This week we’re celebrating people and diversity at Network Rail.
From 1 to 5 October we’re raising awareness of the relevance of diversity and inclusion, and recognising the hard work of our employees to help achieve this goal.
Becoming an increasingly open, diverse and inclusive organisation makes us safer and improves performance through fresh ideas and the confidence to challenge the status quo.
Our Diversity and Inclusion team has worked with our six employee networks and others, including various sponsors and equality reps, to organise a special programme of events.
Everyone matters
Our theme for Everyone Week this year is ‘everyone matters’ to encourage us to highlight that our Everyone Strategy focuses on all nine protected characteristics as defined in the Equality Act 2010.
They are: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.
This year we launched a project to increase the proportion of our female staff to a fifth of our workforce by 2020. Through 20by20, we will improve our processes and practices, which will benefit everyone at our organisation.
We have also launched a campaign to raise awareness of reasonable adjustments – changes to a working environment that enable people to work productively and safely. We are focusing on increasing the understanding of the type of adjustments available, reminding people how to request reasonable adjustments and providing a toolkit to support line managers in such conversations.
Our programme
Everyone Week includes a wide range of talks involving guest speakers. In addition to sessions focused on reasonable adjustments and the 20by20 project, attendees can learn more about topics such as inclusive recruitment, flexible working, inclusive design, leadership, inclusive marketing and mental health and well-being.
There will also be specific sessions on a range of subjects including deaf awareness and sign language, menopause, epilepsy, medical detection dogs and domestic abuse.
Meanwhile, Everyone Week highlights our ongoing efforts to provide opportunities for under-represented groups to experience working at Network Rail, and to arrange school visits to promote careers at Network Rail and learn more from charity Samaritans about how to collaborate further with the rail industry.