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Joanne Conway

Hello and welcome to today's podcast, which is part of the EY Strong When We Belong podcast series sponsored by Mona Bitar, EY UK&I Vice Chair. In these podcasts we want to encourage conversations to spotlight the things that are important to EY, to our speakers and to society. I'm Joanne Conway, Head of diversity, equity and inclusiveness for EY UK, and I'm currently doing a doctorate on the topic of privilege in relation to race, gender and class.

So particularly interested in this topic today. I'm really glad I got the chance to host so social mobility is a strategic priority for EY and in today's podcast we're going to highlight the importance of strong leadership, commitment and influencing meaningful change. I'm delighted to be joined by Errol Gardner, EY Global Vice Chair, Consulting and Co-Chair of EY’s Global Social Equity Task Force.

Welcome Errol and thank you so much for joining us on today's podcast.

Errol Gardner

Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Conway

Oh, thank you. So glad to have you here. I just wanted to start by hearing a little bit about yourself and just why DE&I is important to you. I know, you know, you're a co-chair on the Global Social Equity Task Force. Obviously, this is something that's really high on your agenda. So why is it important to you Errol?

Gardner

Okay, well, maybe let me start with a little bit about what I do today and then my background and the importance, if I can. So, let's start with today, I suppose just to ground that. So, I've worked in professional services for over 30 years in my career. I've been a partner for 18 years and my current role, I'm the global vice chair for our consulting business and I sit on the Global Executive of EY.

And as you mentioned, I'm also the co-chair of our Global Social Equity Task Force. And so that may be just grounds who I am in today's world. And then maybe just talk a little bit about my history in that context. So I was, I was born in Yorkshire to parents who emigrated from Jamaica, who were both seeking their own version of social mobility at the time.

So, my father was actually one of the passengers of what was the Empire Windrush, which have obviously a lot of people have now heard about. And it's become very famous as a known obviously, as very much characterising the Windrush generation of those that came to the UK after the Second World War to help rebuild the country. I guess it was, it was captured at the time.

So, he came across in 1948 and my mother came across in the fifties. So as first-generation immigrants coming into this country, they experienced a number of difficulties, as you would expect with that group. And for myself, in my own personal perspective, I went to a comprehensive school and obviously as a black child growing up in Yorkshire, which is and certainly at the time was not the most diverse part of the country, you know, struggled a lot in terms of acceptance within that environment.

And also given, I guess, the socio-economic background that I came from, there were other issues that I had to deal with compared to other students that were there. But I was really fortunate that my mother, in particular, saw education as being a critical enabler or a foundation for moving forward in society. And in many ways that something with my brother and I, she was very pushy in terms of making sure that we did everything that we could to do the best that we could. And that was non-negotiable.

So, on DE&I and why it's important to me. So, I must confess, this is something that I never talked about in my professional career. It is probably something that I haven't championed and have been at the forefront of for most of my career. And that, in essence, I was a little bit reluctant as I was progressing through the early stages of my career, to in many ways bring attention to the fact of who I was, because I often found that could be a barrier or be that in my mind or in reality, I thought that was a barrier to the success that I may have.

So, my mindset was very much focused on not highlighting my difference in that respect. So, I think that now I've kind of, I guess, got to a point in my life as well as my professional life that I so much see the importance of this and the importance of me personally but other’s role modelling some of the behaviours, the leadership, making the interventions necessary in order to give others the opportunity.

Because as much as the work environment has moved on from the one that I started in, I think that the barriers that a number of people still have in entering the workforce, let alone then progressing once they're within it, we haven't made anywhere near the level of progress that we need to. So, I think that drive to achieve more equity in what we can achieve within an organisation like ours, but across business more broadly, I think is really super important.

Conway

Thank you and thank you for sharing your background. I think that's one of the things that people really want to hear is like that real life experience. And one of the things certainly we see come out, we see this in the research, and we see this in the conversations that we have come across the organisation, is that people want to feel valued for the uniqueness so that piece that you were saying about like, what is it that makes you different? And actually, that is your differentiator in a positive way. But actually, we have this in a need to belong, this human need to want to feel part of it. And actually, that means we don't want to stand out. So, it's a real balance actually, that I think people really kind of on a day-to-day basis that the impact to that is really relevant. So, thank you for sharing that. And when we talk about social mobility, you know, specifically in terms of like, what does it actually mean? So social mobility refers to a change in a person's socio-economic situation. So, either in relation to their parents, which is referred to as intergenerational mobility or throughout their lifetime, which is that intra generational mobility, it's a really good example of what you've given around that, that mobility of transition through from your parents and through your own journey.

