At balancetogether, we work with you to form your leadership vision as you work towards a gender-balanced workplace. It's important that all leaders are engaged with the journey and can share their stories authentically to inspire others within your organisation. 

A good place to start is uncovering your leaders' styles and raising self-awareness through coaching. 

You want the best people, in the right roles performing to their best, to fulfil their career ambitions and the needs of your organisation. Talent mapping finds those right people, internally and externally and develops them into the right roles by creating career pathways to meet their professional development and deliver for the organisation.

The fact is that women get promoted less frequently than men, which results in more women filling more junior roles and men representing more of the senior roles, causing an imbalance at all levels! At balancetogether we challenge our clients to implement dynamic talent mapping approaches that change mindsets and utilise the very best talent for now and as your business changes.

We often find these two terms used interchangeably and they are in fact very different! Ideally have both in your organisation.

Mentors give advice from a position of experience. They act as a sounding board and help build knowledge and confidence and provide challenge too.

Sponsors create opportunities for individuals to shine and grow by advocating on their behalf. They are in a senior position and stick their neck on the line to get the right opportunities for the person they are sponsoring. Be absolutely clear they do this for a reason and although they might think the person is good, their real motivation is that it will make them look good too. How many times have you experienced or seen managers bringing in ‘their own people’? They do it because it works and it is a critical ingredient for creating gender-balance in organisations.

Flexible, often also referred to as agile or dynamic, can create real opportunities in and out of work, which significantly add experience and skills. UK Charity Timewise reported that 87% of workforces want to work flexibly, which makes this part relatively easy to implement as there is far less resistance. One of our clients’ employee ‘feel good scores’ rose exponentially as a result of embracing flexible working, as well as seeing a decrease in absenteeism and attrition.

The COVID pandemic saw most organisations needing to enable their staff to work from home, which helped to dispel some of the concerns about how it would impact productivity. Now, leaders need to be more creative because it’s the right thing to do for their business, and start to design jobs to fit people, measure outputs not face time, trust their employees, add flexible working as a benefit in recruitment advertising and perhaps most importantly to train and develop managers to manage, communicate and develop a flexible team.

It all starts with how you recruit. Many organisations are recognising that their adverts contain innate gender bias, which can put off candidates from applying. Accenture, for instance saw a significant increase in female applicants when they addressed the issue and some software companies have reported as much as an 80% increase in women hires in technical roles.

And it’s not just the adverts, unconscious bias works all the way through the recruitment process for new hires and promotions too. A male manager was shocked when a female candidate gave him feedback that what he was looking for as ‘confidence behaviours’ are not the same for men and women and female confidence behaviours are just as effective.

What gets measured, gets done! Might make you yawn, but it’s true. If you have ever tried to implement a ‘good idea’, even if everyone loved it at the start, you will know that without the right intelligence, a compelling business case and support from the top, you won’t achieve the dizzy heights you deserve.

Our first step is to do the research, which includes the quantitative data and the more compelling qualitative information, because this gets to the likely causes that underpin your numbers. Even the very best cultures uncover information to show how different genders experience the workplace.

Balancetogether support our clients to gain this invaluable, and often surprising, intelligence and put it to good use to improve their performance in many of their business metrics. We will also support you to identify metrics that you can track as you start to work through projects and tasks aimed at improving gender-balance.