Inclusion, Honesty and Hard Lessons: Dana James‑Edwards on Modern Management

Okay, so I'll start off with the Supply Chain Sustainability School because I imagine many of you listening may not have heard of it.

In fact, I hadn't heard of it before I applied there, so I don't blame you.

It's very niche.

It's for the construction and built environment sector.

And the beauty about the Supply Chain Sustainability School is that it is completely free at the point of use.

And actually, even if you weren't from the construction and built environment sector, if you had an email address, you can set up an account in less than five minutes and log into the school and access all of the resources.

So it's free at the point of use because the larger companies in construction pay in as partners to the school so that the smaller companies who work for them and who have fewer resources get access to training and support that they need to be able to be compliant, but also to do things better and reflect best practice in the way they work.

So they're helping to make the industry better overall.

Now, if you log on to the school, you'll see that there's lots of technical content.

So things like carbon and retrofit.

and digital, and nature, and biodiversity, and that kind of stuff.

But it also has fairness, inclusion, and respect as a program, because quite frankly, our industry is not sustainable if we can't get the right people in, and if we can't get them to stay.

And culture and inclusion is the bedrock of that.

So we say fairness, inclusion, and respect, or FAIR.

It would normally be DEI or EDI out in the wider world, but Fair is how we speak about it in construction.

So I lead that program of work, the Fairness, Inclusion and Respect program, and I manage a team of three to be able to deliver it.

On the school's platform today, we have over 400 resources on Fairness, Inclusion and Respect.

And they're quite different.

It's things like videos and e-learning, case studies and guides.

We also run events, so webinars as well that are free.

And also we have two in-person conferences a year, which are also free to attend once you register.

The FUR program holds the industry's largest data set for diversity.

It's about 300,000 construction employees, anonymized demographic data.

And we collect this data in a massive exercise every year across the entire industry.

And then we reflect our findings back to the industry to say, who's here? Where are we losing representation? How are our efforts doing in terms of bringing diversity into the sector? And what might we need to look out for and do better? So that's a massive thing that we're very proud of and that we're responsible for.