Inclusion Group - Our journey so far

Here at Barchester, we understand our team spends a lot of time with each other, so it’s important everyone feels included in the Barchester family.

The Inclusion@Barchester group was founded by our Chief People Officer, Genevieve Glover in June 2023. The group started with team members from HR and Quality. Each member had their own reasons for wanting to be part of driving inclusion forward at Barchester, including many who had one or more protected characteristics themselves.

We quickly realised that to really make a difference to inclusion in Barchester, we needed more members and lots of representation from our Operational teams, as that’s the majority of our incredibly diverse workforce.

We first looked at what our existing data was telling us. Understanding where we were starting from has helped us plan where we want to be, and more importantly, how we are going to get there.

Our data shows just how incredibly diverse our workforce is. One example is we have 122 nationalities within the Barchester team.

As well as engaging new members, getting lots of feedback and ideas, and involving our people in various campaigns, we’re proud to have initiated a number of activities focused on inclusion.

Our Safe Staffing Policy was updated in October 2023. To coincide with launching this, we made updates to our internal staff audit system to be able to capture increased data on our employees living with impairments. Not only have we expanded our main categories from 4 to 6, taking note of newer terminology, we now have space to include what impairments our colleagues are living with, so we can support them in a more person-centred way.

On our Wellbeing Hub, we have recently launched some great tools to be able to help our sponsored workforce feel more at home. By engaging with our current sponsored workers, who have already gone through the process of moving country we have been able to share their stories about how they have settled in to a new life and role here in the UK.

Our Learning & Development team have a huge suite of training courses and materials focused on equality, diversity and inclusion, and recently created a new training session called ‘It’s Good to Talk’, aimed at supporting our managers to celebrate and embrace their teams’ differences.

In June we ran a campaign for Pride month, sharing some incredible stories from our team and our residents of their personal journeys. Several of our residents and employees shared how they only felt comfortable enough to ‘come out’ when living or working in a Barchester home, due to the kindness, care and safe, supportive environment they were in.

This is just the beginning for the Inclusion @Barchester group. We all know there is so much more we can do to ensure every single member of our team, and those we care for, feel they belong. We’re proud of what we’ve done so far, and we’re excited about what we can achieve in the future.