Community partnerships are helping Thames Water improve the diversity of its workforce. Karima Khandker tells us more.
Karima Khandker, Director of Resourcing, Skills and EDI at Thames Water
At Thames Water, our purpose is to deliver life’s essential service, so our customers, communities and the environment can thrive.
Karima Khandker, Director of Resourcing, Skills and EDI at Thames Water
The main challenge facing young Black men, in London especially, is unemployment. Compared to the 15% rate faced by White men, they face an alarming 33% unemployment rate. It’s not that young Black men are less ambitious than other groups, rather, they often face discrimination during the recruitment process and struggle with lack of available job opportunities.
Improving the diversity of our workforce through building a pipeline of skills from local communities is one of our principles as set out in our 2021 skills strategy. Amongst others, this includes investing in the talent amongst young Black men.
Forming meaningful partnerships with organisations supporting under-represented and disadvantaged groups has been at the heart of Thames Water’s over-arching skills strategy. One such partnership was with the Greater London Authority (GLA) Young Black Men Design Lab. The aim of this project was to increase the representation of young Black men in business.
The main objectives of this project were to:
• Create access points into the business
• Create a culture of lifelong learning and careers
• Engage our supply chain.
Using the Design Labs approach, we have invested in our business-as-usual recruitment to create more access points into Thames Water for all. This includes training for hiring managers; enabling candidates facing barriers to identify them during recruitment, promoting vacancies with community partners and tracking the progress of candidates referred by them to ensure the right 1 – 2‑1 support is provided.
We signed up to Ban the Box in early 2021 so we removed the criminal conviction question from our application form and reduced our referencing requirements for all. We also introduced our own bespoke employability programmes, “Surge” and “Flow”, to support those applicants who are not quite job ready by supporting them with CV writing, and activities to boost confidence and teamwork. These actions were done with aims of reducing unconscious bias and removing barriers to employment for all.
We’ve expanded our apprenticeships programme, to ensure that we are building the right skills, in the right areas and to offer more development opportunities to a greater number of people. We’ve also established a summer internship programme with a commitment to support undergraduates with meaningful, paid workplace experience. We work solely with specialist referral partners, including the 10,000 Black Interns Programme and the Drive Forward Foundation. This reflects our efforts made to create a culture of lifelong learning.
Collectively, these efforts are paying off, with Thames Water exceeding its 22/23 year-end target of hire from community partners, 87% of which come from an ethnically diverse background.