Winner Gold Award: ED&I Team BBVS, Old Oak Common Station, HS2
The equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) team for BBVS joint venture – Balfour Beatty, Vinci and Systra – at HS2’s Old Oak Common Station aims to go beyond legal and contractual requirements to demonstrate industry-leading practice and achievements.
The EDI programme, which began in 2020 with the project, aims to take best practice from each of the BBVS parent companies, test whether it works at Old Oak Common and then share successful measures with the HS2 Integrated Project Team (IPT) and supply chain partners.
For instance, its mental health programme drew inspiration from BEP Sellafield and saw more mental health first aiders recruited to reflect the diversity of the project’s workforce.
Other finalists
BakerHicks Belonging BakerHicks
Dobuild Team Dobuild
Women at GRAHAM GRAHAM Construction
Kier Wales Social Value Team Kier Construction
Women in RED & IDEA Initiative RED Engineering Design
The team has trained around 130 senior managers from BBVS, IPT and the supply chain in inclusive leadership, with training repeated every six to nine months.
It developed a RESPECT training programme aimed at training site supervisors and managers in how to engage their teams in conversations about inappropriate or unacceptable behaviours.
BBVS EDI team leader Alpa Kapasi led a workshop for over 40 tier 2 and 3 suppliers, which aimed to address the challenges in delivering and accrediting an EDI programme.
Having identified where there was under-representation, the team piloted a returner programme, in partnership with STEM Returners, aiming to bring more diversity to senior management levels. It also built a skills, employment and education strategy to open talent pathways into careers in construction to a wider variety of young people, creating a local intelligence plan to target activities and an online game to highlight careers in construction, as well as subsidising an online maths system to help identify local talent.
The Clear Company has been auditing BBVS’s progress in EDI since 2020. It moved quickly through the levels of maturity: Bronze, Silver and then Gold by 2022, demonstrating the maturity of its EDI programme.
This category was sponsored by Elecosoft
