Welcome to the Waterstons DEI Naked Conversations Podcast.
Here at Waterstons we're on a DEI journey and we're documenting our progress and our thoughts in this podcast.
We've made it public so that others can learn from our progress and so that we can be held to account for our actions.
In this episode we talk to Alex, our Associate Director of Innovation and Leadership.
Welcome to the Waterstons DEI Naked Conversations Podcast.
Here at Waterstons we're on a DEI journey and we're documenting our progress and our thoughts in this podcast.
We've made it public so that others can learn from our progress and so that we can be held to account for our actions.
In this episode we talk to Alex, our Associate Director of Innovation and Leadership.
Michael: Hi, I’m Michael Stirrup, the CEO at Waterstons. We’re on a DEI journey, and in this podcast series we want to share with you some of the discussions and ideas we’ve been having around DEI.
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Janet: Alex, welcome.
Alex: Hello.
Janet: It’s great to have you as my guest on the DEI Naked Conversations (laughing) podcast today. How are you?
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Alex: I’m very well, thank you very much.
Janet: Good, good. So, to kick off with a couple of questions that I’ve got for you. It’d be great if you can tell the listeners just a little bit about yourself, how you got to be where you are, and also share something that we do not know about you.
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Alex: So, I’m Alex Waterston. I am the Associate Director of Innovation and Leadership at Waterstons, which means that I look after how well we do new things and how well we look after people. How did I get here? I’ve been at Waterstons for nine years. I arrived here by accident (laughing); I never intended to work at Waterstons, and I never intended to move back to Durham, but I did both of those things. Before that, I made computer games, and I made mobile apps, and I worked in digital agencies. Then I made a terrible mistake and moved to London, and couldn’t afford it, and ended up moving back up north, to move in with my parents, where they gave me some contract work (laughing). And then the Business Development Director at the time, a chap called Alistair, offered me a job, and I (to my chagrin) was desperately enjoying it, so I stayed, and I’ve been here for nine years, which is longer than I’ve been anywhere. Something that people don’t know about me is that I came very, very close to once sending a blank CD to be pressed. When I was making games in the first job that I ever made, I burned a disc that was to go off to the pressing for distribution to shops and just managed to catch before it went out of the door the fact that this disc was blank; and it would have gone to Sony and been, like a million and a half copies would have been printed of a blank disc.
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Janet: Ah, wow.
Alex: So, there you go.
Janet: Oh, quite an escape then (laughing).
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Alex: It was (laughing), it definitely was.
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Janet: So, how does your role then, how do you see your role fitting into the company strategy? Because obviously, you know there’s the three-year strategy that’s in place, and everybody’s got that, so how, where does your role fit into that?
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Alex: So, my role is about making sure that - as part of that three-year strategy, and the growth that we want to see, and where we want to be - that we are doing new, and interesting, and dangerous, and risky things. Not dangerous in the physical sense, hopefully, but things that maybe have some more inherent risk than we’re used to. So, stuff that’s a bit different, or a bit out of our comfort zone, or a lot out of our comfort zone, or maybe is working in a way that we wouldn’t usually work, or maybe doing things in a way that we wouldn’t usually do them. That’s part of my role. And then the other half is making sure that we have the leadership structure in place to make sure that we can look after all of the people that we are going to bring on board as we go through this journey of growth, and everything else. Just making sure that everybody has all the skills and are looking after people and really are treating people in what I guess we would describe as the Waterstons way.
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Janet: Yeah, yeah, ok, cool. So, what’s your definition or understanding then around DEI? I mean obviously - and that’s diversity, equity and inclusion - and what does it mean to you? Because obviously, we’ve seen and we’re hearing a lot about DEI and a lot of people now are having diversity, inclusion and belonging adding to all of that. But what’s your definition around DEI?
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Alex: That’s a really good question. So, for me, what I want Waterstons to be is an incredibly safe and inclusive environment for people to do amazing work, you know, for people to be able to do the best things that they can, basically. So, we need to have diversity of thinking in that, we need to have lots of different types of people working in the space, and we need to give them the opportunity and the support that they need to be able to do brilliant work, so that we can service our clients and we can do a much better job for them. So yeah, so it’s about giving people the same level of opportunities, and doing the right thing, and really bringing people on board, and taking them on the journey, and, you know, allowing them to do their best. That’s really what it’s about for me.
