As a digital services company, our role is to drive transformation and introduce better, faster and more fulfilling ways of working. Not just for the good of our clients, but to benefit people as a whole. 

Our product experts go through multiple processes of discovery with our customers to get to the root of their needs, challenges and ambitions. 

Our approach requires individuals with diverse strengths suited to different organisations and people. The future will impact everyone — not just one kind of person with a specific background. By bringing in diverse voices, we can create blueprints of change that suit every individual — their limitations and privileges alike — and introduce technology that meets the needs of everyone. 

Since the introduction of the gender pay gap report, we have set five-year targets to increase our gender diversity across the business. So far, we have seen a 2% increase in the overall representation of women, but there’s much more to do. Through strengthening our gender diversity programmes and keeping up the momentum, we want to create a better future for our business, the organisations we serve and our industry. 

We wanted to share what we’re doing to close our gender gap and introduce more diversity into our teams, at the start of another transformational year for businesses.

What are we doing to improve gender diversity?

Inclusive recruitment

We adopt inclusive recruitment and selection processes, ensuring we are attracting a diverse talent pool reflective of the communities we operate within. Famously, Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In revealed stats that showed women only applied for jobs where they could meet 100% of the criteria, whereas men looked for 60% and over. 

To avoid this, we make sure we use gender-neutral language decoders and advertise roles as flexible, where possible. We aim to empower women to apply for roles by communicating in a way that allows them to demonstrate their potential. We are also an early signatory of the BITC Open Doors Inclusive Recruitment campaign, reviewing all of our recruitment policies and procedures to ensure they are entirely inclusive. 

Supporting women in the business

A big part of our drive towards gender diversity is ensuring all our employees have an equal opportunity to progress throughout the business. We want to employ the right person for the right job but make sure there are no blockers that could prevent women or any other minority group from applying or succeeding in promotion. 

Designing flexibility into strategic positions is key to enabling women to progress. Our policy goes further than where you can work, we are constantly challenging how we can better support different people with different family setups and needs. As part of this, we can explore the possibility of compressed hours and job sharing to name a few possibilities. 

We also participate in two external mentoring programmes – Mission Gender Equity and Mission Include, run by Moving Ahead that enable women to drive their own development and get inspired by their peers. We currently have seven women on mentoring programmes, each deriving from different areas of the business. Taking part in awards events that celebrate women in our industry and gender diversity is also important to us, having five nominees at the WISA final last year.

Creating an inclusive culture

Fundamentally, our objective is to make sure everyone understands what diversity is, what inclusivity is and what it all means for us at Ricoh. Creating that understanding means promoting fairness, ensuring people know that just because we’re raising awareness for one minority group, it doesn’t mean we’re limiting opportunities for other groups. 

We provide employees with support networks, tools and development programmes to promote fairness and collaboration and build a culture of openness. 

We have identified people to participate in an EMEA wide female talent programme to support gender diversity, creating a space for our senior female leaders to discuss common challenges and encourage personal development. Opening up the discussion to everyone, our allyship lunch and learn session, alongside our gender lunch and learn session, gives men a chance to get involved and advocate for gender issues.

Better outcomes for all women

Our next focus is to improve outcomes for women across all diversity strands, not just gender. Crucially, we want to make sure we’re not overlooking the whole lived experience of our people. We are creating a diversity dashboard, which will break down gender, ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation to understand our gaps and improve representation, allyship and support.  Once complete, we will create action plans following data analysis to help improve our diversity.

Data is an essential tool to measure our progress. We will continue to measure the gender mix throughout the recruitment process to identify any barriers and then put relevant actions in place to address these. Our gender pay gap report isn’t just a legal requirement to us, and we are continually analysing pay to address any disparities.

Helping address the digital skills gaps

Improving gender diversity is a long journey. Our job is to find ways to remove inequality inside our organisation to offer a better experience for our customers and our people. But there’s also a societal challenge to overcome. The digital skills gap in the UK costs the economy around £63 billion per year, and it is estimated the UK will need 1.2 million new digital talents by 2023. At the moment, we simply don’t have enough graduates to fill in this need. 

While the number of women in engineering and science roles is increasing, gender diversity in the UK technology sector has been static for 10 years, compounding the problem. We want to play our part by encouraging women into technology by positioning positive role models and providing an environment where women can thrive. Only by taking action like this can we prepare our industry to face future demands.

The post Better gender diversity in our team fuels innovation for our customers appeared first on Insights - Empowering Digital Workplaces.

