Creating communications excellence

Creating a truly inclusive workplace relies on all of us – at every level – to be striving for continuous improvement; whether that’s in the way we recruit or how we celebrate and support our teams every day.

Industry benchmarking surveys have shown that we can and should be doing more to increase the visibility and accessibility of opportunities in healthcare communications. How and where we advertise job opportunities is therefore critical in delivering on our commitments to creating diverse workplaces that better reflect the society we live in. This could include working with community organisations to broaden the reach of new opportunities, reviewing job adverts to ensure they’re accessible to everyone, providing different formats for candidates to demonstrate their strengths during interview processes, and considering how we can do more to mitigate unconscious biases.

Delivering on these commitments requires everyone to be pulling in the same direction, and we should be ensuring that managers and leaders are equipped with the knowledge and resources needed to promote and maintain inclusive cultures.

It’s also important to remember that nobody’s professional life exists in a vacuum. How happy we are at work impacts how happy we are in general, which is why fostering a sense of belonging in the workplace is so crucial to our wider happiness.

In practice, this could involve:

• Creating an open dialogue between leadership and the wider workforce, where people of all levels and backgrounds are given the opportunity to share suggestions and feedback
• Ensuring well-being resources are diverse and accommodate the needs of employees. There’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to well-being support, and interventions that might appeal to one person could deter another
• Implementing flexible practices that support work-life balance. This not only gives people time to do the things they enjoy, but it supports individuals with different lifestyles, or personal circumstances such as caring responsibilities.

Sarah Pollard is Account Director, Well-being Champion and Claire Poynton is Senior Account Director, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Champion, both at M+F Health