MAX FORDHAM named ‘Inclusion and diversity champion’

20th June 2017
Posted By : Anna Flockett
MAX FORDHAM named ‘Inclusion and diversity champion’

The ‘Inclusion and Diversity Champion of the Year’ has been awarded to Max Fordham at the 2017 Consultancy and Engineering Awards. Hosted by the Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE) the awards showcase best practice for the global engineering community. The award recognises the organisation that has ‘diversity and inclusion at the heart of its business’ and seeks to ‘embrace the benefits of a truly diverse workforce’.

Senior Partner, Tamsin Tweddell was delighted with the win. “This award recognises the extent to which equality is intrinsic to the ethos of our partnership,” she explained. “It also promotes the ways we have recently identified opportunities to continue to improve.”

She noted that recognition of this kind helps to inspire and motivate the practice to go even further to improve diversity in the workplace.

Partner and Finance team member, Samiatt Onikoyi was equally enthused by what this award means for the future of Max Fordham.

She commented: “I feel really proud to be part of a practice that’s been recognised for championing diversity.” When asked if anything more could be done to further the gains made so far she responded: “‘We’ve only just scratched the surface!”

The profession of engineering has long suffered from a lack of diversity. The UK has the lowest percentage of female engineers in Europe, while minority ethnic engineers are even more under-represented. The industry still faces huge challenges in the visibility and acceptance LGBT+ people.

Max Fordham has a partnership model similar to that of an ‘employee-owned’ business. Once an employee has completed four years with the practice, they are invited to become a partner. As such, the business of approximately 230 people has around 120 partners. Everyone has the opportunity to contribute to discussions on how the business should be run.

Senior Partner, Henry Pipe explained: “A few years ago we didn’t think we needed to do anything about diversity. Doing the right thing is at the core of our values. We expected diversity and inclusion to be the natural consequence of employing people who are deeply passionate about it. We were wrong.”

Following a query from a young, male member of the practice as to why there were so few women in senior positions, it was decided to establish a Diversity Group to investigate. “It forced us to engage with things we hadn’t fully considered before. We learnt that many other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) companies had found evidence that they weren’t treating people as equally as they had assumed,” Tweddell pointed out. “It was time to have a look at our own data. We were shocked by the results.”

The practice learned that female engineers were receiving higher pay raises less than half as often as male engineers.

Pipe noted: “The process introduced us to unconscious bias, as well as identifying gender bias in self-assessments for pay rises.” The practice put a plan in place to tackle unconscious bias.

He continued: “We trained all our assessors with methods to identify it and eliminate it. We recruited a female engineer to our pay review group, updated our self-assessment guide and – most importantly – published the data internally, in full. Our internal transparency has been a huge factor in making changes.”

The result? Since instituting the plan, female engineers have received higher pay awards slightly more often than male engineers in the two years since the initiative commenced.

These are the first steps at Max Fordham to ensure a fairer, more equal and more welcoming workplace. It’s something they hope becomes more prevalent in the industry.


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