Matt Richardson, Social Value Lead, The Growth Company
Tell us about The Growth Company and your role as Social Value Lead.
The Growth Company is a social enterprise. Established 28 years ago, with over 1600 members of staff, we provide the majority of our services in Greater Manchester and further out across the north of England. The primary areas we cover are business support, employment education, skills, and employment support services. We aim to drive economic impact within the regions where we work.
I took on the role of Social Value Lead in March 2021. I have an internal focus to ensure we practise what we preach as a responsible business and externally support organisations on how to understand and generate social value.
I manage a team of business advisors who provide support specifically around social value and the themes that fall under it for SMEs within Greater Manchester. We align our social value commitments to specific contract needs and lean on our organisational values.
How did you come to work in social value?
I entered the business five years ago as a Leadership and Workforce Development Advisor. Before that, I started as a sports coach working in schools, colleges, prisons, and the community, et cetera, which opened my eyes to inequality, social mobility, and the inefficient use of resources. From there, I joined a national drug and alcohol charity, running social prescribing programs, increasing community integration, and reducing the impact on the NHS as a vehicle to provide brief intervention advice.
What are your social value commitments, and why did you choose them?
Our work revolves more around business support, education, skills, and jobs. So, we can build many commitments off those themes, and our values as an organisation are the backdrop to that. We emphasise quality employment - how The Growth Company recruits, retains and develops people and how the businesses we support do the same. Alongside our support to people, we are also conscious of how our activity can impact the environment and communities, including how we support local people and places. Due to the nature of our work of external business support, we need to practice what we preach. One challenge that can often occur within businesses is that they put a lot of time and resources into the recruitment phase, but this is not continued when looking to retain and develop those same staff. So, we do a lot of work with businesses around due diligence, ensuring that from a commitment side, such as paying the Real Living Wage.
Photo By: Desola Lanre-Ologun on Unsplash
We have initiatives with the Greater Manchester Good Employment Charter. Most areas will have some form of business good employment pledge. The Greater Manchester Good Employment Charter has a lot of weight because the mayor backs it. It is starting to be introduced in procurement activity by Greater Manchester Local Authorities. It stipulates several commitments around good employment practices, such as health and wellbeing, engagement and voice, flexible work, paying a living wage, et cetera.
We are a Real Living Wage accredited employer. We have commitments to the environment and to health and wellbeing support for staff. We have an employee assistance program. We have an equality and diversity inclusion steering group, which has grown legs over the last two years, as it should do. And we have eight sub-networks that have come off the back of that. We have activity every month because we want to move away from doing something one day and then not talking about it for another 11 months. This is extremely easy to fall into as an organisation.
How does a business get involved with your work or request support?
The Growth Company is an umbrella organisation, and then we have various businesses that sit under that. One such business is The Business Growth Hub, which works with around 40,000 companies a year, predominately SMEs. Funded through the European Regional Development Fund and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, we support the ten local authorities within Greater Manchester and are the vehicle to provide that business support.
We will get referrals from the local authorities directly from our website, social media training providers that we work with, and partners.
We offer support across investment to scale, leadership and management, and access to finance, innovation and digital tech, Net zero and sustainability support, the list goes on.
“I would ask a business to think outside the role. So, this person might be applying for a particular position, but how can that person benefit the company? So, seeing it as a skill and experience acquisition, rather than this person will do this job alone. We all know nobody does just the job in their job description.”
You have impressive stats around upskilling and getting people back into work. Can you tell me how you collaborate with the local community?
We are proud of the stats, but as I keep referring to it, quality is vital, and I think a lot of it does come through partnerships. So, whether that is the DWP, Job Centre Plus, or an existing partner, we conduct ongoing checks around the quality of employment. So really drilling down into pre-employment support, understanding what they feel their skill gaps are. Then, from an employment standpoint, once we place people into work, we have that ongoing support for six to twelve months to ensure that the transition is as smooth as possible.
We are working with both the employee and the business itself. One area we have done much more work on, particularly over the last 18 months, is engaging with marginalised communities. And understanding what the barriers are and how we can make it easier for individuals and businesses to access our services.
