By Martin Glover, HR Director for Morton Fraser LLP
Within West Lothian Chamber of Commerce, we are lucky to have a diverse range of businesses and our Premier Partner, Morton Fraser LLP is a prime example of a business who strives to include diversity in all areas of their company while encouraging others to do the same.
In a recent (2019) study undertaken by Page Executive, a leading recruitment and HR consultancy, only 34% of top executives knew what their Diversity and Inclusion Strategy was. Yet 81% of the same population understood the strategic importance of having a well-defined strategy and approach. This presents a significant challenge for HR practitioners and organisations looking to ensure their workforce better reflects their client base and the communities in which they operate.
At Morton Fraser LLP our approach is to ensure that Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) is a thread which we weave throughout all of our people policies and practices so that our approach is deeply embedded and firmly part of our values and culture. What this means in practice is that all of our people policies are written through a D&I lens. We are clear up front what we want to achieve in things like the composition of our workforce, our approach to the gender pay gap, opportunities for all people to progress their careers, how we accommodate people with disabilities, how we attract people into our Firm from socially disadvantaged backgrounds and so on.
As our beliefs around diversity are so strong, we do not generally set targets around each of diversity, believing that our values and belief drive our actions and we measure our progress from an earlier starting point so we can see how we are doing and turn our attention to areas where we believe we should do better.
We believe that talent resides everywhere, and we aim to be blind to difference believing what matters is how people show up and how they work together to deliver the very best outcomes for our clients. We believe our people should be bring their whole self to work and when this happens there are no barriers to success.
So what things can we point to that show how we are doing? There are many because as I have said already D&I is pervasive but a few things I’d point to are as follows:
- More than 60% of our female workforce occupy the most senior grades and our Managing Board is 50/50 female/male.
- We are working hard to appeal to socially disadvantaged groups in our graduate recruitment and use a tool which helps us select people from disadvantaged backgrounds where previously they could be missed. This year we shortlisted 3 people from 24 from disadvantaged backgrounds for our trainee lawyer scheme and 1 of 8 was successfully appointed.
- We have appointed our first Asian Partner.
- We introduced agile working across the entire workforce 2 years ago to help people balance work and personal commitments.
- We provide work experience programmes for people with disabilities to help them into the world of work.
The list goes on and on. The acid test of all of this though is what our people feel about us as an employer, as a place to work and whether they genuinely believe what we think and do makes a difference. We regularly test staff opinion on these matters through the Sunday times Top 100 employer survey and last year we were placed 84th in the UK and in the Top 40 in Scotland.
However we have more to do and we will be busy this year continuing to appeal to all sectors of society to join our Firm and help us be the best independent law form in Scotland. The law is all about justice so it is part of who we are at Morton Fraser that we continue to lead by example and in doing so ensure talented people everywhere can join together and do their very best work here every day.
