Grace Eyre is committed to promoting a supportive and inclusive working environment that provides opportunity for staff to have voice and have influence to progress positive working practices inclusive to all staff groups.
Through working together to address common cultural challenges staff forums will ensure that a diverse range of perspectives are embraced that also inform and influence our development of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) strategic aims.
Staff forums are a series of regular meetings with groups of individuals that could represent a protected characteristic or have a common identity or purpose.
Coming Together
The forums provide a unified and confidential space where ideas can be shared, experiences discussed, and peer support available for each other. They are an opportunity for colleagues to discuss areas and issues that may be directly affecting them within the commonality of the group.
Power to Change
The forums offer the ability to identify and communicate key areas that could be improved or initiated at Grace Eyre that lead to working environments that represent and impact how they want to work.
Staff forums are a new initiative at the organisation and some set guidelines have been introduced under which they will operate.
Participants will be able to take TOIL if meetings are outside of work hours
Participants will need to inform their managers of attendance at a forum but not specify which forum they are attending. Managers will act with discretion and maintain full confidentiality.
To ensure a central contact each forum can appoint their own administrator. This person could assist in:
The administrator could be the same person for each forum or the role can be rotated for this to be a different person at every meeting. This is at the discretion and decision of each individual group.
The administrator will be given 1 hour to manage the administration of each meeting – Templates can be provided to assist any administration areas.
Further support from IT, Marketing and Human Resources for more focused areas of work can be provided as required.
For any events determined from the forum, staff can use their Grace Eyre volunteer day to assist and take part in these.
The following shows steps to be taken for people interested in joining an existing forum at Grace Eyre.
Speak to the Director of Projects & Inclusion. Enquiries should be sent to Nathaniel Lawson at nlawson@grace-eyre.org who will be able to advise on existing forums and how to get involved.
The following shows steps to be taken in setting up a new forum at Grace Eyre.
Meetings are staff-led and designed by the group, for the group where content and purpose is agreed by the group in recognition of the complete autonomy of the staff forum.
However, some suggestions from an existing forum may be useful when setting the parameters, goals and focusses of the meetings and there are several suggestions here that could assist when taking forward initial meetings.
These are only suggestions from the existing group and are for guidance only. The meeting is a confidential place which is staff-led and guided by those attending and how the meeting operates is at the preference of its members.
Members Code of Conduct
Staff forums are established to enable Grace Eyre staff to have open conversations and peer support in groups that share a commonality or characteristic. It could be that groups will participate in conversations that could be triggering or uncomfortable for some members.
To ensure there is guidance on appropriate conversation and actions we are asking members to consider the following behaviours:
Please click the buttons below to learn more about each staff forum and how to get involved.
