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New initiatives

The prominence of BLM has helped us to accelerate the changes we already had planned. We’ve brought forward refocusing our learning and development programme around key speakers, helping to shine new light on racial issues and allyship; made extra learning resources available, including suggesting and buying books to help us educate ourselves and reflect; and encouraged the team to spend time engaging with them. It’s allowed us to have difficult internal discussions – on racial inequality, labels and mental health – so that everyone has been able to learn from each other. 

We’re still actively hiring talent, but our recruitment process is different to before, driven by the dual factors of coronavirus and BLM. We take a very long term view getting the right talent to Mother, and we’re still meeting / open to meeting lots of people, but there is more focus finding diverse, high quality candidates for roles now or in the future. A big part of that is helping to get exceptionally diverse individuals onto our horizon and building relationships for when the right role for them comes available. 

Like many, we’re re-focusing our effort on our existing team, doing everything we can to retain, train and develop the diverse talent we have, especially those in more junior positions. Finally, we’re empowering our underrepresented communities, making sure they have a voice that is heard, with an authentic support network and richer sense of belonging at Mother. Our plan is for these to cover race, LGBTQI+, neurodiversity and people with disabilities. 

Existing initiatives

Our aim has always been for Mother to be an open and accepting environment, yet we know that there is still a lot we can do to be better. Last year we took concrete action in that direction. Hiring the right person to help us lead this was one of the first things we did – creating a new leadership position that looks specifically at improving recruitment, learning and development, diversity and inclusion. 

The first step on our journey was always going to be a comprehensive audit on where we are now – not just recruitment, but looking at everything from internal promotions, training, appraisals, social events; basically everything has been interrogated to make sure it is the most inclusive it can be. This has allowed us to identify and solve any systematic problems, and will help us operate smarter, while removing any potential risk for bias, plus profile our industry to the next generation of talent who may not even consider it an option for them. 

Mother has long invested in creative people from all backgrounds – both the team and the creative businesses we’ve helped get off the ground – and this is a natural progression of the work we’ve already been doing, albeit a more systematic approach.

BAME pay gap

We don’t currently have a BAME pay gap figure. This is something we’re planning on monitoring once we’ve consulted with our team. The current aim is for 2021, when we want to get this data analysed to have absolute certainty that all our people get paid in a suitable and fair range. 

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