Last week, our global offices came together for the next ‘Let’s Talk About It – Black Lives Matter’ event. Once again, our workforce sought to further enhance their understanding of the movement and to discuss diversity issues more widely. Following feedback from our JDXers, the event featured open and honest discussion around:

• Whether racial equality has improved in society, if at all
• The role and impact of sport on the BLM movement
• JDX’s progression and commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

Thank you to the Diversity and Business Committee for organising another important event, and thank you to our JDXers for their honest and open discussions. We are committed to maintaining momentum with regards to our learning and progress, and last week proved to be another milestone in our transformational journey.

Since our last update, JDX has made several improvements with regards to diversity and inclusion. Firstly, with regards to our recruitment procedures. We are pleased to confirm that we have now removed all names from CVs. This will enable our recruitment teams to know, with confidence, that they have eradicated unconscious bias from the initial stages of the recruitment process. Our interviewers and managers and above have all attended our ‘Unconscious Bias’ training sessions, and our ExCo will have all attended the sessions within the next two weeks. We have also widened our recruitment criteria to include students who have achieved 2:2s as well as 2:1s. To further these efforts, we have also decided to recruit from a wider range of Universities, rather than solely Russel Group Universities. With these steps in place, we hope to open opportunities at our firm up to a far wider range of applicants, which will in turn hopefully allow us to recruit an even more diverse workforce. In the coming month, we hope to create competency frameworks for interviews, and set guidelines with our recruitment agencies.

The second area of improvement is with regards to the internal progression of ethnic minorities at JDX. Crucially, our black employees have flagged that, since black and ethnic minority leaders are so underrepresented in the finance industry, they felt our Firm would benefit from engaging external black mentors to help our black and ethnic minority workforce fulfil their full potential with confidence. In a largely white-male dominated industry, our workforce understand that it can be difficult for ethnic minority groups to aspire to roles that are traditionally held by white males. Industry-leading black and ethnic minority role models will be mentoring our employees to help them reach their full potential, and we hope that this will be the first step towards ensuring our workforce have a more diverse leadership team to learn from. In the coming months, we hope to engage in partnerships with local colleges, and to formally sponsor and begin a school mentoring programme, both with the hope of creating opportunities for young black people in each of our regional hubs.

Thirdly, we have gathered and taken onboard feedback about the inclusivity of the JDX culture. Though we pride ourselves on our vibrant culture and can do attitude, we know that there is more to be done to ensure that every one of our staff feels at home at JDX. We want to celebrate the diversity of our workforce and to cater to all JDXers. As a first step, our Diversity in Business Committee now has a team lead for each minority group who is responsible for hosting events, discussions, and sharing materials to ensure that the DIB annual schedule of events is as diverse as possible. The committee are aiming to host at least one event in each region per month to encourage open discussion and learning about minority groups. The ‘Let’s Talk About It – Black Lives Matter’ events have been the first step towards this improvement, and the response from JDXers has been fantastic – we are excited to continue to learn more about the many cultures of our JDXers.

Finally, we have taken the first steps towards complete transparency with regards to our diversity and inclusion statistics as a Firm. As we have stated previously, we want to remain entirely transparent about what we are doing to tackle racial inequality and bias in our workplace and beyond. Our HR department will be publishing our new Diversity and Inclusion policy in the coming weeks, and we can now confirm that we will be monitoring and reporting on the employee lifecycle of minority groups. In addition to this, we will publish our mission statement, targets, and a full report on our statistics annually. Each of these steps take time, and we hope to be able to share them in the coming weeks. We are proud to hold ourselves accountable for change and are confident in our ability to do so.

Thank you to all our JDXers who are playing such a vital role in this transitional period. We are grateful, as always, for your communication, honesty, integrity, entrepreneurial spirits, and willingness to learn. We look forward to sharing further improvements shortly.

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