If an organisation has, throughout its entire fabric, staff who accurately represent its customers, then it will automatically have a better understanding of what those customers want.

It will also deliver its products and services with far greater focus.

If you confine or restrict your talent pool, then reaching that level of clarity or insight becomes a lot harder to achieve.

Those are all points that some of the UK’s biggest firms are beginning to embrace wholeheartedly, without any prompts from policymakers.

Signs are that there’s significant appetite among businesses to take charge of the diversity drive, rather than wait until the next government or think-tank report urges them to do so.

Take Lloyds Banking Group, for example. Last month, it became the first-ever corporate in the FTSE 100 to set a target for non-whites in senior roles – aiming to boost its roster of BAME talent to 8% of senior management, and 10% of the total workforce, by 2020.

Delicate balance

In the words of Lloyds’ inclusion director Fiona Cannon, “What gets measured gets done.” She goes on: “We recognise that companies with diverse management teams perform better and have made a public commitment to create a truly inclusive workforce. It is our ambition to better reflect the customers and communities which we serve.”

I met Fiona recently at a Women’s All Party Parliamentary discussion on flexible working, and she said unequivocally that it’s the business case for flexible working that must be compelling. This should also be a guiding principle when introducing any other inclusivity initiative. 

Particularly in large firms – where there are so many, delicately balanced factors that can influence day-to-day running – a ‘best-guess’ attempt to implement a well-meaning initiative could actually create more problems than it solves.

One company that has approached the task in the right way is accountancy firm Grant Thornton. Its recent decision to scrap traditional academic barriers to entry was ostensibly a risky move.

However, it led to a 47% increase in applications to the firm’s school-leaver programme last year – plus the top spot in the UK’s first-ever Social Mobility Employer Index.

Compelling reason

Such a dramatic widening of an organisation’s talent pool enables it to find staff who can make different, more creative and more innovative decisions.

Similarly, Lloyds wouldn’t be taking the course of action it has chosen to take in the field of representation if it didn’t think there was a compelling, economic reason to do so.

A heartening aspect of these schemes is that, once an organisation such as Lloyds or Grant Thornton has embarked upon a change-making scheme to shake up its staffing policy, its competitors will very likely reassess their own arrangements.

They will sit down and work out whether they, too, could yield economic benefits from undertaking similar programmes. With that in mind, there’s ample scope for momentum to continue to build among firms in relation to issues such as diversity, and for that momentum take on a life of its own.

It’s the development of the business case, the ‘sitting down and working out’ phase that’s crucial, here: before the effort gets underway. The reasons for the decision should be clear and compelling.   

By all means broaden your intake of talent, or help your staff work more flexibly – but ensure that there are sound business reasons for doing so.