At a recent high-profile property event, the BBC’s John Humphrys turned to the room of 150 property professionals and asked them if they thought the UK should leave the EU. There was a resounding show of hands against our exit.
Humphrys said that this response differed from the public opinion polls, which were showing around a 50-50 split. The same pattern was repeated when he asked about Heathrow Airport extension proposals, with the room convinced it would be successful in contrast to wider public opinion.
It may not be surprising to hear that the room was dominated by middle-class white men. The experience illustrated to me that without a diversity of background, in all its forms, we end up with similar people with similar views, reinforcing our own assumptions without challenge, and therefore leaving ourselves – individuals and organisations – vulnerable to our blind spots.
Many studies, including one from the McKinsey Group, validate that notion that greater diversity in the workplace leads to more successful businesses. Thankfully, the property industry has begun to address the issue with such initiatives as the RICS’s Inclusive Employer Standard, Freehold and CBRE’s Women’s Network.
But it seems there is much less emphasis on issues of class. This interests me because it is so much harder to define, is connected to gender and ethnicity and is not something that tends to be recorded as part of equal opportunity surveys.
Yet we know that UK social mobility has been in steady decline from the late 1950s, and is lower than it is in the US, according to the Sutton Trust. And inequality is worsening. Since 1980 the share of total income received by the top 1% of British earners has almost doubled, to about 13% in 2011, reversing a three-decades-long trend towards greater equality, according to Oxford University’s Danny Dorling.
We reinforce our bias towards people from the same socio-economic groups all the time: defining jobs as “graduate only” where once people would have been able to work their way up a business, recruiting from the same small group of universities, perpetuating the treadmill of unpaid internships and subscribing to “who you know, not what you know”.
For example, five schools in the UK send the same number of students to Oxbridge as 1,800 state schools.
Some of this is in the name of recruiting the best talent – it is a competitive world, after all – but as a consequence we are undermining our own competitive advantage through narrow thinking.
What can we do? Programmes like the Reading Real Estate Foundation’s Pathways to Property, initiated by the private sector in partnership with the University of Reading, seek to address the issue of awareness among academically high-performing young people from less privileged backgrounds of the opportunities in the sector through summer schools, graduate mentoring and careers fairs. We have also worked with them on outreach days with students from across central London.
The programme helps to overcome some of the barriers to entry by enabling work placements and helping find routes into the sector through further education and flagging bursaries available through the foundation.
As a profession, we need to be more aware of our own in-built assumptions and patterns of behaviour that may cause us to recruit only in our own image, as well as ensure a more open and transparent approach to the “informal opportunities” our organisations may offer.
Not only is there a wealth of opportunity for young people in this sector, but our commercial success will be secured only if we have a diverse workplace that supports different (and more representative) ideas and captures the best talent.
