Gender equality in facilities management

Blog from facilities management recruitment specialists 300 North 

Poor equality and diversity in any organisation has been shown to negatively affect the bottom line. Not only can poor diversity affect customer perception and lead to negative press or social media commentary around your brand, it can also put off potential hires, who don’t want to be seen to be working for a homogenous company. People see diverse workplaces as being safer and more welcoming for them, and as a place where they can fit in more readily.

Senior Director of the Office of Diversity at Walmart, Donald Fan wrote, “diverse teams often outperform teams composed of the very best individuals, because this diversity of perspective and problem-solving approach trumps individual ability.” Diversity in the workplace drives innovation. Different people have experience with different pain points and are therefore able to see different problems that need to be solved. These problems can then be assessed and tackled by the more diverse team.

The discussion about diversity and equality is larger than attempting to make a workforce proportionally representative of a population. It is about ensuring that different voices are heard: from the young apprentices in the company, to the people on the board. Companies with different voices being heard from the top down more often than not have better economic returns, and higher employee retention rates because they are more inclusive. Research has shown that “over the past decade, highly educated young professionals have increasingly prioritized personal values in deciding where to work, whether it’s a commitment to sustainability, philanthropy or social impact.” 76% of people on a Glassdoor poll said that diversity in their workplace was important to them. Any employer who puts equality, diversity and inclusion to the side now will face trouble when recruiting for the future.

Coronavirus Consequences

Current reporting is showing that women have been more adversely affected by the pandemic in terms of job retention and job security. Reporting from McKinsey shows that women make up 39% of global employment, and yet 54% of pandemic related job losses. Women are more vulnerable to instability in the job market as 77% of the 3 million UK workers in ‘high-risk’ jobs are women. They are also generally employed more in jobs negatively affected by lockdowns and the pandemic, as well as the loss of external childcare and schooling.

The Fawcett Society in partnership with other equality charities and groups across the UK have found mothers are four times more likely to be the main caregiver for their children, and 32% of working mothers (either part time or full time) said they be unable to take paid leave to cover childcare due to school closures. Dr Mary Ann Stephenson, Director of Women’s Budget Group, said “mothers were disproportionately responsible for the extra care responsibilities, including home-schooling and more likely to be interrupted in their paid work.” These interruptions are more likely to ensure that women take time off from work altogether to avoid major drops in performance that may result in facing redundancy, or dismissal.

Having to take time off to ensure that childcare and homeschooling for children is provided has been a detriment to the careers of many women, and though assisted by full or part-time furlough, carer’s leave, or requests for other flexible working arrangements, there is more that could be done to save women’s jobs. Part-time furlough has been particularly helpful to parents as it has allowed parents to share the childcare and homeschooling responsibilities, however women have still borne the majority of the responsibility when it comes to giving up work in favour of looking after children’s needs.

Sodexo

Companies like Sodexo, where 20% of their security team are female (rather than the usual 9%), show clear benefit from having a diverse team. Women retraining into FM may feel daunted by a more gender imbalanced team, and may therefore not attempt to go into the industry. Sodexo have created multiple schemes and projects that target women at all points of life, whether school leavers, established career professionals, or current and ex-offenders. Each of their programmes works to highlight the breadth of roles available in their company, as well as in the wider FM sector.

Sodexo are working to combat a lack of diversity in security and FM through their SheWorks programme which helps female offenders approaching release see that they can be employed after leaving the prison system. For International Women’s Day 2021, Sodexo held a special virtual open day in two women’s prisons that had women from all over the company explore their roles and career paths with the offenders. The hope is that the programme will lead to women gaining confidence to apply for roles and skills training in all sectors after release, but particularly opening their eyes to employment opportunities in FM. This is “part of [Sodexo’s] social impact pledge and commitment to creating local career pathways, [through which they aim] to fill 5% of [their] job vacancies with prison leavers and those with an offending background by 2023”. This will hugely impact women leaving the criminal justice system and successful implementation will reduce reoffending rates.

Sodexo are also looking to increase the diversity in their staff in partnership with Generation Success. The 14-month mentoring programme hopes to bring 40 diverse young people into the sector and show them the breadth of roles available. This programme will also benefit the coaches mentoring the new recruits, as they are enrolled on a coaching apprenticeship. This kind of mutually beneficial programme is great for upskilling a company’s workforce whilst nurturing new talent. It helps to future proof the company and the workforce.

Expeditious Services

Another security company with a strong policy on gender equality is Expeditious Services who have a 12% female security staff, and a head office where 85% of their workforce is female. They have implemented a flexible and agile working culture which helps women fit into the security role. Their flexibility as a company allows people to take flexible shifts around caring duties, education commitments, and partner working hours which entices people into the roles, but they also get to the very basics of ensuring people feel pride in themselves and their work, by getting them well fitting uniforms that look professional. They have a lone worker protection procedure which means that they are called hourly by account managers to check up on them, making the staff feel cared for by the company, and safe.

They also attempt to recruit from outside the security field, bringing in talent from across a range of sectors, and looking more at transferrable skills. This allows them to pull from a more diverse pool of candidates. They also support defined plans for career progression within the company and sector, allowing more people to fulfil their potential in the business.

