Ellie Hayward
Hello, my name is Ellie and I’m the Project Manager at RazorSecure. I work closely with all departments within RazorSecure, and spend most of my days interacting with developers as their Scrum master, and communicating with customers. I am responsible for ensuring that projects run smoothly and that communication is open and effective.
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is very important in RazorSecure, and throughout my 1.5 years at the company, I have spearheaded implementation of good practices in multiple parts of RazorSecure, including our hiring and interview strategy, our general company culture and our project management processes. As the Project Manager, EDI is something I am very interested in incorporating into the everyday running of projects, starting with project meetings that I chaired. Through being a scrum master to both of our development teams, I have had the opportunity to learn about scrum and agile ways of working, and their benefits. I personally find the focus on continuous improvement really beneficial, and aim to follow the 5 key principles of scrum in all my work: openness, courage, focus, commitment and respect.
The Digital Maintenance Project is a great opportunity to pilot our new approach and proactively work towards encouraging equality, diversity and inclusion. To begin with, we started with our internal meetings, with the view to being ‘deaf friendly’. We agreed on this approach after personal experience from one of our project team.
Our Head of Digital Safety, Dr Emma Taylor, mentors some students who are deaf, and has met multiple people throughout her communications that have been deaf or hard of hearing. She found that the deaf community are not always accommodated in an everyday online working environment, and often have to find solutions themselves to deal with these challenges, or keep their condition secret from their colleagues. Therefore, we aim to create an environment that is welcoming to all, regardless of their hearing level, whether they wish to disclose this information to us or not. Instead of waiting for this problem to arise to initiate change, we wanted to proactively make changes to ensure that everyone we communicate with can actively participate in the project.
How do we implement EDI in our Digital Maintenance project?
Deaf awareness has become an integral part of each of our weekly meetings, and is included in any interviews or external meetings we hold. We have found the following changes are easy to maintain, relatively minor changes to our normal operations, and help conservation and efficiency for us too, even though none of our project team are hard of hearing.
We do this by:
-
Sending out an agenda before a meeting - this helps people to review the information, process and prepare in their own time.
-
Distributing the previous meeting minutes prior to each meeting -this allows attendees to review any outstanding actions, and update on any progress or changes.
-
Sharing the minutes on screen during the call, and editing the document live - this allows everyone in the conversation to follow where we are, and I organise the meeting minutes by ‘topic’ to help focus the meetings. This also helps to avoid swapping between windows or screens.
-
Sending out summary minutes after each meeting - this consolidates the conversations and changes made live in the meeting, and allows people to review their actions for the upcoming week. The actions are also repeated in a group message I send out in our slack channel after each meeting so they can be easily revisited.
-
Reminding everyone of our EDI principles at the beginning of each meeting - this reinforces our practices, and ensures awareness for everyone on the call. This works particularly well when new people enter the meetings on an ad hoc basis or for interviews. Our principles include encouraging everyone to use their webcam if possible, to stay in frame, avoid hand gestures that cover the face and have good lighting where possible to avoid glare. This will help people to lip read and pick up on body language and facial expressions.
-
Setting a good example - as well as reminding everyone of our principles, it is also the responsibility of everyone in the meeting to ensure they adhere to our rules and to politely remind others when they are not. This encourages a culture of improvement and personal accountability.
-
Using a ‘hands up’ approach in meetings - encouraging participants to raise their hands into frame when they have a question helps to avoid interruptions and maintain the flow of the meeting.
-
Using closed captions - closed captions are turned on by the individual, and can only be seen on their screen. I remind participants how to turn the CCs on at the beginning of the meeting, and personally use this function to help me when producing the meeting minutes.
-
Frequently ask if people have questions - at the end of each meeting topic section, I will specifically ask if anyone has anything to add. This allows people to ask any questions that they did not get an opportunity to ask (e.g. due to the flow of the conversation) to ensure that everyone's voice is heard.
-
EDI moment of the week - I encourage the team to actively participate and get involved, by sending in their ‘EDI moment of the week’ before the meeting. Reviewing this moment every week together allows us to relay our experiences, in internal and external meetings, to help us improve our own processes and communication.
I hope this blog will help others to think about good EDI practices and how they can be encouraged in the workplace: what we have learnt from our implementation in the Digital Maintenance Project is that even one small change is a step in the right direction, and can make a massive difference on the people who need it most. In my next blog in July, I will write about some of our learnings from our internal process, and from the team attending other meetings with a view to EDI and deaf awareness.
