It's National Inclusion Week

Mel Aston, D&I Manager - Compass Group UK & Ireland

National Inclusion Week is a chance to celebrate diversity within our business and what a great week we have planned. Diversity and inclusion is important to us, so this will be an opportunity to hear from our people and celebrate this agenda.

We recently launched Our Social Promise, an ambition to positively impact one million lives by 2030. As part of this, we have laid the foundations for ambitious gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic representation targets – the latter of which is our industry’s first.

We believe that organisations with better diversity are better places to be and work. That is why inclusivity is so important, to attract and retain diverse candidates that provide different perspectives and to ensure our culture is open and transparent.

The theme of National Inclusion Week this year is “Time to Act - The Power of Now”. It is about the importance of taking action on inclusion in this moment and highlighting that it’s not just a one-off week of action. It’s giving us all the opportunity to empower everyone in our organisation - to let everyone know that now is the time to act and have your voice heard.

We have lots of far ranging celebratory, listening and sharing activities this week, which are predominantly being led by our employee networks. These are run by colleagues for colleagues, to promote openness around key topics and issues. They include – Within; Pride in Food; You Matter and Women in Food - they have hundreds of members that support the inclusivity, awareness and mental health agendas and this week will see the Lead Sponsor for each make a commitment to further enhance and develop this work in the year ahead. This is something that I am really proud of, especially as we have already achieved so much.

National Inclusion Week is a great opportunity for our people to come together to recognise and celebrate the rich diversity in Compass – it’s what makes us the amazing organisation we are. I’d like to say thanks to all our fantastic people, as we look forward to a great week celebrating them.