Difference makes us stronger

Pamela Thomson-Hall, Head of International, WTW

 IWD 2022

At WTW we believe that difference makes us stronger. We want the make up of our workforce to reflect the different and varied markets we operate in, and we want to build an inclusive culture where all our colleagues can bring their best self to work every day, feeling welcomed and valued.

Supporting women in the workplace is an important part of our inclusion and diversity strategy and we're proud to have areas of focus that are aimed at helping us #BreakTheBias.

In our global Inclusion and Diversity (I&D) strategy, we’re focused on: attracting and hiring to increase the pipeline of under- represented talent; developing and promoting to increase representation and overall diversity in senior leadership and throughout our talent pipeline; promoting an inclusive culture and work environment; and measuring our progress to inform our actions. But what does this mean in reality?

Last year, we launched our License To Hire training, giving hiring managers and recruiters the tools they need to be inclusive and mitigate bias in the recruitment process. The License to Hire training makes sure all involved in the hiring process follow inclusive recruitment best practices, with the goal of attracting, assessing and hiring the most qualified candidates from the broadest and most diverse talent pools.

In addition to attracting in diverse talent, we’re also committed to developing and promoting underrepresented talent (URT) to increase our overall diversity in senior leadership. In 2021 we launched three new programs. The Next Three is a global pay-it-forward development program giving continued development, exposure and opportunity to high potential women; the Career Accelerator program is aimed at high potential women further down our talent pipeline; and our SHE Leads program focuses on habits from the book “How Women Rise.”

Since the beginning of the pandemic, and now more than ever, we’ve been putting our people first. At the start of the pandemic when everyone was at home together, we saw many of our colleagues struggling with juggling home school, childcare and work – something that we know disproportionately impacts women. We created a hub on our intranet page called Parenthood in the Workplace filled with resources, helpful support and ideas, as well as creating a Yammer community to connect parents and carers to share experiences, tips, questions, and ideas to help everyone feel connected and part of a community.

We’ve also used data to inform our actions. By measuring our data and having honest conversations with our colleagues and stakeholders, we’ve gained a better understanding of the work we need to do to further enhance the representation of our workforce and build a more positive colleague experience.

As a company, we joined Paradigm for Parity over five years ago – with a goal to achieve gender parity in senior leadership by 2030 – and since that date, we’ve worked hard to make our workplace culture more inclusive and put in place a number of different programs to help us boost overall diversity in our company.

We’ve recently been recognised in the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index, reaffirming our commitment to gender equity and empowering women at work. We know we still have more work to do to achieve our goal of gender parity in senior leadership but collectively, we can help break the biases that most commonly affect women in the workplace.

Let’s all #BreakTheBias!