Making a good case

Diversity has long been a buzz word among personnel managers but it is only recently that lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans staff have hit the radar.

While some major employers have made major strides forward, many bosses have done little or nothing. That’s why Pink Paper took the chance to attend the annual CIPD conference to explain to the country’s personnel and development managers why having a diverse workforce, including gay staff, can benefit them.

As the government has been keen to point out, ensuring you have a positive working environment isn’t just a nice thing to do, or simply morally nice – it can also help companies and organisations to save money and be more productive.

At our presentation, Pink Paper editor Tris Reid-Smith told a capacity crowd about research by gay campaign group Stonewall which indicated that some gays and lesbians might even be prepared to work for less money if they had a positive and supportive environment. That, he said, indicates how important it is for staff to be treated properly.

There are an estimated 1.7 million lesbian, gay and bisexual people in the workforce at the moment and another 150,000 gay students or recent graduates, but despite this many employers, even large employers, have never tried to recruit directly from this market and many more have only made a token effort. Those that do try, often resort to boring stereotyped concepts and designs in their advertising and promotion, getting it right can ensure they hire the best talent from our community.

But that’s not the end of it, as Reid-Smith told them. Once staff are on board, they need to be provided with a supportive environment and helped to develop and thrive. The costs of failing to do this can be high. A third of staff will leave in the face of discrimination and in one case of homophobia which ended in an employment tribunal, the payout was £120,000.

Obviously this can also have a knock-on effect on the employer’s reputation. A massive 74 per cent of gay people and a surprising 42 per cent of straights are less likely to use services and products if they believe the organisation which provides them is anti-queer.

We also shared with them advice pioneered by Stonewall and other diversity experts on how to build a better working environment. There are a number of low-cost, high-reward policies that companies can follow, like supporting the gay community through sponsorship, appointing a senior manager or director to be in charge of diversity and setting up an LGBT staff networking group which can raise problems and help create solutions to them.

The rewards of this are a happy, contented staff where everyone knows they will be treated fairly. That means people are more likely to stay in the organisation, reducing the costs and disruption of constantly having to hire new employees. But it also means their productivity and creativity will be higher.

Despite the message being simple, and the rewards being great, gay issues still feel under-represented in the diversity debate. In particular, no-one has yet satisfactorily solved the problem of how to get small and medium sized companies to improve – they make up a huge portion of the economy but have limited resources. Even if they are willing, they can often overlook the problems.

Reid-Smith said: “Although there were hundreds of gay people attending, we believe Pink Paper was the only overtly gay organisation represented at CIPD’s conference. That’s a shame as gay diversity in the workplace is still something that needs a lot of work but it tends to be overlooked.

“Personnel managers, particularly gay and lesbian ones, have obviously realised this and the response to our being there was overwhelmingly positive. Many people came up to us simply to say how pleased they were to see us.

“Others had more in-depth questions. Some asked if their diversity policy was well worded, others wanted to discuss setting up a gay networking group in their organisation. And one or two had obviously done nothing on this issue but knew they needed to – we helped them with some ideas to get them started.”

Pink Paper also hopes, in the future, to use its two decades of expertise and its extensive audience research to help employers develop a better understanding of what their gay staff, consumers or service users expect.