Mitie

Mitie have been recognised for the third year running as one of the UKs top inclusive employers by Inclusive Companies. This recognition follows Mitie’s 2020 Social Value Report which launched their Mitie Girls Can initiative. This scheme allows women working for Mitie to complete technical engineering apprenticeships to further their education and role within the company. This kind of training allows more women to engage with facilities management and become a part of a company working hard towards diversity, equality, and inclusion. In 2020 they achieved their target of increasing women in STEM roles by 20%, which works towards their larger equality and diversity strategy.

As part of their equality and diversity strategy, Mitie have endorsed the Ten Steps WISE campaign who focus on gender balance in STEM, starting from educating women on the attractive vocations they can have in STEM, to ensuring that STEM companies have gender balanced boards. They have a proven track record of helping companies improve their culture and recruitment to be more diverse through the Ten Step programme. With this partnership, Mitie hopes to again improve their diversity after increasing hiring of women into STEM roles in their business in 2019 by 20%. In 2019 they also made half of their Board members female. This inclusivity and diversity stands to benefit the business in the long run.

Engie

Engie is another FM company working towards managerial parity, and have a range of equality practices in place to support women at the company, such as the UK’s Women in Engie network. Employees are encouraged to create networks and groups together to address any diversity issues they may have, or raise any solutions they believe could be implemented to the betterment of their working lives and the company as a whole. The network was launched on International Women’s Day 2020, and has so far promoted an internal women’s mentoring scheme and has affected fair recruitment and wider company equality policies.

The wider Women in Networking network by Engie was created in 2008 to promote leadership among female staff and to allow them to come forward with policies and structural changes that would benefit their position in the company. The founding team was made up of just eight women. It is now a global network of over 2000 Engie employees, male and female, across the world, and has powered the idea of having half of all management positions filled by women by 2030 through the

“Imagine 2030” programme. The network is a place where women can be supported in their professional and personal lives, and can gain mentoring from others in the group though shared experience.

We also spoke to Craig Fullwood, an Engie Regional Director, about equality and diversity at Engie. As someone with the capacity to bring new people into the business, he is very much focused on how to reach out to women in the community of engineers, in the community local to his regional hub, and most importantly, how to reach out to those who are not yet in the FM sector and expanding the Engie talent pool. There are many transferable skills people need – anyone in high profile, high pressure environments may be suitable to come across into a more STEM role and could bring in cross business ideas. He is interested in bringing women into Engie at all levels, and is working closely with a recent graduate on Engie’s sustainability. He also focussed on how important it is to have more women doing the hands on, local jobs, fulfilling the Engie contracts as engineers in NHS hospitals for example.

He also spoke about the powerful visibility of equality and diversity within the Engie workplace, as people are able to form groups, such as the LGBT+ and women’s groups that have brought particular challenges they face in the workplace to light for others to understand. Speaking on the changes he’s seen in equality and diversity in the last few years at Engie, he said, “I’ve seen the diversity of the business increase, definitely. As a client previously looking in, and then, you know, being on the inside I can see diversity’s definitely moving. The conversation’s being had.” The conversation is also being had at the very top. This International Women’s Day event was a large Teams meeting with senior leaders coming together from across the business to say what International Women’s Day meant to them and what they were doing across the company to increase diversity.

Mace

Mace are one of many FM companies leading in equality and diversity in the sector. Recent appointments at senior levels following the integration of their Operate division have been diverse, including Marlies Hoogeboom as Managing Director for UK and Europe and Maud Santamaria as Workplace Experience Director. Having achieved net-zero carbon, they are looking at creating a much more equal and diverse workplace. With the release of their Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2020, Mace have set out a series of six steps in order to achieve further equality in their business. They also champion the equality and diversity networks set up in the business for everyone, including their Women at Mace network, the Pride at Mace network, Ethnic Diversity and Inclusion Network (EDIN), the Enabled at Mace network and the Mace Military Network. Each of these works to support colleagues at Mace and to raise awareness of the challenges faced by different people.

SPIE

SPIE’s So’SPIE Ladies Network has been created to challenge the stereotypes of female employees in the workforce. They are working towards gender equality to bring more women into engineering, to help avoid the ramifications on the sector of “compounding the persistent skills gap” between men and women. The network has been running for three years and has had a direct and positive impact

on the increased number of women employed in that time. This year for International Women’s Day they highlighted fifty women within the company to show what female engineers and technicians can do and to celebrate their work. They also do frequent visits to schools to share their work at SPIE and to get young people excited about the FM sector.

This article is clearly focused on the issue of gender equality in Facilities Management and in the workplace more broadly, however equality must be addressed in all areas, including ethnicity, disability and the LGBTQIA+ community. The pandemic has been widely shown to have disproportionately affected people from black, Asian and ethnic minority (BAME) backgrounds, and people with disabilities, who face different barriers to the workplace in some cases than women. Women from BAME backgrounds for example are overrepresented in the healthcare sector, making them more vulnerable and exposed to COVID-19. They are also “[33%] more likely than white workers to be in precarious work”, which as stated above, disproportionately affects women as well.

FM companies are already making great strides towards a more equal workforce and acknowledging the inequalities in the sector. Many FM companies have diversity networks which allow people to come forward as a group to make change in a business. These networks also provide a safe space of support and understanding, and a place where people can come to understand how to become better allies to these communities. The formation of these networks shows a true willingness to change and become better in these very large FM companies which brings hope and brightness for the future of women and all minority communities in FM.