Ricoh UK was delighted to have five of our female salespeople shortlisted at the Women in Sales Awards, together with 15 nominees from Ricoh Europe. Nominating our people for WISA awards helps us do two important things: 1) Recognise and congratulate a job well done 2) Challenge the idea of what success looks like in an industry that may have previously displayed inequalities.

Events like WISA are crucial to bringing more women into the industry, giving a platform to women succeeding in roles that have traditionally been favoured by men. It brings a greater awareness of the need for gender diversity in sales and across all areas of business, as well as help grow the pipeline of sales talent. 

Creating role models

In the world of work, ‘you have to be able to see it, to be it’. We take part in WISA to show women searching for a career that technology isn’t just reserved for one type of person, background or personality. Success doesn’t have to look a certain way.

Internally, it also helps us identify and nurture ambassadors for gender diversity that can champion the progression of women and other minority groups within our organisation. Having buy-in from everyone is critical to achieving an inclusive working environment. And for us, gender diversity isn’t about fulfilling a quota. Having these conversations makes good moral sense and good business sense – we can only meet our customers’ complex needs by employing diverse people with diverse skills and experiences. 

Our 2021 WISA finalists

In the interest of giving a platform to our brilliant nominees, I wanted to share some of their thoughts, feelings and insights on their award nominations. If you’re inspired by their words and want to hear more about a career with Ricoh, get in touch with us. 

Our goal is to enable our people to feel fulfilled, achieve their ambitions and bring their whole selves to the workplace. We’ll be releasing more details of the inclusivity and diversity programmes we’re leading with in 2022, soon. 

Katie Huggon – International Account Manager & 2021 Finalist – Digital Sales 

‘’To be recognised by senior management for the Women In Sales Awards in Europe this year, is to me, a great achievement in itself. I am humbled and honoured to have made the finals in the digital sales category. 

I came into Ricoh UK as an International Business Graduate nearing 7 years ago and I feel my confidence and knowledge in the sales field has continued to grow. I believe my recognition within the awards is just the start of my journey within Ricoh and I am very excited to see where my hard work can take me in the next couple of years within the International Team.’’

Wendy Bendix – Inside Sales Team Leader (Office Service)  & 2021 Finalist – Inside Sales

“I was elated to hear that I had been nominated amongst my female peers, let alone making it to the next step by being selected as a finalist within my category. I have always been grateful for the internal recognition Ricoh UK Ltd has given me over the past six years, but this is a massive milestone that has without a shadow of a doubt confirmed to me that the more I have put into others the more rewarding the experience is for me. I wanted to create a personal brand that my customers, team, peers, colleagues and management could trust and depend on and knowing that they will all celebrate this success with me makes me extremely proud.

Working in sales has taught me that I can overcome any challenge and be a powerful force in this extremely demanding industry. My focus has always been on coaching my team to peak performance but in a nurturing and positive way, we play to our strengths and support and care for each other during these difficult and challenging times.

The key to my success has been to watch and learn and grow as a person and take my team members on their own journeys of self-discovery. I am competitive but recognise that my potential can only be reached if I compete with integrity, compassion and a positive attitude towards everything I do. I am human and there have been moments when I have wanted to throw the towel in but the women in my leadership team are always there to catch me. They show their faith in me, allow me to vent, make me laugh, put me back on track and that towel is soon back on its hook where it belongs.

I am truly thankful to the women leading the way in Ricoh and I’m honoured to be representing them and my company.”

Helen Biggins – SCA Client Director & 2021 Finalist – Field Sales 

“I am truly honoured to even be nominated, it is amazing to be recognised for all the hard work we do but to be selected and move through to the finals is mind-blowing, especially when you see the ladies you are up against from major corporations across Europe. I would like to wish all the finalists the very best of luck (not that they need it) and look forward to celebrating getting this far at the presentation evening.”

Other Ricoh UK finalists include Sally Minikin nominated in ‘Technology Sales’ and Louise Pook in ‘Sales Operations Manager’ categories. 

The winners and finalists will be recognised at the WISA awards ceremony on December 7th in London.

The post Creating positive role models is an important step in achieving gender equality appeared first on Insights - Empowering Digital Workplaces.

With the vaccine rollout underway, the road to normality becomes a serious possibility. So we can soon start to make plans for the future but the first thing we need to understand is where precisely are we now? That’s why Ricoh undertook ‘The Conscious Workplace Survey and Report’. By surveying over 1,300 people across the UK, we have established a clear understanding of what workers in the UK have dealt with this year. This includes employees working both remotely and in the office ranging from frontline workers to c-suite managers.

