Diversity, equity, and inclusion

DE&I at Efficio

Increasing diversity gives us and our clients a broader range of experience, expertise, and attitudes. An equal focus on inclusion enables us to unlock the value of a diverse workforce through making people comfortable to speak up, ensuring all voices are heard, and all perspectives are valued. This is how we can develop truly innovative ideas and maximise the potential of our people. Through diversity and inclusion, we can hire the best people and help all our staff develop over long careers at Efficio. Efficio will be more competitive, win more work, and deliver better outcomes for our clients.
 

Create an inclusive culture together

The bedrock of our efforts to create a diverse and inclusive workplace stems from our company culture, is reinforced by our talent acquisition processes, and extends to our business relationships by helping clients see their supply bases through the lens of inclusion and diversity.
 

Company culture

This focus on inclusion is reflected and formalised in our company policies; our equal opportunities policy protects the interests of all our staff, clients, suppliers and prospective employees. Our leadership team fully endorses the efforts Efficio places on positively and proactively addressing diversity and inclusion as a business priority, and our ongoing commitment to develop a diverse workforce and build an inclusive workplace is actively supported by our board of directors.

In 2020, we established our Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Steerco to develop and maintain company-wide focus on this important issue and to get input into initiatives to become a more diverse and inclusive organisation, with initial focus on becoming a more gender-balanced organisaiton, becoming a more ethnically representative organisation in each of our jurisdictions, and to consider other diversity topics, including LGBTQ+ representation and accessibility requirements in the workplace. 
 

Talent acquisition

We believe that a diverse workforce drives innovation and helps our people grow, both professionally and personally. As a growing business, hiring across all our jurisdictions, we have the opportunity to change the composition of our workforce more quickly than would a static business, but we face challenges. For example, to recruit talent with strong analytical and numerical skills needed to support the particular nature of our work, successful candidates typically have a STEM degree background. However, when compared to the general UK population, for instance, there is low representation of STEM graduates who are women, from less privileged backgrounds, or ethnic minorities. Historically, we have imported this external imbalance, so to diversify the candidate profiles which are invited to interview, we now include talent with non-scientific/numeric degrees in our recruitment activities, if such candidates can demonstrate strong grades in maths or science at A-level.

Along with the challenge of recruiting a more diverse workforce, we are also working hard to overcome the indirect barriers that can exist for people to thrive throughout their career in consulting and which may discourage people to aspire to the most senior levels of Efficio. We have put in place the checks needed to ensure equity in our performance management processes, promotions, and bonus calculations. We have also introduced guidance for our staffing team and project leadership to normalise working practices that support people at different stages of life and career. 

We acknowledge there’s a lot more we need to do and will continue to address the challenge of recruiting a diverse set of backgrounds, genders, ethnicities, sexualities, gender-identities, and abilities into our business and then enabling them to reach the most senior levels.  
 

Business relationships

We leverage our experience and our background to stimulate our clients’ thinking on diversity and inclusion. Thanks to our inclusive culture, we bring a diverse perspective to identify, deliver, and sustain opportunities and challenges in procurement and supply chain.

To respond to an increasing demand from our clients, we have created a practice dedicated to sustainability that leads assessments for clients’ supply bases, covering diversity and inclusion topics.

We embed diversity and inclusion best practices in our clients’ organisations, making a positive impact and supporting them in introducing the necessary changes that lead to more diverse and inclusive supply chain and procurement programmes.