Earlier this year we published our mission statement around making Raconteur a more diverse and inclusive workplace:

 As a leading B2B marketing agency, Raconteur’s success is intrinsically linked to the creativity of our ideas and breadth of our thinking, so diversity within our workforce is of vital importance to us. To achieve diversity, we must broaden our horizons and continue to build a workplace where everyone can feel included, regardless of any differences.

As part of our mission, we have committed to sharing an annual update on our D&I progress, especially as we continue to grow, with headcount up 50% since 2018. 

In December 2019 we ran an anonymous survey asking all staff members to answer questions which would help us understand the makeup of our workforce - particularly the elements that can’t necessarily be seen.

We’re publishing these results in the interests of transparency, and to give us a benchmark to improve from - not because we feel our results are good enough yet, or anything to shout about at the moment. We know we have much more work to do.

That said, we have done a huge amount in the last 12-months to ensure we become more diverse and inclusive - and I’ll be publishing a new blog post around all of this in the next couple of weeks detailing the changes we’ve made.

In the meantime, though, here are the findings from the 2019 survey:

Senior Team (Directors, Managers and Heads of Departments)

67% Men, 33% Women

84% White, 16% BAME

94% Heterosexual, 6% LGBTQI+

Company Wide

53.4% Men, 44.8% Women, 1.8% non-binary

82.8% White, 17.2% BAME

93.1% Heterosexual, 6.9% LGBTQI+

Nationalities and Religion

There are 8 different nationalities represented at Raconteur, and 6 different religions.

Age

19% are aged 22-25

43.1% are aged 26-29

24.1% are aged 30-33

6.9% are aged 34-37

6.8% are aged 37+

Mental Health, Neurodiversity and Disability

None of our staff reported a physical disability

27.6% reported a mental health condition

8.6% say they are neurodiverse

Education

93.1% are educated to degree level or higher

Inclusion

98.3% said they “feel included” at Raconteur.

Clearly, there are some eye-opening findings here. The ones which speak loudest to us are those around disability, age, ethnicity and education. The actions we have and are taking to improve these will be laid out in my next post.

We also thought it would be interesting to look at what happened in 2019 in terms of promotions and pay rises, and the findings were as follows:

72% of the total number of women received a payrise and/or a promotion

52% of total number of men received a payrise and/or a promotion

66% of our BAME employees received a payrise and/or a promotion

In terms of who left, and who joined in 2019:

61% of leavers were male, 39% were female

56% of hires were male, 44% were female

And finally, we found no evidence of people doing the same job, at the same level of performance, being paid different amounts at Raconteur, since we have flat entry bands for the roles where multiple people do the same job.