You are currently reading Issue 90: Womanthology Thought Leaders, November 2017
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Connecting women and opportunity

Womanthology is a digital magazine and professional community powered by female energy and ingenuity.

Connecting women and opportunity

Womanthology is a digital magazine and professional community powered by female energy and ingenuity.

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How will you make your organisation more diverse and inclusive today? – Caroline Moore, People Director for Sage in the UK and Ireland

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Caroline Moore is People Director for Sage in the UK and Ireland – the UK’s largest listed tech company and the market leader for integrated accounting, payroll and payment systems. Caroline has worked in a variety of HR roles throughout her 19-year career and she is a passionate advocate of diversity and inclusion across the business at Sage.

Caroline Moore - Sage
Caroline Moore

Caroline chaired the panel session at our Diversity Thought Leaders’ event at Warwick Business School in The Shard on 20th November 2017. Panellists were:

Kevin Poulter, Employment Law Partner at Child & Child

Ruby Steel, Senior Design Strategist at Smart Design

Professor Jan Godsell, Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Strategy at WMG

Mark Lomas, Head of Equality, Diversity & Inclusion – ‎High Speed Two (HS2) Ltd

My role at Sage

I am the People Director for Sage UK and Ireland. So, I am responsible for the attraction, development and engagement of almost 3,000 people across my region. In addition, I play a lead role within the Global HR team on Global Diversity and Inclusion along with a number of other senior colleagues across Sage plc. Our vision around diversity and inclusion is:

“Sage embraces diversity in all forms. We want to reflect the diversity of our colleagues, customers and partners – which will accelerate growth and innovation. We will create a truly inclusive environment where everyone contributes to our vision, whilst being their true selves.”

Chairing the panel session at the inaugural Womanthology Diversity Thought Leaders’ event

We talked how we can accelerate the change, how changes in the law can help with this, linked to things like the gender pay gap but with more consequences for non-compliance.

We also talked about role models, strong leaders who lead by example, are brave and not afraid to speak out when they see behaviours that don’t fit with true diversity and inclusion.

Later in the conversation, we talked about the need for responsible business to demand more from their suppliers too – if change is going to happen we need to hold each other to account and be clear that diversity is a key requirement, not a side line!

Event highlights

I loved hearing the speakers at the event. Fatima [Benkhaled], an Amazon Women in Innovation Bursary recipient, was the most memorable for me as she was so authentic and passionate. She has an amazing story. I also loved Mark [Lomas]. He was so knowledgeable and spoke so clearly about the change that we need to make.

Ideas I took away from the event

Caroline-Moore - Sage
© Liz Drake Photography

I liked the idea that grit and determination move you on, propel you! I believe in this myself and firmly believe there is always a way to succeed if you want something badly enough.

On the back of Mark’s points around unconscious bias I am also seriously considering a system that could support us with anonymous, strength-based assessment.

I really noticed the passion in the room, and also the fact that some changes are simple and easy to make – we can all start doing that today. Be brave, be bold, be a role model, be a mentor!

Coming up for me and Sage

We’ve got some super exciting plans for the next 12-24 months. We’ve just appointed an Executive Sponsor for Diversity and Inclusion in Sage Group Plc to help us continue to make traction globally, we will be expanding and growing our global women’s mentoring programme to invite more women to benefit from this, we will also be kicking off mentoring for other minority groups.

Early in 2018, we will be partnering with Gartner to roll out full day workshops on unconscious bias training for our senior leaders and middle managers across three key regions – UKI, North America and South Africa.

In addition, we have targets to increase our gender balance in senior leadership and technical roles to 35% women. (Sage’s gender balance globally is 48% female, but this is lower in senior and technical roles). We will also be bringing in a 50/50 group of apprentices this year and a specific group of female-only graduates to help us start to quickly address some of our gender imbalances.

We have already rolled out Mental Health First aiders in the UK and Ireland and we will be expanding this to other regions over the next 12 months.

There is a lot going on but lots more to do!

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http://www.sage.co.uk/

https://twitter.com/sageuk/

https://twitter.com/mouldcaroline

https://www.facebook.com/SageUK/

Diversity Thought Leaders issue

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