. We are keen to continue training in the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion space throughout the group and our next session in January will be on Neurodiversity Awareness.

As we look to 2021, our work of course continues based on the targets we set out in September — moving towards our goals for 2023. The major areas on the agenda for early 2021 will be a full review of all of our internal policies; rewritten and designed for inclusivity. We’ve also been working hard behind the scenes on a relaunch of Lecture in Progress to focus even more sharply on improving access to the creative industry, and look forward to sharing that with the world in the new year.

Like we said last time, lots of progress has been made in the last three months — and clearly so much more to do.

As always, any questions, comments and feedback before our next update at the end of March are always welcome — alex@thehudsonbecgroup.com

Alex and Will