Each day of National Inclusion Week has a different focus, with today’s being ‘Empower and recognise’. We wanted to take a moment to recognise the good work being done by Miller’s Inclusion Alliances, who are key to Miller’s commitment to building a workplace welcome to all. Read as the Chairs from each of our Alliances share more on some of their achievements from the past 12 months:

Vanessa Horne, Pride Alliance

• Becoming a Stonewall Diversity Champion and undertaking a full review of our people policies to ensure they are LGBTQ+ inclusive, recognising the need for up-to-date, tailored policies and paying particular attention to language used
• Running of Pride Open Forums during Pride month to help colleagues better understand the realities of being a member of the LGBTQ+ community when at work, and to understand how we as an Alliance can better empower those wanting to become better allies
• Launch of the Pride Community to help develop LGBTQ+ allyship across Miller and provide safe spaces for individuals at work. Pride Community is essentially a safe space for LGBTQ+ individuals and allies to come together, both virtually and in person
• Appointment of an Executive Sponsor (James Hands), who is actively involved in Alliance conversations on how we can progress LGBTQ+ inclusion at Miller further
• Sponsors of Link’s Insurance Pride campaign, which overall resulted in raising over £20,000 for akt, a charity supporting LGBTQ+ young people in the UK who are facing or experiencing homelessness or living in a hostile environment
• Engaging with Diversity Role Models to partake in their role model volunteering programme with schools, and explore fundraising opportunities for Miller to lend its support.

Georgina Robinson, Gender Alliance

• Presentations to Team Leaders and Managers within Miller to start discussions on how they can support their teams and take ownership to re-dress and address gender imbalance within the organisation. Encouraging senior employees to sign up to be a mentor and also make themselves a sponsor for female employees
• Marking of International Women’s Day with informative articles and promotion of events for employees to join. This year’s theme was Choose to Challenge
• We worked with Miller's HR team to review the performance review process and implement changes to ensure it is inclusive for both women and men
• Held our first coffee mornings, both in person and virtually, to invite the Miller community to attend and ask questions of the Gender Alliance, find out what we are doing and provide vital insights into what they are experiencing.

Inyang Udosen, Culture Alliance

• Creating an environment in which it is no longer anathema to talk about race, ethnicity and the barriers people can face at work due to being of the minority within these protected characteristics
• The ambition to set meaningful, stretching targets around representation has been reiterated by C-suite executives at Miller multiple times. This allyship empowers and encourages the Alliance to do the difficult and time-consuming work to develop the proposals we hope to see the company implement
• Miller’s leadership has engaged faithfully with the Culture Alliance on the importance of ethnicity pay gap reporting and are making strides and progress towards transparency on this vital issue of fairness and inclusion. 

However, the Culture Alliance is most proud of the cultural shift rippling across the business because without this, everything we do would be merely cosmetic.

We're looking forward to the rest of National Inclusion Week and this important opportunity to celebrate and promote diversity.