Southbank Centre - Case Study

Bitesize Diversity and Inclusion

Overview

Southbank Centre is a unique festival site, staging events covering a hugely diverse range of subjects and spanning all art forms. It occupies a 21-acre site and includes Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, the Hayward Gallery, and the Saison Poetry Library, as well as restaurants, cafes, bars and shops.

Need

Southbank Centre benefits from a very proactive HR team who really believe in the importance of investing in their people and we have worked on a range of development projects with them from helping to shape their first talent programme to management development for a range of department and team leaders.

A key project involved working on diversity and inclusion, with an aim of helping everyone to consider what they could do to promote an environment which is equal, fair and inclusive to all.

Solution

With over 600 employees, many working varying shifts and across a range of departments, we needed to design sessions which were punchy and relevant to everyone. We worked closely with the Future Talent Manager to create highly participative 2 hour workshops covering 2 key areas:

• guidance around how prejudice can affect our behaviour and how bias sits within all of us at a subconscious level
• using work based scenarios to challenge peoples’ assumptions and help them to be more aware of what might be shaping their decisions and interaction with others

Our facilitator, Heather, delivered these workshops over 6 months to every employee in the organisation and they have had such a positive impact that the HR team are now going to factor in a number of sessions for new staff coming on board each year.