Hertfordshire County Council (Herts CC) is the largest employer in Hertfordshire with 25,000 employees, 80% of whom are part-time and 55% full-time. An EO Policy has been in place since the early 1980s which was reviewed in 1994 as part of a general review of HR strategy. The important question was how the organisation measured up to their public statements that ‘We are an equal opportunities employer’ and ‘positive about disabled people’.
Their actions fell into a number of categories. On disability, the Council introduced awareness training, access audits and employee’s forum, and became accredited as a ‘two ticks’ user. They also changed the stress on their policies to ‘ability’. On race, they instituted a black employees’ group and designed a specific development programme for black employees together with a full audit of their performance against the CRE Standards. For women, they were the first local authority to join Opportunity Now and developed a wide range of flexible working initiatives alongside a women’s development programme.
Other initiatives included the development of staff support schemes, mentoring programmes, a work place nursery and a reassessed harassment at work policy
They were conscious that all of these actions needed ongoing assessment and this was carried out through an annual DDA audit and a set of specially designed performance indicators. Interviews with leavers included questions on their own assessment of the value of the EO Policy. Four years on, an overall assessment showed success in most areas, although there were pockets where awareness was low and where management considered that EO was a job for the Personnel department, not for them.
There have been two employers’ organisations set up to encourage the business case. Opportunity Now was set up in 1991 to increase the quality and quantity of women’s participation in the workforce. The Employers Forum on Age, launched in 1996, had 160 members in 2004 which represented 14% of all the UK’s employees. Ruth Jarrett, Development Director commented at the launch that:
