So your organisation has achieved QED and embedded EDI successfully. What next?
QED Leaders Award is for organisations who have successfully maintained their QED Award for three years and wish to take their equality, diversity and inclusion commitment to the next level.
Awardees include:
Responsibility for meaningful action lies with those at the top.
Effective and inclusive leadership is essential to achieving change on EDI. QED Leaders places specific focus on this as a foundation for impactful organisations.
Meaningful action will only take place if the responsibility for EDI lies with people at the highest level, with strong and visible accountability mechanisms for performance on EDI.
This demonstrates that the organisation is serious about the change it wants to achieve and ensures the right steps are taken along the way.
Diversity is fact, inclusion is an act.
QED Leaders places particular focus on the importance of having and publishing robust diversity data and the ways in which it is used at the highest level to drive progress.
Robust tracking of diversity, overseen and ‘bought-into’ at the highest level is essential to creating a tangible difference over time.
Whereas diversity deals with the composition of the organisation, inclusion is all about what we do with diversity. Diverse organisations perform better but only in the presence of a proactive and measurable focus on inclusive cultures within which diverse employees and customers thrive.
Listening is the most sincere form of respect.
To truly connect with and represent diverse stakeholders, organisations need to be leaders in listening.
It is not enough for communication to follow a top-down model if practice that is truly representative and inclusive is the goal.
Equity in channels by which stakeholders can raise their voice, be heard and have impact, influences decisions and planning leading to more sustainable solutions.
Practice makes perfect.
The Practising foundation provides an opportunity for the organisation to lead on a focused EDI project to improve a service(s) or experience for a specific group of people/stakeholders.
The project should be ambitious but there is no requirement that it should be complex and/or large, only that it produces tangible and positive outcomes for the people/stakeholders. This could be a project that the organisation is currently working on and/or has in their corporate plan.
The project lifecycle should run in accordance with the lifetime of the QED award (3 years) but to be successful in achieving QED Leaders Award, some impact must be clearly demonstrated at 12 months (and then annually at review stage).
A project initiation document (PID) should be completed and shared at the end of phase 1.
Discussion and agreement will take place during phase 2 and 3.
The QED Leaders award process consists of 4 phases:
Discovery
Dialogue
Development
Demonstrate
The first phase of QED Leaders takes approximately three months and begins the journey of discovery and reflection. During this time confidential surveys will be undertaken with Board, Senior Leaders and all colleagues.
A comprehensive self-diagnostic which forms the QED Leaders framework will be completed and the organisation will start to identify an impact project to work on.
The second phase is facilitated assessment which involves consultation between the organisations Senior Leaders and Tai Pawb over the course of one month.
These sessions are a space for reflection, support and
Challenge.
The third development phase spans two months and finalises the work that the organisation will do during the phase 4 to achieve QED Leaders.
During this time the change plan actions, and the impact project will be refined, finalised and approved.
The fourth phase will take approximately twelve months to complete and during this period, you will work on your actions and impact project while receiving support and advice from Tai Pawb.
