At Riverside, we are committed to supporting and promoting equality, diversity and inclusion and putting people at the heart of everything we do.

We care passionately about our people and creating an environment where colleagues can realise their potential regardless of their ethnicity. We want the diversity of our workforce to reflect the customers and neighbourhoods we serve.

When it comes to ethnicity, we’ve worked for many years to listen to our ethnically diverse colleagues through a variety of measures, including our incredibly valuable staff group, EMpower.

On their recommendation we commissioned an external review to look at how we can go even further to create the workplace we want.

Following a series of recommendations, we’ve been working on developing and implementing our new ethnically diverse talent strategy.

Formed in partnership with our staff group, EMpower, this strategy aims to ensure we become an industry leader in the way we recruit, nurture and support ethnically diverse talent.

It will help to address our Ethnicity Pay Gap, create opportunities for ethnically diverse leadership development and make all of our employment offer more inclusive.

So far, we have:

• Created a new policy, guaranteeing an interview for every suitably qualified ethnically diverse candidate who applies for a role at a management level or above
• Voluntarily published our annual Ethnicity Pay Gap report which sets out our current deficit and where we need to improve.
• Provided training for colleagues on recognising and reporting discrimination in the workplace
• Launched and promoted a new contact mechanism for reporting incidents of discrimination of any kind – Call it out, Clear it Out
• Refreshed our management information data to ensure widespread understanding of our current position throughout the group
• Set clear targets on progress

Going forward, we will also:

• Re-design our recruitment processes and communications to ensure they fit our aims and are effective and representative
• Re-design our wider communications standards, messaging and photo library to ensure they reflect our diverse workforce and customer base and launch a proactive recruitment campaign
• Re-design internal and external web pages to reflect the changes above.
• Appoint a specialist agency to consult on improvements and develop our talent pool.
• Review interview panels, questions and selection processes to ensure they meet our aims and are effective for all candidates.

This strategy is ongoing and will continue to evolve and develop going forwards.

View our current vacancies now.