We need businesses that can place people into roles quickly and efficiently, and in the right way. Because, again, the kind of people we are talking about here is potentially long-term unemployed. Having said that, we have also done a lot of work with people being made redundant due to the pandemic and the labour market crash.
A big part of your work is around diversity and inclusion. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
As I mentioned, we have an internal equality diverse inclusion steering group. We have eight sub-networks, including LGBTQ+, race, religion, health, and wellbeing, which includes neurodiversity disability. We have women, parents, carers, and veterans.
Pieces of work we have done are the ‘Dignity at Work’ policy and implementing a discrimination tracker. In addition, we work a lot with the LGBT Foundation and Black United Representation Network (BURN), a Greater Manchester-based organisation. We are also trying to flip all our learnings externally because there’s excellent support that we can then share with businesses.
Businesses often say, ‘I’m struggling to engage with diverse communities around job roles.’ However, most companies have only touched the surface. Most businesses are guilty of things like the imagery they use, terminology, and acronyms. For example, the terminology is potentially perceived as being for younger people rather than older staff members, which is just from an age standpoint. It is vital that businesses embed these practices into their business and do not just see it as an add-on. We want companies to make those considerations in everything they do. So, for example, suppliers they engage with, did they collect any information on the suppliers? How diverse is their supply chain? If they are not, what could that look like? Who can they engage with if it shows that it is not as inclusive as it could be? We can help facilitate those conversations.
I feel like a lot of businesses front-load the recruitment process. However, these people will not stick around if your business is not an inclusive workplace. They think this looks great and then believe this is not what I thought it would be within a couple of weeks.
By 2030, half of all adults in the UK will be over fifty, so how can businesses become more age inclusive and what are the benefits?
In job descriptions, the terminology you use, the imagery you use on your website, acronyms, and wording in general. So, it could be things like ‘innovative.’ Innovative is often perceived as young people or somebody with fresh ideas. Innovation is used all the time, particularly around public sector contracts.
Intergenerational working. So, does your organisation have some form of internal mentoring service? If it is informal, great. Is there reverse mentoring as well? So, it is not necessarily people who have been in an organisation for longer or older staff members. It benefits both. That also promotes inclusivity in its broadest form.
The sharing of ideas. Of different perspectives and different ages. So how can you embed that within your organisation? That does not need to be an all bells and whistles dating-like profile where it is like, right, I am a mentor, and I am a mentee.
Flexible working. Encouraging career development, apprenticeships, and broader training in growing sectors around the green skills agenda and digital training. Do you have an employee assistance program? What is the quality of that? What can staff access? Are you talking about health and wellbeing with your staff in your one on ones?
Do you have the confidence to be able to speak about diverse topics around age? So, whether it is menopause, retirement, or care responsibilities, which might affect older staff members. You do not need to feel like you have all the answers, but at least have those resources available.
What is one of the challenges faced by an ageing workforce?
Being overqualified for the role for which they are applying. We had a perfect example when a staff member talked about where they had worked in recruitment for many years. They knew the industry very well but left the organisation due to redundancy. But then could not get back into the labour market. So, when they were going for interviews, they noticed that the panels they were meeting with did not necessarily reflect the organisation or him as an individual. So that goes back to interviewing. I think having diverse representation within interviewing panels is also important.
So, what are the barriers to employment, and how can businesses implement an inclusive work policy?
Visible progression roots within organisations. So, if they are not there, that needs to be addressed potentially. For example, if you have a predominantly white organisation, how are you looking at engaging with diverse communities to help you understand any barriers? Because there are barriers there, whether they acknowledge them or not. You will not engage with the audience you want to if you cannot demonstrate collaborative working and diversity in its broadest form.
We often see businesses share workforce demographics; they will often give us the overall staff demographic. So, for example, ethnicity will often provide broader stats. But then the next question is, how many ethnic minorities take senior management and middle management team leader roles? That comes down to not seeing that route in front of them. Whether they are doing anything with that information is another question. But there are things that organisations can do to see what those trends are. So, one of the areas that we look at with Burn is when we are promoting staff. However, we focus on team leader and senior management roles, particularly with that network, which comprises black professionals and business owners. So, again, that is only a tiny tweak to make around the communication that most businesses could adopt.
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