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Janet: It’s often said that diversity without inclusion won’t stick, so from an employer or a client/customer perspective, how can Waterstons foster a culture of inclusion?
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Alex: I think that’s a really excellent point actually, because a lot of my role, from a leadership perspective, is about making sure that people do feel included. And, in fact, a lot of the way that I have led people in the past, when I have had people reporting to me, is to make sure that everyone feels included and part of the process, and part of what we’re trying to do; everyone in the team has ownership of where we’re going, everyone feels as though they have the right to speak up and to talk about what’s important to them; and everyone feels as though they have all of the tools and the support necessary to be able to do their job. Alice, who used to work for me, who was instrumental in the development of our own diversity initiative at Waterstons, Alice used to use a quote which was about: diversity is about being invited to the party, and inclusion is about being asked to dance. And that really rang true with me, that’s so important. You know, we can have the greatest wealth of diverse people coming through the door and providing such incredible different insights, and their own strengths and weaknesses, and everything else, but actually if we’re not providing that safe environment for people to work in, they’re never going to stay, you know.
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Janet: Mmm, it’s so true. And I think one of the things that I’ve found coming into Waterstons, been in and worked in lots of different companies, but there was just something that when I came in, I felt this feeling of belonging. How bizarre, and like wow, I never thought I’d experience this by talking to the people, but not just by just talking, by interacting, having the conversations that everybody what f-, it made me feel as if I belonged, and I’ve only been here, what, you know, that was my day t-, my day one, and you were my first conversation on day one (laughing) and I was like wow! I went to my husband and I went: wow, I actually start to feel something; and the more I engaged in conversation, certainly the more that was something that I felt included. Do you think that Waterstons recognises just that with the people that they’ve got - and obviously, you know, from diversity you want to include and have more representation - but does Waterstons, do you think, understand that there’s something about the inclusion and making people feel belonging, that you’ve got?
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Alex: I definitely think so. I think we can definitely do better at this, absolutely, but the feeling that people get of being in a huge, great big family at Waterstons is something that’s been baked in there since the beginning, you know, it really, truly has; and making sure that we treat people as well as we possibly can, has always been at the root of how Waterstons has been, has operated. And, you know, our people fundamentally, our people are actually the only asset that we have, everything else is kind of negligible in any other terms, so we have to look after people, we have to look after people.
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Janet: Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of people, and certainly within the HR field, that everyone’s talking about, you know, placing people at the heart of what they do, and that means in every single, everything that you talk about in your company impacts on people, so.
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Alex: Yeah, exactly. You know, yeah, we’ve always been ‘people first’, forever, and that, that’s it, that’s a huge part of what we are. This is another layer on top of that, which is making sure that we’re not just treating everyone equally, but we’re also helping to lift people up.
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Janet: Definitely. So, how do you weave DEI then through innovation and leadership? And what do you see, what are the benefits then for your teams, and your clients, and your customers? Because a lot of time people talk about DEI and sometimes it ends up being a tick-box exercise, but how do you weave that through?
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Alex: So, for us, I mean for me, I get very uncomfortable about the prospect of building a business-case for diversity or inclusion. I understand some businesses, that’s necessary; at Waterstons it really isn’t, you know, we don’t want it to be necessary. But there are some side-effect benefits of us having lots of diverse people. A diversity of thinking means that we are going to have, you know, we’re going to create a lot more ideas, we’re going to be more innovative, and when we are innovative, that level of inclusion that we’ve got is going to make sure that the things that we’re creating are inclusive for other people. You hear about hand sanitisers that don’t work on any other skin than white skin tones, you know we want to avoid those problems as much as humanly possible.
Janet: (laughing) Yeah, yeah, definitely.
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Alex: And diversity truly is the only way for us to be able to do that, actually.
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Janet: Yeah. I think technology obviously plays quite a huge part in all of that as well, doesn’t it, in, and that’s your guys’ business. And te-, and we’re, certainly the groups that I move in, and what I’m reading, how important it is to use technology more to help in some of the solutions in driving DEI. What’s your view on that?