The Conscious Workplace Report

Our Conscious Workplace Report uses survey data captured in September 2020. This was used to evaluate managers and workers’ experience to help identify their most significant challenges and overall employee behavioural experience. This, in turn, enabled us to highlight the opportunities we, as businesses, currently face as we plan our future.

Almost all the participants cited four common concerns:

• Happiness, motivation and productivity are significant challenges
• Existing office spaces are unsuitable for a post-COVID world
• Managers are struggling to introduce new processes and look after their employees
• New technology also caused concerns for managers over security issues and its inefficient use.

So, why does all this make employee behaviour experience such an important factor? Because every challenge facing organisations across the UK, in terms of productivity, process and wellbeing, centre around your people.

What are the challenges facing employees and managers?

We may have come a long way, but there are still many teething issues that affect our day-to-day lives. And managers and employees are on the front line of dealing with them.

Anything that changes in our life causes friction and stress. Relocation, remote working, changing power dynamics – these are all common occurrences across the country, but they’re major events which have occurred all at once. Then there are all the little things we used to take for granted whilst working in an office environment; such as conversations, micro-rewards, and collaboration ease. Now all replaced with digital imitations that sometimes don’t quite hit the mark.

Sudden changes to routines, environments and ways of working can have a big physiologically impact, which can ultimately change the employee behavioural experience, ultimately impacting wellbeing.

Meanwhile, for managers, there is an additional layer; their roles have changed drastically. Once they were focused on organisational objectives. Now they must pay much more significant consideration to their employees’ wellbeing – whilst still ensuring things get done. And this is all happening amidst huge societal change, with distressing news and uncertainty across the country.

Managing employee behavioural experience needs behavioural insight.

One of the most difficult things to replicate from our office days is social interaction – a critical human happiness requirement. It plays a huge part in peoples’ mental wellbeing. We’ve all come to understand the challenges with video conferencing, collaborating while working remotely and getting quick answers to questions you could once ask in person.

Your people can no longer easily enjoy ‘water cooler’ moments, share stories or discuss projects. And it’s much harder to receive constructive criticism, praise or positive feedback from managers. A key aspect of how we get happiness in the workplace.

Behavioural science can help bridge the gaps between your peoples’ difficulties with motivation, happiness and self-worth – both as individuals and within our teams – and a manager’s organisational challenges of the economy, productivity and process. Leading to a more positive employee behavioural experience.

How can a strategy centred around The Conscious Workplace help alleviate these issues?

Organisations have to look at how they can evolve agile working practices that cater to a blend of remote and physical workplace environments. And people are central to that. So put in place an employee behavioural experience strategy to fit a hybrid work style.

Technology
Technology is a great example of this. There are many fantastic options out there that can help your business transform to meet new challenges and opportunities. But you need to pick the ones that are right for your people, or your business will never see the full benefit. It would be best to consider how any new technology will affect your managers and your employees, and how you can help them integrate the new technology into their working lives and use it effectively.

Wellbeing
When it comes to wellbeing, it’s important to understand that the position we are in now isn’t sustainable, whether we’re comfortable working from home or not. You need to be conscious of your people’s health, productivity and happiness, and ensure you’re making critical business decisions with their future in minds.

Coming into the office will become a choice enabling aspects of flexible working to be maintained. Therefore organisations have a positive choice to cater to their needs. Making them feel valued, enabling those shared social interactions, and keeping them safe.

Get this balance right to create a positive employee behavioural experience across the organisation.

What steps do organisations need to take moving forwards?

One of the key issues to address is the disparity between IT experiences at home and in the office. Many people have found working at home to be easy; they can rely on their own setup to connect with others. But when they return to the office, they have to rely on the IT support and infrastructure there, which may well be lacking.

It’s vital that organisations look to technology that enables a seamless transition between the office and home working. And the same is true for existing processes. Scanning, printing and documentation also have to be as easily available to a remote worker as it is in the office.

And when it comes to your people, your greatest resource for identifying what you need to do moving forwards is the people themselves. The cornerstone of The Conscious Workplace is continual interaction to seek a positive employee behavioural experience. Asking them how they are feeling, what difficulties they are having, and then finding and testing the solutions to those problems to find the right fit for your organisation. 

Where can I go for more information?

To learn more about creating a conscious workplace, read our report – The Conscious Workplace.

Ricoh empowers digital workplaces by using innovative technologies and services, enabling individuals to work smarter. Our Work Together Anywhere webinar series is a great research destination for insights and to gain further understanding from experts.

 Watch past webinars and register for upcoming events here.

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