New accreditation demonstrates our commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion

Mott MacDonald achieves Clear Assured Gold accreditation

Gaining a new level of Clear Assured status is a significant success, according to Anna Sirmoglou, equality, diversity and inclusion manager for UK & Europe at Mott MacDonald.

Priority placed on commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) at Mott MacDonald was officially recognised at the end of last year with achievement of Clear Assured Gold accreditation. The new award from the globally recognised assessment body for benchmarking and accrediting organisational progress on EDI came just 12 months after we attained the Silver standard, showing the pace at which we are delivering change too.

The milestone is particularly significant as it reflects the consistent progress we have made in an industry that has historically faced challenges with diversity. In making the award, Gold Assured said: “Mott MacDonald is dedicated to integrating EDI into its business practices, implementing comprehensive policies and procedures that support long-term cultural change.”

The accreditation acknowledges our proactive, data-driven and measurable approach to EDI, as well as recognising some of the new initiatives we put in place in 2024 and others we developed further during the year. While getting the accreditation is important, taking time to reflect on the work our business has put in over the last 12 months and the impact that has had for our staff is important, as well as look ahead to what we plan to do in the next year too.

Stand out moments

There are many initiatives that I could draw on to showcase the work we have delivered over the last 12 months, but these are three that stood out for me:

• Mandatory training and specialist resources: In 2024, we launched a nine-month inclusive behaviours campaign featuring resources such as Addressing Microaggressions, an Inclusive Etiquette Guide, case studies with colleague and leadership participation and new e-learning modules. The campaign generated a lot of conversations and internal engagement that helped highlight the importance of speaking up and being active allies
• Inclusive leadership development: Following feedback, we expanded the scope of our reciprocal mentoring scheme last year to include further cohorts, including women, parents and carers. During the year, we also delivered inclusive leadership training to our regional senior management board
• Employee networks and support: Our EDI networks, which cover can we name the five here, worked to collaborate more closely with the EDI champions in our transport, buildings, advisory, energy and water and environment businesses last year. This brought even closer alignment with our wider regional EDI strategy which helped ensure key messages were better embedded within the business.

Inclusive hiring

A cornerstone of our EDI strategy is inclusive hiring and in 2024 we worked with a range of internal stakeholders to fully audit our recruitment approach. As a result, we developed a new framework to ensure consistent, inclusive, best practice hiring across the business. The process included capacity building in our talent acquisition team, developing in-depth training for hiring managers and creating shortlisting and assessment tools that will help enhance fairness.

This initiative built on work to redesign job descriptions, implement inclusion decoders and remove barriers such as the requirement for a 2:1 degree in most graduate roles. By actively engaging with non-Russell Group universities and targeting underrepresented groups, we’ve broadened access to opportunities in our sector.

The partnerships we have built externally, including those with organisations such as 10,000 Black Interns, the Association for Black and Minority Ethnic Engineers and Breakthrough, have also helped to amplify this effort. Last year also saw our Armed Forces Pathway programme develop further to better support members of the military community in their transition to civilian life and employment and this will evolve further in 2025.

EDI in everyday practice

As a business, we believe that EDI is everyone’s responsibility and should not just be the fall to an EDI team – individual accountability is really important to lasting change. What we are especially proud of is how many colleagues, not just those in an EDI network or EDI champion role, are actively engaged with the agenda and show genuine interest in day-to-day inclusion. EDI moments and dilemmas are used in team meetings as conversation starters and help generate thought provoking conversations, while EDI performance goals, though optional, saw an encouraging uptake of 23% in 2024.

Future vision

While we are proud to have gone from Silver to Gold in a year, we have plans to build on this success and further develop our EDI offer in 2025. Our ambitions for the year ahead currently include:

• Launching our revised experienced hires inclusive recruitment processes to improve consistency and fairness
• Reviewing and refining the early careers recruitment process and create a programme of learning and training for the early careers talent acquisition team
• Launching sexual harassment mandatory e-learning for colleagues and managers
• Delivering a targeted ethnicity talent development programme
• Continuing to expand our library of EDI dilemmas and moments to be used as conversation starters and developing a suite of resources for colleagues and managers on a range of related topics
• Cascading inclusive leadership upskilling to a wider range of senior colleagues.

I’m proud that as a business we have achieved the milestone of Clear Assured Gold but it is just one chapter of our ongoing commitment to EDI which is vital to playing our part in championing change not just in our business but across the industry.