Julie writes:
A few weeks ago Jimmy Callaghan and I attended a Supply Chain Sustainability School course to become FIR ambassadors.
FIR means fairness, inclusion and respect, and the idea is that the people on the course will become role models for FIR in their offices, sites or projects.
We travelled to Birmingham to where the day-long course was run by Action Sustainability. There were many other leading providers, including people from Carillion, Costain, and Kier, and it was really good to discuss these issues with them.
We expect everyone to treat each other with dignity and respect. This includes being considerate, fair, and polite and not making assumptions based on age, gender or background. We need to be aware of each and everyone’s needs and adapt where possible to accommodate these with our day-to-day activates.
As part of the course, we worked in groups. We discussed what fairness, inclusion and respect mean to us, and we concluded that we want to:
- be part of positive change
- work together
- get people talking
- shift focus from targeting by protected characteristics to values and behaviour
- drive behavioural change.
We looked at definitions of the three elements.
Fairness
- Consistency
- Transparency
- Treating everyone as individuals, according to their needs
- Being unbiased
Inclusion
- Involvement / sharing knowledge
- Engagement
- Confidence to be involved / ask
- Understand roles and feel you can contribute
- Making everyone feel a key part of the business
- Valuing the different skills that everyone brings to the team
Respect
- Treat people how you want to be treated
- Respect differences and adapting our practices
- Safety / greater collaboration
- Creating an atmosphere where we all succeed, whoever we are and regardless of our backgrounds and beliefs
We also talked about why FIR is important. Some of the conclusions were that it is important to:
- help improve productivity
- make people feel proud to work in our industry
- develop a culture of respect, aiming for a ripple effect across industry and supply chain
- shift to team partnership and collaborative relationships (not client and contractor)
- attract people from a wider talent pool
- make FIR part of our reputation as well as meeting commercial and client expectations.
Our industry offers great career opportunities for everyone. The next generation of construction and engineering workers will be building HS2, etc and it is important that new entrants are encouraged to enter and stay in our amazing industry
I have put together some slides of the presentation – the pdf (270kb) can be downloaded here.
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