“We need to be bolder. We need a strategy. We need to push again,” says Cushman & Wakefield’s head of UK & Ireland, George Roberts, as he unveils an ambitious goal for the business.
Roberts is not talking about becoming the biggest real estate consultancy in the UK market. He’s not talking about having the largest market share or making the most money. Roberts has set his sights on turning Cushman & Wakefield into the most diverse and inclusive consultancy in the sector. And he has given himself and the business just four years in which to do it.
“I believe that we can and we should do more,” says Roberts. “By the time we have delivered this strategy, I want to be able to say that we have the most diverse workforce in our industry, that an understanding of diversity is built into everything we do, and that our desire to be at the forefront of ‘what’s next’ is supported by an inclusive culture that drives creativity and new thinking.”
Roberts says the time for talk is over and that now is the time for hard action. The group has already followed in the footsteps of CBRE by getting a National Equality Standard accreditation from EY and has joined the small group of real estate businesses reporting their ethnicity pay gaps. But now he wants the business to do more. Now he wants the business to be better.
Delivering change
Chief among the new strategy’s elements is a requirement on the senior leadership to shift its baseline figures across all under-represented groups in real estate upwards over the next four years.
The firm, like many in the sector, has been making positive moves with female representation. Some 43% of its current workforce are female, with women reflecting 35% of associate and partner positions. Cushman has set itself a target of increasing these to 47% and 39% respectively over the next four years. The agent is already making decent progress with its promotion of women to partner level. In 2019, 42% of all partners promoted were female, up from just 17% in 2017.
Roberts says the shift in those percentages will have to come not just from a focus on the numbers but also from changing the culture within the business.
Karen Clements, UK executive committee member and chair of Cushman’s diversity programme Inspire, says much of the work to move the figures will come through enabling D&I-confident people managers, by educating and supporting those that can bring others up through the business.
“I don’t come from a traditional property background and that experience in other sectors has helped me understand how important difference and diversity is to the performance of teams and businesses,” says Clements. “We have tried really hard to get to the heart of what needs to change and believe it is important to be transparent to effect evidence-based change.”
The new strategy will also have a much greater focus on social mobility, which Clements says can have the biggest impact on everything else, on understanding disability and on retaining colleagues from ethnic minority groups.
In a bid to diversify its sources of talent and the backgrounds they come from, the new strategy will see Cushman launch a national work experience week next year and expand its apprenticeship programme to more schools to double its apprenticeship intake by the end of 2024.
The firm will also seek to find ways to best capture socio-economic data across its workforce so it can come up with a specific action plan for 2022 onwards.
Data dive
Capture of data plays an important role in Cushman’s plan for change. When it undertook its first ethnicity pay gap report earlier this year, it had ethnicity minority group data on only 64% of its employees.
Using available data, Cushman says that just 8% of its current workforce is from an ethnic minority group, with just 6% in associate or above positions. It has set itself a target of increasing these figures to 12% and 10% respectively and hopes to be able to do this by introducing blind screening and increasing the diversity of its recruitment panels and by putting individual action plans in place for ethnic minority groups within the business.
When it comes to disability, figures are even lower, which again could be owing to the lack of declaration among employees.
Less than 1% of Cushman’s workforce has identified as disabled. The agent wants to increase this to 5% and will next year launch a disability awareness programme which it hopes will help raise awareness of both visible and non-visible disabilities and increase the declaration of disabilities in its data collection.
Alongside the top line shifts in percentages Cushman wants to see by the end of 2024, managers throughout the business have been given year-on-year improvement targets to make sure that the business moves forward.
“We know from external research that diversity coupled with the equality that comes from a truly inclusive culture is a powerful multiplier of innovation and growth,” says Roberts. “My vision is that all colleagues recognise the importance of this, not just specific groups, and that we all value this as part of our culture.”
Cushman’s 2024 D&I targets
- 47% of workforce is female
- 39% of associates/partners are female
- 5% of workforce declares a disability (visible or non-visible)
- 12% of workforce is from an ethnic minority group
- 10% of associates/partners are from an ethnic minority group
- 3% of workforce declared as LGBTQ+
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