What are your views on social mobility Errol? So, you could bring it to life a little bit for us please?

Gardner

Well, as I described earlier, I wouldn't be where I am today without social mobility. So, on a purely personal and maybe even selfish level, I see the importance of this. And of course, this is a topic that you can drift a little bit into the political zone, and I don't want to get into that. It's not about anything in relation to politics or morality or any of those topics. I think it's really important that we acknowledge the barriers that certain people have in terms of access to the workplace as well as being successful and help them to navigate those barriers. And if you look at it purely from a business outcome perspective, you know, we're talking about in this country at the moment a labour crunch, supply shortages in terms of employment at the moment, the more you are preventing people joining organisations like ours, the more you're causing issues for your organisation to be successful.

So not accessing that supply of later, if you like, in quantity terms, but also in qualitative terms, I think you are missing out as an organisation. So, I think it's not just, you know, elements of why it's a good thing from, you know, be it a human level if you like. But also, I think from a business case perspective, there are very clear reasons why it's important.

And for me, it comes down to one of opportunity as well as expectation. So if you look at it in terms of opportunity, I talked earlier about education being critical and it was for me, but it's not just about what you technically learn at school that matters, but it's also about developing some of the softer skills that are critical as you will know, within the work environment and in many ways building relationships and how you connect to people, which are also really important skills, but also then it's access to resources as well.

So, you know, we've seen through the pandemic, the impact that it had on school children who came from a particular background. If you don't have access to a laptop, you don't have access to stable broadband, you don't have enough physical space in which to operate, how that will have impacted significantly and negatively the life choices that those individuals will have, as a consequence.

But the other dimension of this is the expectation, and I think I've experienced this very much myself as well, which is, that in many ways your mentality and the mentality of those around you. So almost what is it you expect of yourself and what is it that people that you associate and socialise with expect of your progress? And if you have a social circle that has low expectations of you, you'll generally not fight against that. And that's a real barrier that I think we need to work through with individuals. But their own mentality in terms of the push and the progress and the drive that they have to achieve, but also helping others that are around them, not pulling them back and holding them back, not preventing them making progress is also very important in relation to that.

So, for me, that absence of opportunity and expectation are the key barriers to social mobility.

Conway

Thank you. It's so important to hear you talk about the individuals, not just about the access to what you said about skills, but also, it's the environment of where they are and who they're surrounded by. And that has a huge influence around. And we see that a lot. You know, people talk about role models and actually sometimes with social mobility, you don't even for certain individuals don't even have visibility of what they don't know about. So, they don't even know what questions to ask. They don't even know what it is that they don't have access to. So, I think that's a really, really critical part of it.

And, you know, we know that social mobility is fundamentally about ensuring that a person’s occupation and income are not tied out to where they started in life. So, again, coming back to that, that equity piece, you know, it's more than that and it's about how do we create that fairness across society and ensure that people of all backgrounds get those equal opportunities in early years at school, education, but also at work, whatever they choose, that to be. So, I think that's really important. And with that in mind, I'd love to hear a little bit around why you think social mobility is important? And we hear in this coming through from you, from your own personal story and actually from some of the examples that you've given around what you see social mobility being. But, well, why do you think it's important? So, if anybody's listening and thinking, well, why should I have this on my agenda?

Gardner

Well, I already touched on, I think the importance or the imperative from a business perspective and and the need for the skills that we have in the market and or to respond to the market that we're in. But the reality is that any business who looks at their customer base, who looks at the employees that they could have access to, who looks at the stakeholders they have to interact with, will have people that come from different backgrounds.

And if you don't have individuals within your organisation that understand that and understand those people, then you're going to get to a position of suboptimal outcomes, decisions in how you interact with customers, suppliers, whoever it may be. And I think that's, you know, again, another part of the business case for why something like this is important. But I think also in terms of creating the right level of aspiration in young people and giving them a sense of hope that they have the opportunity to do something different.

Now, it's easy for me to look at this now in the rear-view mirror, if you like, and look back at my career and view it through in many ways a different lens. But if I think about, you know, 30-35 years ago when I started working, I had a very different view of what I'd be doing, how I might operate. And I would never have even dreamt of becoming a partner within an organisation like EY. And that's back to that point of, you know, where my aspiration would have been set and certainly the environment in which I was operating. But by my second year in my career, I was already earning more money than both of my parent’s combined income was.

So, if you just think about how that changes and you mentioned earlier about the intergenerational aspect, you know, and what's amazing now, as I look back with my own kids is how their expectations, how their opportunities are so much different as a consequence of that. And why is it that I and others have that opportunity.

