Member Blog

Business owners and leaders are constantly learning new things and as a relatively recent business owner I am no exception.  I am always seeking advice, and trying to find the best people to help me make the business a success.

A great example is marketing.  Coming from a technical and consulting background, this is not really my area of strength.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve picked up a lot over the years, and I’ve managed, through luck or judgement or some combination of both to do enough to get the business into a pretty good place in our first three years.  But when it came to the point where we decided to put some real focus on our marketing, I wasn’t really too sure where to start.

Clearly there are many aspects to marketing a business, whether you’re new or established.  I knew I needed some help, but to whom should I turn?  Should I employ someone, or use an agency?  Should I look for a generalist, or a specialist (or a number of different specialists)?  I know that I prefer working with specialists, but if I pick a specialist in one area, am I neglecting other important areas?

The problem, for me, was that not having sufficient experience or knowledge of the area that I needed help with, I wasn’t sure how to articulate exactly what help I was looking for.

I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Fortunately, I managed to find my way through this with some advice from friends in the field, and some trial and error, and I’m confident that we’re now on the right track.  However, if there had been a course or workshop that I had come across that would have helped me figure out the key areas that I needed to consider, key questions to ask myself and guide me towards some priorities, I would definitely have jumped at that.  I’m sure they exist; I just didn’t find them.

When it comes to Cyber Security and managing the risks to a business, I frequently see exactly the same scenario.  Business owners, and senior management teams know that their business is at significant risk from Cyber Attacks, ransomware, email-based fraud and similar, and many know they need help.  Their IT department, or external IT provider looks after some of the technical aspects of security but they’re often not specialists in security – they’re typically more focused on keeping the lights on and implementing new technology to help the business stay ahead.   Rightly so.  The owner, or leadership team, however, has this nagging feeling that they should definitely be doing more.  They know they need some help.

But they don’t know what they don’t know.

Our Cyber Security for Business Owners and Leaders training is, for security, exactly what I was looking for when I needed help with marketing.

The point of the one-day training workshop is not to make you a security expert.  It’s not designed to scare you into buying services from us (although it might scare you a bit).  It’s purpose is to help you understand what you don’t know – what’s important, what to look at and prioritise when it comes to security, and where to go for help that you can trust.  But  it’s more than just telling you.

Yes, we provide you with lots of information, all geared towards owners and senior management teams, but it’s a bit of a whirlwind “voyage of discovery”.  Through carefully designed exercises and discussions, we’ll help YOU discover how to determine what is important to your business, how to assess risks and impacts in a security context, and how to build a strategy and plan to improve security and reduce business risk.

Want to find out more? You can contact us to talk through your needs or alternatively go online and book yourself on to the next available course.

We are a team of highly experienced and qualified HR Consultants and our mission is to help your business realise its full potential by supporting you in managing your people and ensuring they’re the best they can be!

Ignite will get to know you and your business and will tailor HR solutions to support your business needs.

Contact us to arrange your free Health Check: [email protected]

“Your people are your biggest weakness when it comes to security”.  You’ve probably heard this statement more than once.

We believe that this can, and should be a fallacy in all businesses when it comes to cyber security.  We want to help you grow your people in to your biggest strength and asset.

So how do we get there?  Well, Security is all about risk – appreciating it, understanding it, and reducing, mitigating or sometimes accepting it.

Beginning with a desire to create a culture of security within your business will set you off on the right path, and from here we’d suggest making this your guiding principle. You can read in detail about this here, where we will expand and share more about how your approach to cyber security feeds in to building this culture.

At CyberScale we talk a lot about taking a risk-based approach to Cyber Security.  This is an approach that is tailored towards your specific business or organisation.  It takes into account the specific data that you have, the way you use systems, the people you have in your organisation and their level of understanding of all things security, the processes that you have in place, and how all of these combine to create risks specific to you.

Different organisations will have different security requirements, that’s a given.  But, what sort of differences are we talking about?  Well firstly there is data.  Some organisations are heavily reliant on data, some not so much.  Some organisations collect and process particularly confidential or sensitive data, such as health data for instance.

Some organisations have employed staff only, where elements of security policy can be made part of their employment contract and ongoing training, whereas other organisations have a heavy reliance on freelancers or subcontract staff where this is not so easy.  This will inevitably raise issues around building and embedding a culture of security.  Management of systems used by these groups also differs in its level of practicality; managing and controlling devices which are company supplied is one thing, but devices owned by a freelancer or subcontractor present a particular challenge.

Going back to the beginning here will ensure that even though you’ve recognised these challenges you will be able to view them through the goal you have, which is to create a culture of security across all staff whether permanent or not.  Having your guiding principles embedded in those who hire, onboard and work with all types of staff is going to be ever more important.

So how do we do this?  Training.  The answer seems simple, but it really isn’t at all.  A culture of security will come from having a set of agreed and embedded values across the workforce which determines how everyone thinks about and approaches cybersecurity.

Training can have many aims, here it is to help you understand what you don’t know – what’s important, what to look at and prioritise when it comes to cyber security, and where to go for help that you can trust, both inside and outside of the business. 

But it’s more than just telling you.

Through carefully designed exercises and discussions, we’ll help YOU discover how to determine what is important to your business, how to assess risks and impacts in a security context, and how to build a strategy and plan to improve security and reduce business risk.  This is an ongoing commitment and when invested in regularly will move you towards building the security culture you seek.

With a combination of public courses where attendees will be from a range of organisations, and bespoke solutions for your business, we are experienced in ensuring that what we deliver suits the needs of your business. 

We are focused on providing cyber security training that also brings personal benefits to individual attendees in their broader lives and not just in the workplace.  We do not deliver a standard CBT session or something general, which might feel like a tick box exercise for the business and attendee, we ensure that we are linking the training with your specific process and policies.

Are you looking for a tailored, individual Diversity and Inclusion initiative to support your business strategy and objectives?

Do you want build and enhance your employee experience and create a platform for growth?

Please get in touch to arrange FREE consultation over a virtual coffee to explore your diversity and inclusion agenda and how we can support you on this essential journey: [email protected]

Starting a new business in this day and age can be a truly troublesome venture. There is just so much competition for new businesses out there now, and that’s even without mentioning the fact that there is oftentimes a lot of one’s own capital at stake if said business fails.

On the other hand, starting a business now is easier than it has ever been, and it really is within the grasp of anyone who has the determination and drive to make it happen.

Start a Blog 

Perhaps one of the best ways businesses can grow and increase their outreach is simply by starting and running a consistent blog. The topic of the blog doesn’t have to be any too fancy – just make sure it’s something related to your business and something in which you have some level of expertise.

For example, a betting site could write a post about the newest betting portals or the best sports to bet on. On the other hand, a company that primarily focuses on buying and selling real-estate could make a post about the best locations for people to find their perfect home or tips and tricks that people could use in order to get an advantage when looking to buy a property.

Blogging can be one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways for businesses to connect with their customers, as well as draw new ones in.

There are endless advantages for businesses who blog, and you will surely see this for yourself after a few months of growing your blog. 

Get Involved in Social Media  

Nowadays, everyone has a social media account, and that’s even including businesses and corporations. By creating an account for your business on one of the several popular social media sites, you can not only increase public perception, but you can also get access to a vast number of potential customers that you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. There are a variety of ways business leaders can get involved with social media, and if you want to keep up with your competition, getting on social media sites is a must.

Don’t be Scared to Stand Out

New business owners are so frightened to take risks or do anything differently, and this ends up being a huge detriment to both business and the people. In reality, there is now so much competition out there that doing something new and standing out is really the only chance new businesses have of becoming successful.

Don’t be afraid to stray from the beaten path

Starting and running a successful business can be a headache, there is no debating that. Although by putting the tips we have given you through this article into practice you can get ahead of the competition and have a much better chance at succeeding. 

We’ve all been there when surfing the web and you stumble upon a website that makes you feel a little uncomfortable. Especially now conspiracy theorists are having a field day about targeted ads, cookie data and GDPR breaches we have experienced over the past decade, cybertrust is a contentious topic. It’s no wonder we might feel uneasy about the online world. Especially because most users don’t know very much about it. The internet is a complex environment that the majority of us probably care not to think about too much. As long as we can get our online next day delivery and stream our favourite shows, we’re good. 

But why do we trust some websites more than others? It works in a similar way to first impressions of people. It’s no secret that as humans we tend to judge things by how they look. In real day to day life it is normal for humans to question something or someone that doesn’t follow a certain expected behaviour or aesthetic. We like to feel as though we know what’s going on, and it’s no different when we enter the parallel world of the wide web. We want to feel like we trust the site we are browsing.

Here are just a couple of hints to ensure your website is considered trustworthy.

Clean upfront design 

If you were walking down a street lined with cafes you’re probably most likely to enter the one that looks clean, professional and well established. If you’re in a hurry to find that next cup of joe you may ignore the appearance, and go straight into order. You might get in the door, however take one swift look around at the cluttered tables, drab colours and confusing menu, and turn around without spending a penny. It’s the same with a website.

A user isn’t likely to stay on a website for more than a couple seconds if it doesn’t immediately look inviting. Do the colours match the intent? Is there plenty of ‘white space’ giving room for key messages and click points? Is the imagery of good quality and relevant? If the answer to these is no, then it sounds like you’re looking at a poor quality website… with a poor quality business behind it? Not necessarily, but remember your website is your first point of contact in the digital world – so make sure it’s a good one.

Accreditations

For health or care services in particular, affiliations or accreditations really matter. Think about the last time you seeked a self diagnosis online… A user is far more likely to trust websites that are endorsed by a recognisable organisation, like the NHS for example. If your online business, product, or blog is supported by a large & trusted organisation, people will have more confidence believing in you too. 

Imagery 

As briefly mentioned above, images are a crucial part to get right when it comes to keeping people’s attention. We are, first and foremost, a visual culture. So images that are clear, engaging and unique to your website are a sure way to gain trust from your audience. It’s also important to ensure that your images are fit for purpose. Say you owned a company that refurbished vintage watches. You’d want to reflect that directly through sharp, modern, real life photography to not only show the quality of what you do, but the credibility of your brand. 

No Spam!

Ads, pop ups, and spammy language in the copy is a sure way to put someone off looking at your website. Why? Mainly because it’s annoying and irrelevant to the user’s journey. We could probably all recall landing on a website that almost looks like an arcade. With so much going on how could anyone be expected to give it the time of day. 

Pushy Sign Ups

Another culprit that causes suspicion. Let users come to their own conclusion that they want to sign up for something. This can be done far more genuinely…by actually giving your audience something they want to invest their time in. There is nothing more off putting than being too eager. Humans hate that. 

When you work in digital marketing, these tropes become increasingly irritating and obvious as bad practice. But even to an untrained eye these qualities are a quick way to send a user away from your site. In industry this is called a ‘bounce rate.’ If your website has a high bounce rate you might want to consider a reskin!

For many it can be a daunting step to take in starting your cyber security journey when the realisation comes that you need to do more to protect your business, teams and customers from the ever growing risks associated with cyber-attacks.  And herein lies an ongoing challenge; many businesses know they need to do something so will often focus on ensuring they have some technical solutions in place such as firewalls, anti-virus software and multi-factor authentication, however this is far from the whole story when it comes to protecting any business.

Quoting directly from the Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2021 published by the Department for Digital, Culture Media & Sport “this…survey continues to show that cyber security breaches are a serious threat to all types of businesses and charities”, going on to say “a sizeable number of organisations that identify breaches report a specific negative outcome or impact.  On average, for those that do, the costs are substantial”. 

Once a business becomes aware that it needs to take action to strengthen its cyber security there may be an initial panic regarding how to go about doing this, but with a pragmatic risk based approach you will feel less overwhelmed and more in control of what you need to do.  Starting your cyber security journey doesn’t need to be something you do in isolation.  When businesses work with CyberScale they will typically, within the first year, go through a journey that will encompass much if not all of the following work:

Cyber Security Assessment & Roadmap – looking at where you are today, and what the steps will look like for your business to get you where you both want and need to be, the assessment process will lead in to the development of the Roadmap which will take in to account the risk profile of your business and will enable you to prioritise and plan all required actions.

Cyber Security Strategy – following on from the initial assessment and putting in place a clear roadmap, ensuring that you have a Cyber Security Strategy developed and embedded in to your business is the next step.  Within your strategy not only will there be a clear plan on delivering the Roadmap, we will also be looking at your security Policies, your approach to Incident Response Planning and how you are engaging your staff with Training and Awareness activities.

Implementing your plan is a process unique to your business and will often require some oversight and assistance from our team, which is when clients tend to engage with our vCISO service.  Delivering the strategy and ensuring that all elements are embedded within the business cannot be where all your hard work so far falls down.

At this point in your journey it may feel like you have achieved all you need to, and you will have indeed achieved a lot, but the fight isn’t over.  Cyber threats are constantly changing, with new challenges for even the most security-conscious organisations being realised daily.

By acknowledging that standing still is not an option and that Security is an iterative process, you will always be reviewing, changing and learning your approach to cybersecurity.  At this point in your journey we can continue to work with you to ensure you have a process of continuous improvement in place and are always working towards embedding a culture of security throughout your business, working together to guide your Cyber Security Strategy in conjunction with Leadership teams to take the business forward, securely.

What underpins our approach is our belief that effective cyber and information security requires a strategy built around your individual business going beyond technical solutions, you can hear more of our thoughts on this in some other articles on the need for a strategy and guidance for business owners.

“Supporting your employees getting vaccinated comes with several benefits.

Having the COVID-19 vaccine means:

✅your employees can better protect themselves and those around them

✅lower risk of your employees catching and spreading COVID-19 to colleagues, therefore reducing the negative impact on your workforce

✅protecting your customers when using your services

✅bringing your staff back safely into the workplace sooner

All those aged 18 and over can book their vaccination through the NHS booking service. You can also call 119 free of charge, anytime between 7am and 11pm seven days a week. You can book via the NHS” here: https://bit.ly/3yjZlNW

Foreign currency can be a precarious topic. When seeing the words “FX”, it can set off alarm bells that someone is trying to convince you to speculate, gamble, or to pay them to teach you how to speculate and gamble.

FX trading is one thing, whilst managing currency as a business is something entirely different. The truth is that currency fluctuations can be deadly to any business, and so can currency without any fluctuations.

Avoiding bad exchange margins

There are two ways currency can hurt a business. Firstly, the buying and selling of currency itself. Now, you may not think of yourself as someone who regularly buys and sells currency, but if you’re dealing with international clients and/or customers, then you most likely will be. 

This is because when you’re selling something to a customer overseas, one of you must exchange currency in order for the transaction to happen. Often, it’s abstracted, like on Amazon. This means the customer only sees their domestic currency, and the seller only sees their own too. 

The reality behind the scenes is that Amazon (among other marketplaces) are reconciling and exchanging these currencies at a very poor rate, which is directly taken out of the seller’s revenue. 

Often, this is around 3% lost to margins. This may be thousands per year lost in revenue, which can make an even larger dent in gross profit margins. Businesses often get stung the other way around too, when purchasing supplies or SaaS in foreign currency. If it’s not the marketplace intermediary ripping you off, it’s the high street banks, as many still charge terrible ~3% margins too.

The best way to mitigate exploitative margins is to take control over the exchange. To take control over it is to receive money into a virtual wallet in a multi-currency account, and exchange on your own terms.

There are over 40 business foreign exchange options to choose from when picking a multi-currency wallet. These will exchange at margins between 0% and 1% usually, with no extra fees (or if they have fees, they usually have no significant margin).

Many of these exchange companies are fintechs with a great understanding on the laws surrounding virtual wallets, and use this in their favour to let users create what is essentially a bank account (though it may not be technically), with bank account details for receiving money into, in often ~30 currencies (though some deal with over 100 currencies).

Avoiding currency fluctuation

The second way currency hurts business is that the market prices fluctuate wildly. Even when volatility is forecasted to be low (which it isn’t), small movements in the price can make your raw materials and products much more expensive.

A British firm putting in a large order with a US supplier, for example, could result in the goods being a lot more expensive than agreed. For example, agreeing to pay $10,000, but you’ll pay 30 days after the invoice as agreed, may mean paying £8,000 instead of today’s £7,227 because there was a price fluctuation. 

War, commodity prices, business confidence, pure speculation and momentum, among thousands of other factors causes prices to fluctuate. The amount of volatility is hard to predict, let alone the direction of the price. Thus, this is the opposite to speculation, this is about insurance.

To insure and protect from these events happening, we can purchase hedging products through the same foreign exchange brokers as mentioned above. Though, only some will be suitable, as others focus on multi-currency wallets only, and neglect hedging.

We can see the spot rate for GBP/USD going from 1.16 on March 20th to over 1.30 at the end of July. Or worse, two weeks before it was 1.16 in March, it was 1.30. This could be a matter of losing out on thousands of pounds if an order was placed during this time, or if goods were sold during this two week period.

The price direction doesn’t matter in many cases, and it’s simply being unable to predict your costs and revenue accurately in the future that is worrisome. It makes cash flow forecasting difficult, along with managing liabilities and risk.

Small business international payments should be set in stone upon being agreed, and hedging products do this in a few ways. Firstly, a Forward Contract is a way to agree on the purchasing of a specific amount of foreign currency, at a definitive price, but for a date in the future. 

So, in the previous example of buying the $10,000 worth of supplies, we could lock in the purchasing of this dollar amount at the price of £7,298 (plus a small fee, which is the cost of this “insurance”), and thus our forecasts and purchases are definite. We can also use this business foreign exchange hedging method with revenue too, where we preemptively purchase foreign currency back into our domestic currency, collect the revenue in foreign wallets, then exchange back when the forward contract is to be executed.

Two potential issues can arise from this, though. Firstly, currency may fluctuate in a way that’s favourable to you, and the hedging contract is now a bad deal. Secondly, revenue may be delayed, and the firm may not yet have that foreign currency that they wish to exchange – which could be a major problem.

To solve these issues, foreign exchange companies sometimes offer Option Contracts. These are similar to Forwards, but instead afford the option of executing the exchange to the business. Thus, we can simply decline the exchange if it isn’t a good set of circumstances when the agreed date comes round. Businesses will lose this small fee, but this is worthwhile in many cases, as the alternative could be losing thousands.

Foreign exchange costs are something many small firms forget to factor in. But the reality is that business fx is no more difficult than individual use cases, such as an expat using TransferWise to exchange their pension money. Small businesses do not need to be experts at FX, and they certainly don’t need to predict price fluctuations.

For small businesses that are unconfident in hedging, and would like extra advice, many of the foreign exchange companies have a dedicated dealer. These dealers will be there to offer free advice, facilitate deals, and nudge firms in the right direction. For example, they may challenge your assumptions, such as exchanging when it’s not actually necessary because if you wait, you may get a better price due to a larger transaction amount.

Though, for those who are confident, and simply wish for speed and convenience, there are apps in which FX transactions can happen in a split second at the click of a button.

A recent BBC article reported that Facebook has been accused of rolling sexist job advertising.

Investigative campaigners, Global Witness, have brought a startling bias to light, claiming that Facebook’s advertising strategy has a considerably sexist approach. The organization had created 4 test adverts to put Facebook under scrutiny, which lead to uncovering a huge discriminatory gender bias.

The ads that ran were for 4 job advertisements, linking to genuine vacancies posted by recruitment company indeed.com. The roles were for nursery nurses, pilots, mechanics and psychologists. It’s critical to note that Global Witness did not manually enter any targeting strategy, it was left entirely to Facebook who use an automated algorithm that shows your ads to ‘who is most likely to click on them’. When creating your advertisement via Facebook, they require advertisers to confirm that they ‘will not discriminate when posting job ads’ however ‘it’s own ad delivery system appears to operate in a discriminatory manner’. (Global Witness)

And here are the findings to prove it:

• 96% of the people shown the ad for mechanic jobs were men;

• 95% of those shown the ad for nursery nurse jobs were women;

• 75% of those shown the ad for pilot jobs were men;

• 77% of those shown the ad for psychologist jobs were women

(Data collected directly from

Image credit – Chamber Canva Pro 2023

“Britain’s Court of Appeal confirmed…that riders for food delivery firm Deliveroo were self-employed, dismissing a union appeal against past judgments on their status.”

This was because they did not have to provide personal service; they could send someone in their place to do their job.

Read more here: https://reut.rs/38h9u3C

There can’t be many people whose jobs haven’t been affected by the pandemic – whether that’s newly working from home, being furloughed or even losing a position permanently. But it’s had a particular impact on women, with their job losses outpacing men’s significantly in 2020. So why have they been so hard hit, and what can employers do to try to put things right?

Despite huge advances in gender equality in the workplace, it’s safe to say that women have always shouldered the bulk of unpaid care work at home. And this has only increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. School closures have meant parents who work have had to cope with the added strain of childcare and home-schooling, with a lot of the responsibility falling disproportionately on women. Add to this the fact that a lot of the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic are female dominated (e.g. retail, creative industries and hospitality), and the fallout is likely to have an extremely detrimental affect on women’s career progression for years to come. In fact, it might be years before we completely understand the long-term effects of all this. But we’re already seeing how women are suffering.

What’s happened to women in the workplace?

Deloitte recently carried out a global survey which found 70% of women who have experienced disruption to their routines because of the pandemic believe this will slow down the career progression. PwC’s Women in Work Index (which reports on gender parity in the workplace) has previously always shown good progress being made – but in their Women in Work 2021 report, they said they expect the value of the index to fall back to 2017 levels.

A lot of this is down to women juggling extra responsibilities at home while still working – something which is negatively affecting their work/life balance and their mental and physical health. As well as this, unfortunately, it’s still the case that most senior decision-makers are men. So they might not be aware of the types of problems women have had to deal with during the pandemic. This poses a real threat to gender equality in the workplace. It’s not just about parents either – women without caregiving responsibilities at home are struggling due to the need to be ‘always on’, whatever the time of day or night. It’s taking a real toll on their well-being.

All of this is likely to lead to more women leaving the workforce permanently – something which could irretrievably damage gender equality, and also have a huge economic effect.

The problems in detail

1. Women’s performance is being negatively affected

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) recently released a briefing note about how mothers and fathers have been balancing work and family under lockdown. One of its key findings is that women have been spending less time on paid work and more on household responsibilities. And that the time they do spend on paid work is more likely to be interrupted by things going on in their households (according to the briefing note, before the pandemic mothers and fathers used to be interrupted during the same proportion of their work hours; now women are interrupted over 50% more often). This is of course going to affect their abilities to do their jobs. And it could then lead to them missing out on promotions, bonuses or pay rises, and slow down their career progression.

1. More women than men are working flexibly

According to the Deloitte survey, more than a third of women are now working from home full-time, compared to 1% before the pandemic. Obviously agile working like this does have several positive effects, like fewer interruptions and less time off sick or on holiday. But with more women having to apply for flexible working than men, it could lead to male-dominated workplaces –  a real step backwards. Women who work away also often don’t get the support or mentoring that being in the office regularly can bring – something else that can put a real dent in their career progression.

1. The gender-pay gap

A survey of women working in corporate jobs in the US showed that more than a quarter are considering reducing their working hours or leaving the workforce for good as a result of the pandemic. This will mean even less women in leadership roles, further increasing the gender-pay gap.

In recent years many companies have put great initiatives in place to try to tackle gender inequality at work. But it’s likely they’ll need to put these on hold while they recover from the financial effects of the pandemic which is another worrying development.

What’s the answer?

With no clear end to the pandemic in sight, it’s clear that employers are going to have to make positive changes in the next few years to help women continue to advance in the workplace.

So what can employers do to help to lessen the effect of the pandemic on their female staff? Deloitte have come up with six steps that organisations can put in place now to support their workers both during and after the pandemic.

• Make flexible working the norm: this doesn’t just apply to working parents – it needs to be available to all workers. And it also doesn’t just mean working from home (although that is part of it) – it’s about making sure that people’s working arrangements give them the best possible work/life balance while still benefitting the business. Workplace cultures must support people who take advantage of this for whatever reason – whether that’s down to caregiving responsibilities at home or something else – without penalising them.
• Lead with empathy and trust: leaders and managers must have open and supportive conversations to build trust with their teams and promote an empathetic culture – so they can understand any problems or constraints their employees are facing.
• Promote networking, mentorship and sponsorship: these types of resources can be a real boost to career progression. But they must be offered in a variety of ways so women don’t feel excluded from them (for example by only offering early morning networking breakfasts that clash with responsibilities at home).
• Create learning opportunities that fit with employees’ daily lives: most women want to progress their careers. But the usual ways to do this (e.g. professional development courses) often don’t work for people with a lot of responsibilities outside of work. So employers need to find creative ways to allow their staff to get the expertise and support they need in flexible ways (e.g. tailored online learning that they can do at their own pace).
• Remove unconscious bias in reward and promotion processes: unconscious bias due to people’s backgrounds or gender is something that lots of organisations have been working hard to address. But the pandemic means employers also need to factor in bias towards women who want to work remotely because of unavoidable commitments at home, especially as these relate to caregiving responsibilities.
• Make diversity, respect and inclusion non-negotiable: 30% of women in the Deloitte survey said they’ve experienced non-inclusive behaviour (like being excluded from meetings or projects) at work. And this is a big reason for them not wanting to progress within an organisation. It’s not enough just to have a diversity and inclusion policy in place either – employers need to address problems like this head on to make sure people are living the right values at work. All day, every day.

What we’re doing at Pure

We’ve run our Women’s Leadership Programme for some time now for women who want to boost their confidence at work, develop their leadership skills and build a new network. But we’re changing things up for 2022 to play our part in alleviating some of the extra pressure on women caused by the pandemic. So we’re making it more accessible than ever before. We’ll be delivering it using a mixture of remote learning and face-to-face meetings, spread over a number of days. All to give working women access to as wide a support network as possible.

Since 2014 over 100 women have taken part in the programme. And 26% of them have later been promoted. If you think it could make a difference to your working life, or know someone else who could benefit, head to the programme’s website to find out more.