Addressing Inclusivity and Inequality at Fischer & Brown Engineering

This report addresses the critical issues of lack of complete inclusivity and workplace inequality at Fischer & Brown Engineering, an international engineering consultancy. The primary concern revolves around the company's failure to achieve true inclusivity, despite emphasizing it as a core value. The report highlights the underrepresentation of women in the workforce, evident in low female participation, gender pay gaps, and limited career progression. It also points out inequality issues, including staff behavior, lack of awareness of equality and diversity, and instances of exclusion and harassment. The report recommends establishing an Inclusion Council to promote inclusivity, modifying recruitment practices to enhance diversity, improving equal pay approaches, and implementing policies to support work-life balance and prevent workplace harassment. The report also emphasizes the importance of creating an open-minded environment to achieve gender equality goals. The recommendations aim to foster a more inclusive and equitable workplace, encouraging employee feedback and continuous improvement.

Managing People
NAME OF STUDENT:
LECTURER NAME:

Hi, I am ……. and I am going to highlight issues that are currently challenging for Fischer
& Brown Engineering. I aim to prioritise the issues and outline recommended solutions to
overcome these challenges.
I intend to present the problems that are faced which are…..
The primary issue at Fischer & Brown Engineering is lack of complete inclusivity of
workforce. Though the company has emphasized the need for diversity and inclusivity as one
of its major organisational values, but they tend to have not attained inclusivity in its real
meaning and Fischer & Brown Engineering’s inclusion initiatives fall into category of sincere
ignorance. Though they look and sound powerful but wide range of company decisions and
approaches have proved or failed to maintain complete inclusivity in workforce and a lot has
yet to be done. Fischer & Brown Company representatives have accepted that out of their 60
collaborators, only 2 are females and white in origin, which clearly represents the issue of
poor inclusive workforce. However Fischer & Brown have made some sincere efforts to
improve their inclusive workforce representations in recent years and have attained
substantial progress in hiring female staffs like around 50% of graduate intake represent
female engineers. However a lot still needs attention such as overall % of female in
engineering/technical roles is low however being fair with industry standards. Also
considerable issue is noticed in retaining female staffs like around 32% have not returned to
work after maternity leave, there is even considerable gender pay gap as well as gap in bonus
pays between males and female staffs. Another evident issue that points out at lack of
inclusivity of workforce is low women progression in career which indicated that female
representation drops significantly in higher level or senior engineering/technical roles.
The second issue that is evident at Fischer & Brown Engineering is workplace inequality
where it is highly observed that staff behaviour needs greater awareness and education
towards understanding and realising the challenges and benefits of equality and diversity at
workplace. Specifically managers were found to be not completely aware of their
accountabilities in context to adhering to employment laws and recruitment policies for new
staffing that related to equality and diversity concerns. This poor realisation of need for
equality indicates gaps between policies and practice. Moreover reported events have been
noted where part time female staffs were allegedly excluded from significant projects or
meeting with client and were offered less relevant projects to handle. These led to poor career
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development and visibility. Other related issues of inequality are sexual harassment reported
at work and in informal team events as well as inadequate job fulfilment of female staffs of
the company i.e. 34% as against 68% for male staffs, specifically in context to working
environment and leadership roles.
Both these issues significantly represents under-utilisation of female talent as well as lack of
representation in significant roles within Fischer & Brown Engineering. The issues even
present lack of inclusive workforce where female intake in technical roles is poor, there is
evident gender pay gap and issues in retention.
My recommendation to address these issues are…
My first recommendation to address poor inclusivity in workforce is to form Inclusion
Council that can consist of members or influential leaders at Fischer & Brown, such as C-
suite. These leaders can be made as a channel for communication between the rank and file
and the executive leadership and they can advocate understanding of inclusiveness of
workforce and encourage discussions with managers or employees when necessary. Inclusion
Council can form goals for hiring, retaining and advancing a diverse workforce as well as can
actively develop goals and approaches to address employee involvement issues in staff
groups. These Councils can even review feedback and carry out messages about their work
and role model to others to encourage inclusivity (Arenas, Di Marco, Munduate and Euwema,
2017). These Inclusion Councils can be as diverse as possible with members representing not
only diverse ethnicities and genders but also diverse business operations and geographies.
These members of Council should be thoroughly aware of Fischer & Brown Engineering’s
diversity and inclusion strategies from HR, Diversity and Inclusion policies and feedback
from other Employees Resource Groups (ERG). These Inclusion Councils will form diversity
business network typically for middle-to-front level workers who share similar backgrounds
and these councils can promote Diversity & Inclusion approaches, conduct audits and offer a
safe working environment for people to express themselves freely and without fear.
Sometimes discussions can be encouraged where employee groups can suggest innovative
ideas to enhance diversity and inclusion or can even provide early signals of concerns