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Alex: I have mixed views on that, I guess. Technology can prov-, is a tool that we can use to make it easier for people to be included, that’s definitely true. You know, remote work allows us to do, to be much more inclusive for people, you know, we can look after people who are single parents, or we can look after working mothers, or we can look after working fathers, or whatever it is, that’s definitely it. But it’s not a means to an end, it’s the tool that allows us to do those things, it’s a tool that allows us to be more inclusive, or gain access to more sources of diversity than we usually would. It’s interesting, Waterstons has always been a consultancy-led business in the past, consultancy is notoriously difficult for people with neurodiversity, you know, we spend a lot of time talking to each other. But now, because we’re growing, and we’re doing more things, and we have more services and more offerings, but people don’t necessarily have to be client-facing, they don’t have to talk to other people all of the time, or the people that they can, or they do need to talk to, are people that they can be familiar with. So, from that perspective technology has benefitted us massively. You know, we have a lot of people who do monitoring of tools, they don’t, if actually anyone needs to really, actually talk to them from a client, it’s because something’s gone so catastrophically wrong that, you know, there’s someone else who can deal with that problem. So, it has provided us with benefits, but it’s a tool, it’s not, it’s not the mechanism by which we become more diverse.
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Janet: No, no, that’s cool. Shifting the conversation just a little bit, in terms of looking back. The 25th May 2020 - so almost two years now - the killing of George Floyd was a massive wake-up call for me, and set me on my road to Damascus experience that brought me to the conclusion that I needed to be the change that I wanted to see: a game-changer, especially when I think of my own grandchildren. During that time, what was your experience? What came up for you?
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Alex: I mean, the thing when I think about, when I think about that whole time, and the whole Black Lives Matter movement that really kind of, I guess, rose to prominence off the back of that, I actually think about my kids, actually, because as part of that we had conversations with them about what was going on in the world, and that was a trigger for us to start these difficult conversations with them. And they were 6 - no they weren’t - they were 5 and 8 at the time. And Lila, who’s 5, didn’t really understand what it was, and she couldn’t understand why people were being mean to each other, and Molly couldn’t understand that either, but she had a better grasp of what might be happening; and now we have a h-, she made a huge Black Lives Matter poster that sits in our window, that she sat and worked on, and she talked to her friend Dorothy about it, and they did things together, and it became a thing for them and they started thinking about it. And it was really important and instrumental in getting the kids, it made me realise that we needed to talk to them really early about what was happening in the world, and that they were old enough to understand it, and that talking to them early enough actually meant that they would do things as they grew up which would help with some of the inequality and inequity in the world.
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Janet: Yeah, that is absolutely fantastic, and that’s what I’ve always felt, that when this happened and I thought about: God, my grandchildren, you know, what am I going to do, and what conversations do I need to start, we need to start telling them. Because we probably underestimate them, as I know that the kids today are far more intelligent and ahead of us than certainly I was in my time, and so never underestimate that you think that they won’t understand, actually they probably do.
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Alex: Yeah, absolutely. You know, Lila, who’s 7 now, she listens to everything, she listens to all the conversations. She told me once that when she’s bored, if she’s ever bored and she’s doing something, she just sits and listens to what’s going on around her (laughing). So she was, you know she knew that something was happening, and she knew that things were changing, or that people were th-, were talking about things differently, but actually talking to her helped her to be able to understand to a degree what was going on, or at least start to listen to things in a better way.
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Janet: Yeah, I mean and it’s so important, isn’t it, for creating those spaces where people can talk, and where we encourage people to talk, because we are human, we have, we may have different views on things, but having that space where we can talk, and during that time, and certainly now, through all the work that I do, I can see the importance of just creating the space to listen and to talk to people, which is so, so important. So, in your opinion, what do you feel leadership, the role that leadership needs to play to make a difference, ensuring that Waterstons evolves or risks a shrinking candidate pool, reduced market share, and ultimately lost profitability?