And that's not an opportunity that is not open to all. And I think that's really important that the others get that that chance, that opportunity, and we do whatever we can to remove the barriers to enable them to do that.

Conway

Thank you. And I think, you know, the point that you make around when you become upwardly mobile and it's one of the things that I'm particularly interested in and conversations that I've been having with people, you know, particularly when you start to talk about this, people start to share their own experiences, whereas previously they probably haven't because they haven't seen a platform for this. And one of the things that's come out in my conversations with people is around this guilt that you can feel as you transition and you almost straddle between two lives. So, you know, you've got this person who grew up, like you said, went to a comprehensive school, had this background, you know, working class family. And then as you progressed, you kind of don't really fit there anymore.

You don't really fully fit in terms of polish and fit in terms of this world. And you're almost kind of always in between. And I think unless you being in that place is quite difficult to describe. But anytime I've spoken to people about it, it's like they're like, oh yes, I get that. Do you have any experience and that does that resonate with you?

Gardner

Yeah, I think absolutely. I mean, when I started work, you know, in 1990, you know, I joined a professional services firm very similar to what I would call out who that was. But there were very few black people in the firm at that time. Most of the people, at least it felt this way, that I interacted with came from a private school background, went to some of the best universities in the country.

And if I look to the people who I worked for, you know, none of them looked, acted, had a similar background to myself in any way, shape or form. And so, you know, when you are in an environment like that based on where you've come from, because you go to school or you go to university, you kind of find people and relate to people that are similar to you.

You have no choice then to operate then within a very different environment. And to your point, I mean, it wasn't just when I started. It's in many ways being quite a theme of my professional career that I've been living the two lives notion that you talked about that you are always super conscious of you not being like the group. If you like that you're joining and therefore that you need to find ways to mask maybe what are some of your underlying characteristics and be more like that group even though you're not like that. And that's very difficult and it's very difficult obviously the younger you are because you know, it's always hard to in many ways balance and juggle those things in that way.

But it continues and it continues as you kind of progress and make progress in organisations like this, because effectively, as you get more senior, you still are interacting with the same group of people because they haven't really changed in that sense. So, you know, that is something that was certainly an issue for me when I started work. And to be honest, if I look back at the thing that or the single most important change in my life again, even though I didn't realise this at the time and it's only looking in the rear-view mirror, but I can see this is after working for about three and a half years in the UK. At the start of my career, I did a secondment to Jamaica for two years. And what that meant and did on a number of levels was that all of those barriers, all of that kind of trying to be like another group, a little bit went away. And now I'm in an environment which is completely different. And there are two aspects to that. One is that you don't have to be like a group that you struggle to understand what they're like, but also it stops giving you an excuse for yourself to say, well, the only reason I don't progress is because they don't like me for this reason, that reason, any other reason.

So, you no longer have that as an excuse. It's also that makes you more focused on your own performance and what you're doing and how you're making a difference. And ultimately, that period of time gave me huge amounts of confidence, which when I then returned to the UK to work a couple of years later, I never really lost. I didn't, I recognised the importance of that feeling of knowing actual confidence, and especially in a profession like ours is so important in terms of your day to day working life. And therefore, being able to show that in the work environment just made it much easier for me to operate thereafter. So just a small example of how something like that and as I say, I didn't realise it at the time, can make such a massive difference in terms of the career.

The slight concern I have about that, of course is not everybody has the opportunity to go on a secondment like that and to change their circumstances like that. So how do we find ways to make it easier for people to have in many ways that kind of transformation or transformative experience around their own confidence levels here in the UK in what they're doing in some of the organisations and in our organisation as well in particular.

Conway

Thank you, that is a really good example. I think that the mask in the kind of having to have that kind of extra baggage almost you know, it stops you from being as it is feared if you wanted to be and to have that space to actually just be freed up and that can be exhausting at times.

I think talking about it, I think having conversations like this, I think people listening will be surprised that somebody like you have had that experience. And I think it's really important that we have those conversations not just for people that identify as coming from a lower socio-economic background, but actually for everybody else, because this is a conversation that needs to happen with everybody because it's never about fixing underrepresented groups. It's about how do we make sure that we all understand, and we create a place where we can all, all be successful.

So, thank you for sharing. That's a really good example. Just to bring it to a little bit now into, you know, we've talked a lot around kind of what it is and your personal experience. So, you know, you've clearly got that motivation and investment. What can organisations do? So, people will be listening, thinking, okay, I really want to do something now, what would you recommend and how can organisations improve social mobility?