emerging with Fischer & Brown.
Recommended Inclusivity Checklist
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 Insure leaders of Fischer & Brown interpret that inclusion is about insuring that
everyone’s voice is being heard, ideas and suggestions are considered and value to
team is evident.
 Managers can be offered training on Diversity & Inclusion Management and should
be hold accountable to demonstrate that inclusivity is core competency at Fischer &
Brown
 Establish an Inclusion Council to influence and promote inclusion at workplace
 Value disparity and build an environment where people may feel comfortable
bringing their full selves to work (Hight, 2017).
 Recognise under-represented groups like needs of female staffs, minority groups and
give them essential assistance and resources.
 Offer staffs with safe space to voice their issues
 Benchmark key elements of organisation’s culture and interpret staffs experience
before making modifications to encourage inclusivity.
My recommendation to address inequality issues are…..
Fischer & Brown Engineering can modify their recruitment practice and approaches to
enhance diversity and equal opportunity at workplace. The practices can focus on improving
gender diversity ratio so that irrespective of gender only talent is encouraged. The company
needs to first assess their organisational culture to evaluate the issues and disparity in gender
diversity or inclusive workplace. After assessment, Fischer & Brown can enhance gender
diversity in their HR and recruitment policies by modifying practices through building an
inclusive gender-diverse workplace, encouraging gender equality with better job descriptions
and engaging a diverse interview board for hiring process (Scarborough, Lambouths and
Holbrook, 2019). Also Fischer & Brown can encourage proactive sourcing of gender diverse
pipeline, include fair compensation practices to close gender pay issues and learn from exit
interview the reasons or concerns that triggered staffs to quit job. All these information can
help to improve HR practices to include and encourage equality at work.
Further Fischer & Brown can improve their equal pay approaches by encouraging this
concept, where pay can be based on job role. Also regular pay structure should be introduced
to enhance transparency and rule out discrimination in pay rate issues. Altogether decisions
including payment need to be informed to staffs prior to eliminate any kind of mis-
interpretations. Contrastingly, annual pay audits can be performed to assess whether gender
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pay bias is occurring within Fisher & Brown or not. The company can start measures to
provide equal pay for female staffs as they are no longer perceived as weal gender anymore.
Moreover work-life balance can be prioritised (Meyers and Vallas, 2016). As female staffs in
general find it complicated to reach to their career objectives because of absence of childcare
support at workplaces, which lead to lower female participation after maternity. To relive
stress of working mothers and support them in attaining their career objectives, paternal
leaves can be offered to fathers. Also work-life balance measures can be considered to bring
in healthy work environment and to maintain adequate work-life equilibrium to reduce stress
level at workplace. Flexible work arrangement or work schedules can be offered to balance
work-life needs. Also stringent and efficacious policies against workplace harassment and
offense need to be established at Fischer & Brown to curb sexual harassment, racism,
bullying etc. and provision of stringent punishment or penalties need to be established and
enforced. Regular vigilance need to be kept to identify any harassment or racism issues at
workplace and in case such incidences are reported then Fischer & Brown’s authority should
take prompt actions to insure that culprit is punished and should take essential measures to
support the victim in any possible manner. Also Fischer & Brown authorities should take
preventive actions towards such events to clearly promote gender equality (Nachmias,
Aravopoulou and Caven, 2019). Lastly an open minded environment should be created at
Fischer & Brown to attain gender equality goals which is possible only when management,
process, managers and employees lead a wide and open minded policy. The departments
within should also be free from gender bias so as to promote growth and development of firm
in long term and wherever possible staffs should be appreciated based on their talent and
performance and not on personal preferences.
To summarise there is not comprehensive list but when suggested measures will be
considered at Fischer & Brown they gender equality as well as inclusivity goals at workplace
can be attained. Further staffs at all levels can be encouraged to share their valuable opinions
or suggestions to offer insight into what is happening at the firm and check scope of
improvement.
Thanks for listening.
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References
Arenas, A., Di Marco, D., Munduate, L., and Euwema, M. C. (2017). Dialogue for inclusion:
when managing diversity is not enough. In Shaping inclusive workplaces through social
dialogue (pp. 3-21). Springer, Cham. Available on 10.1007/978-3-319-66393-7_1
Hight, D. L. (2017). Managing Workplace Diversity and Inclusion: A Psychological
Perspective. European Journal of Training and Development. Available on
doi/10.1108/EJTD-07-2017-0065/
Meyers, J. S., and Vallas, S. P. (2016). Diversity regimes in worker cooperatives: Workplace
inequality under conditions of worker control. The Sociological Quarterly, 57(1), 98-128.
Available on: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/tsq.12114
Nachmias, S., Aravopoulou, E., and Caven, V. (2019). Diversity and Equality Issues in
Modern Organisations. In Inequality and Organizational Practice (pp. 17-43). Palgrave
Macmillan, Cham. Available on 10.1007/978-3-030-11647-7_2
Scarborough, W. J., Lambouths III, D. L., and Holbrook, A. L. (2019). Support of workplace
diversity policies: The role of race, gender, and beliefs about inequality. Social science
research, 79, 194-210. Available on doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2019.01.002
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