How diverse is your team? Do they represent the community they’re trying to serve? LGcomms want to know so they can draw-up a plan to help bridge the gaps, as their vice chair Zander Mills explains.
Does your team reflect the communities you serve?
Have you ever been asked to deliver a recruitment marketing campaign?
Perhaps you’ve been asked to help to recruit more social care workers, police officers, firefighters or nurses.
Maybe as part of that campaign you’ve been asked to help generate applications from underrepresented groups, in a bid to make the workforce in your organisation more representative of the communities that you serve.
But hand on heart, at the end of the day, when all’s said and done- is your own team any better? Do you and your colleagues really represent the communities you serve?
And I don’t just mean in terms of gender and race.
What about disability, faith or sexuality?
And to what extent does someone’s social, economic or educational background determine whether they will land a job within your team? How important is it to their chances of promotion?
Local public service communication teams showed during the pandemic and beyond how absolutely, completely and utterly critical they are to delivering vital campaign messages to communities.
Out with the nanny state, one-size-fits-all, top down messaging- in with the supercharged segmentation, hyper local marketing and audience based insight which only local public service comms teams can deliver.
The problem is, if our own communication teams don’t reflect the communities we serve- how we can be sure we are getting things right?
That’s why LGcomms has launched the first ever equality, diversity and inclusion survey of public sector communication professionals.
So, please respond to the survey and share it. The more responses we get, the richer and more reliable the information, meaning a more effective and informed plan to redress any imbalances we discover.
Zander Mills is Vice Chair of LGcomms and communication manager at South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue