Our D&I journey: Commitments for 2022

We are going through a period of significant growth here at Apsida Life Science, and at the end of 2021 we wanted to do a “temperature check” on how our employees felt we were performing across multiple areas of our business. 

Our Co-Founders and Talent Acquisition manager put together a comprehensive survey that would assess four core areas of Apsida Life Science: Our culture, our training, our leadership, and our D&I efforts. 

This survey will be rolled out every quarter to ensure that new starters (and current employees) can provide us with regular touchpoints for improvement. It didn’t make sense for us to blindly make decisions, when in reality the opinions of our employees are what really matters. We intentionally made this anonymous to give individuals a platform to be transparent.

With growth, comes change, and we were hyper-aware that we were entering territory where we would no longer be considered a boutique business, so it was time to set some good, actionable intentions for 2022!

What were our results?

We scored highly across our culture and values, and there was excellent, practical feedback on how we could elevate our training – namely through flash training sessions on consultative techniques, as well as regular refreshes on the tech tools our consultants use on a day-to-day basis. We were thankful to receive such candid responses, and have already started implementing training directly off the back of this feedback.

An area that was highlighted as needing improvement was our D&I efforts. This didn’t come as a surprise to us, as we were already aware that we hadn’t put any meaningful initiatives or intentions in place. 

And, being completely honest – it was because we didn’t know where to start. But, we decided towards the end of 2021 that we were in a place as a business where we felt ready to invest time, budget, and resources into things that directly impacted inclusion first, which would then enable us to hire more diversely.

As a boutique recruitment company, we have been mindful that with rapid growth, comes change. This is why one of our goals for 2022 is to improve diversity within our business, as well as review our incentives and initiatives to ensure that they’re as inclusive as possible.

What have we committed to doing, and what have we already done?

One of the main suggestions that came up in the results was regarding our incentives, and making them more inclusive. Our leadership team sat down and thought about how we could keep our incentives true to our brand and vision, whilst also ensuring that it didn’t exclude anyone from feeling excited about them.

One of our biggest incentives enables consultants to earn £5,000 which will be put towards a luxury watch. 

The idea of an incentive is to excite our employees and give them the drive and determination to achieve it; however, we understood from the teams’ point of view that from a gender perspective, we weren’t thinking broadly enough to make this appealing to the women within our organisation. We have now officially changed our incentive to be £5,000 towards a piece of luxury jewellery, with high-quality brands that were suggested internally. For us, making smaller, meaningful steps like this in the early stages of our D&I journey is a great way for us to lay foundations for a longer-term impact. 

Another commitment we have made is rolling out D&I training to all of our managers, and we are in the process of selecting an external partner who will support us with this. We appreciate that D&I is multifaceted and requires continuous engagement, so this partnership for us will be integral not only from a leadership perspective, but also for talent attraction and retention. 

We know that this will also equip us with broader knowledge and expertise to advise our clients on similar situations within their organisations, and we’re excited to expand our knowledge base, and support them as best as possible.

We want to take our time

Being performative is something that we wish to avoid altogether, which is why we haven’t gone from one extreme to the other with our D&I strategy so far. 

For us, it’s smaller, incremental changes that impact our current team that matters the most, and create a culture whereby we can build on what we already have – as well as what our consultants need from us!