Not a box-ticking exercise

Not a box-ticking exercise

By Alex Robinson, 19th March 2025

Rolling back on DEI? Then it was never there.

Goldman Sachs recently axed a policy that barred it from supporting companies with all male, all white boards to float on the stock market, saying it had “served its purpose”. Yes, you read that right. And if you’ve been paying attention to global news, you’ll know we’re seeing rollbacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) elsewhere too – with Walmart and Meta being among the latest to scrap their initiatives.

But if your DEI work can be scrapped that easily, was it ever really embedded?

A growing number of the businesses we work with are turning their sustainability strategy on its head by centring it around their people. They're encouraging sustainable behaviours like cycling to work, defaulting to plant-based catering, or adopting reuse in production. Then, they're using the insights from these behaviour change trials to shape their sustainability strategy.

That’s exactly what we did with Pets at Home. In 2022, we worked with them on The Big Listen, an active listening research project involving over 17,000 colleagues. By crowdsourcing ideas and feedback, we uncovered a wealth of solutions that could be scaled across the company.

If the people most impacted by environmental issues aren't at the table, we're missing crucial perspectives.

Being ‘for everyone’ means being something different, for every ‘one’.

At Hubbub, we believe in being for everyone. But we know that ‘for everyone’ doesn’t mean treating everyone the same; it means recognising that different groups have different needs.

We’re committed to creating spaces where everyone feels they belong. While we’ve still got strides to take, we’ve made progress in areas like flexible working, increased maternity pay, creating a shared understanding of neurodiversity and reducing the stigma of talking about mental health. And we’ve improved transparency, by taking part in the Race Report.

The Race Report

Only 4.5% of people working in environmental or conservation jobs in the UK identify as non-white, compared to 16% of the overall population. That's a massive gap. And it’s one The Race Report has set out to tackle – they’re driving transparency across the sector to create the impetus to go further and faster on diversity and inclusion.

If you check out Hubbub’s Race Report transparency card, you’ll see that while we’ve made progress, we’re not yet representative. We still have plenty of work to do to build an organisation that truly reflects the diversity of people in the UK. Things like rethinking our comms, so that the content we produce is truly for all the communities we work with, rather than about them. Or working with inclusion consultants Spark Insights to deepen our understanding of racial inequities and challenge our leadership to build a more inclusive team and board.

It's easy to pay lip service to DEI. It's harder to do the work. But if we're serious about tackling the environmental crisis, we have no choice. I’d love to hear about what you’re doing in your organisation, or your feedback on where we can do better.