Gardner

Well, I mean, this is you know, I could speak for a long time on this. But if you keep it very brief and talk about two areas, so pipeline, if you like. So, who are they attracting into their organisation? What are they looking to do in terms of bringing talent in? And how do they think about the types of places that they recruit individuals? Be they graduate and or experienced hires, whatever they look like.

And I think it's been great that we, from an EY perspective, have started to say, and in our profession generally, are starting to take people directly from school rather than the production line through university. I think that's been a tremendous difference and I'd encourage more organisations to do the like. We over index, I think, in this country on the importance of further education as a means to demonstrating your talent within the workplace and the environment, which I'm not sure that correlation is as direct and as strong as people think.

Then obviously doing more around internship and apprenticeship programmes to make sure they're more inclusive in terms of the people that are coming in, reaching out to schools to make sure that you're sponsoring the talent and giving. I talked earlier about that expectation but helping super talented kids who may be from a particular background, lift their ambition, lift their aspiration to see that they can and will be able to do it differently with just a little bit of help and encouragement. So, I think all of those things are important in terms of who you in who you attract.

But I think we all know as well when you have challenges, once you've attracted them as to how do you keep them engaged and on board within the organisation, so there’s a lot around performance management bias. Looking at how in our profession, deploying people onto the engagements and making sure that's fair and equitable. Looking at skills development and making sure people have got the opportunities to expand their skill base.

And ultimately then it's kind of helping people to those, that may be some of the naysayers around topics like this, also to see how their behaviours can impact others and cause some issues within the system. So, I think you know we've done a lot of great work around Smart Futures and other programmes that start to do some of these things and start to help, you know, be those students and those school kids and others outside of our organisation, to be onboarded within an environment like ours, which I think gives them the confidence to do that. And I got some great stories out there where that's worked.

I think we need to do more of those types of programmes but do not underestimate that when people are within an environment like ours, there's still an awful lot of work to do anyway.

Conway

Thank you. That leads me onto my next area that I want to talk to you about, because it is about culture change. So, it isn't about, you know, onboarding this fantastic talent and then expecting people to assimilate. So, we know that culture change, there is no silver bullet, you know, it's long term and the research tells us that the closest thing to a silver bullet is the change being leader led. So, if you could just give like one or two examples of you know, individual leaders listening today, leaders at all levels, what can they do? What would you recommend in terms of their impact?

Gardner

Well, I think first and foremost is awareness and being aware of difference and embracing what that means. And so, as you know, we've got and I talked earlier about this, the Global Social Equity Task Force, and we've got a programme within that at the moment, which is uplifting social equity, which is actually just having a bunch of people with different diverse backgrounds talking to their experiences in the workplace.

And what that's really trying to do is encourage other people who've got similar backgrounds to tell their stories, but also to educate those that do not have those backgrounds, that history, so that they understand how those people are acting, operating, how they process some of the things that they experience in the work environment. To make it a, more of a conversation that people are more comfortable to have, but also hopefully to change that environment so that people operate in a different way going forward.

So, I think having those conversations and whatever mechanism that you can do to encourage people to have those, I think that's really important. The other I think that makes a huge difference is mentoring and sponsorship.

So, reaching outside of your social circle to sponsor people who are not like you, who are the most likely to benefit, if you like, in terms of making a difference from the level of sponsorship or mentoring that you could give them, I think is probably the single most important thing any individual can do in terms of helping others on their journey.

And that doesn't have to be people that are close to them in age or rank. It could be even talking to some of the most junior people in any organisation to help them with those early stages of their journey and get them help them figure out, if you like, the roadmap of what's important. Because as you know, when you start in organisations like ours, you actually don't know that. And unless somebody lays that out to you, it can take a while to figure it out as well.

Conway

Thank you. So, so important. We know we talk about, you know, all of the processes and the policies that we have. But actually, it's all of those, you know, the shadow processes, the unwritten rules that you just, if you don't know about it, then you know, so that mentoring and sponsorship is a really key part of that.

Thank you for sharing those practical takeaways for our listeners. We know that they find them really, really helpful. So, I wanted to just take us back a little bit now to your personal experience to close, because we talked a lot about social mobility and belonging and, you know, really look at it from an organisational and a personal perspective. And in this podcast series, we ask all of our guests to finish the sentence I belong when.

So, I'll get us started by saying I belong when I feel valued and respected. Over to you out.

Gardner

So, I belong when the person that you engage with at work is the person that my family and friends see.

Conway

That's great. Thank you. Thanks so much for your time. It's been great hearing from you. Really, really enjoyed it. Our Strong When We Belong podcast series is available on ey.com and on Spotify.

Thank you so much for listening.

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