Some trips take longer than others. For Vimcar, our Diversity & Inclusion strategy is one of those trips. We recognise that we still have a long way to go when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion. This trip will take time, but our goal is to foster a growing sense of belonging for everyone at Vimcar.
On this page, you will find relevant information regarding our status quo, as well as our upcoming initiatives.
Our journey so far
In 2021, we set out to create a more concrete and visible plan of action when it came to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Vimcar. We created a 2021 playbook to ensure internal alignment across our business, and to enable us to slowly embed DEI into the fabric of our company culture.
Some of our key milestones in 2021 were:
- Collecting data on employee experiences and perceptions of our DEI status quo using our anonymous feedback tool
- Delivering conscious inclusion trainings to our executive team and people managers
- Creating educational spaces for our employees to gain more knowledge about different DEI topics
- Analysing our compensation data to uncover and target any gaps or inequalities in our salary distribution
- Building an employee-driven Code of Conduct to create a sense of shared expectations for how we work and treat each other, and what we will not tolerate
Where we are going next
Visibility
Over the course of 2022, we want to stimulate more awareness and visibility around the DEI work. At the moment, most of this work is done in the background, and shared periodically in our company-wide All Hands meetings. In the future, we hope to create more spaces and groups (such as employee driven resources groups, Slack channels, company newsletter) where our employees are encouraged to both share, and stay up to date on the efforts we are making at Vimcar to create a growing sense of belonging.
Employee Participation
The internal engagement towards DEI has consistently increased over the past 12 months. We are thrilled to see this, and want to continue building on this energy by creating more opportunities for our colleagues to get involved and contribute. Our goal this year is to create more voluntary formats for our employees to connect, share ideas, and work together to drive impactful DEI initiatives at Vimcar.
Recruitment
Introducing diversity metrics is often the first impulse for recruitment, but we believe there is important work to be done first. This year, we will deliver inclusive hiring workshops to all of our hiring managers and interviewers, and also redesign our interview processes to include more diverse interviewer panels. We will continue exploring different methods to build and ingrain a mindset towards inclusive hiring, so we have the best foundation for attracting and hiring diverse talent.
Intercultural Communication
At Vimcar, we are currently uniting 34 different nationalities who are working together on a daily basis. This diverse setup allows us to accomplish even greater milestones in the future but also involves the danger that communication gets lost between cultures. With this in mind, we will start with offering a training to our people managers on inclusive leadership principles, and best practices for intercultural communication so they have the necessary skills to support teams from diverse cultures and backgrounds. We will embed intercultural communication into our company wide learning formats, to make sure we are all pushing in the same direction.