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Alex: Yeah, I think all of those things are definitely possible for businesses that don’t embrace diversity. You know, things like Techtalent are in such incredibly high demand at the moment, if we can get ahead of that: if we can help people from different socio-economic backgrounds who don’t usually go into IT, to actually learn to train, to go through apprenticeships, we can look after them, or we can help them, or we can help late career-changers who are coming back from maternity-leave or want to change jobs later in life and things like that; if we can help those individuals to have a good experience of work and to train them and to, you know, to teach them how we at Waterstons work, that’s only going to have massive benefits. When we look after people, it only pays back in dividends for us, to be honest, they look after us, it’s absolutely the case; and the better we can do for people, the absolutely the better they will do for us; if we look after our people, they will look after our clients. So, we really have to make sure that we are doing the best by people. If we can broaden our talent pool out, because there are so many incredibly intelligent people out there who maybe just don’t have the skill set for this but are client-focused, or are good relationship people, or have all of these attributes that are beneficial to us, we should absolutely take advantage of that. And that runs alongside all of the policy stuff: and a lot of our clients are demanding diversity policies, and are demanding that people are doing more, absolutely rightly, as we do with our suppliers as well. So, we have to be doing more, from a really fundamental, mercenary sort of viewpoint, we actually do, we haven’t got a choice.
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Janet: Yeah, I think, certainly from the whole recruitment piece, is really important as well, as you mentioned, and certainly that there is such a demand now in the tech space as well, and I’m sure that you’ve been involved in the hiring process here at Waterstons. What things does Waterstons do well/ need to improve on when thinking about DEI?
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Alex: I mean, we have a lot that we need to improve on, I’ll be really honest. I think it’s fabulous that we’ve come a long way. I think it’s really important to understand that we’re not, you know, we’ve never been overtly bad, we just haven’t understood everything that we need to do in order to be good, that’s actually where it is. And this conversation that Alice fundamentally started, three or four years ago, when she was around, and we’ve kind of carried on, is fundamental to us becoming good and becoming better at it. There are things that we do well. We take care of our people incredibly well, our flexibility that most of us have is hugely important for people who are, you know, who need that, who are carers, or are looking after people, or whatever it is. The flexibility in the remote work that everyone at Waterstons has, the ability to work remotely is massively important to us, and we’ve done that since day dot, we’ve done that for 28-and-a-bit years, we really have, before anyone else was talking about this, we were actually doing it. The ability to drop, at the drop-of-a-hat go and pick your kids up from school, or even just to wait in for the boiler repair people to turn up and fix the boiler, is enormously powerful to us. And those are the things that we have done well. We’ve concentrated on what people are like as individuals and what their personality’s like, and what attributes they have, rather than, generally, the skills that they have - unless we’ve really needed specific skills bringing in. We’ve looked at training people up on the job so that we can take more, we can bring more people in. These are the things that we have done well, and we need to continue doing those and do them even better. But we need to take more ownership of our recruitment pipeline, to make sure that it is more diverse. When we do that, it does work, but when we just rely on the recruiters to do it, it generally doesn’t, you know, it’s not a thing. We need to broaden the number of universities that we work with because the university we work with, they’re all brilliant, but everyone that comes off the course is pretty much the same person, you know. So, these are the sorts of things that we need to do, to improve on; and they’re all tangible, manageable, achievable things, truly they are.
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Janet: Mmm. I think, certainly coming in and being involved with Dawn and her team and the things that are doing, and everybody across Waterstons, the DEI group as well, that you guys have got quite a lot of things in place, you know, there’s some good stuff that you’ve got, and for me that’s great. And I’ve worked in some places that are slightly different to that (laughing) shall I say, so it is kind of refreshing. And also refreshing that everyone, it feels everyone has that commitment, and absolutely understands the need as to understand why we need to have more inclusion and div-, you know, because obviously when you have more inclusion you will naturally get diversity as well. And so, it’s really nice to see, but as you say this work is no walk in the park, and there is always room for improvement, there’s always things that can be done, so, but I think you guys have made a great start (laughing).
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Alex: (laughing) I’m really glad about that, I really am. Yes, yeah, we just mustn’t get complacent, you know.
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Janet: Yes.
Alex: Yeah, we’ve just always got to be doing better.
Janet: And that is the thing that I see with lots of organisations, either that things have been turned into a tick-box exercise, because either their investors are saying: look, we want to see this, this, this and this, and so they can right, right, right, and we’ll put this in, that’ll do it. But for me, it doesn’t feel like that here, it’s not tick-box, that you’re absolutely wanting to do it because you understand that when you start to attract the more minoritised ethnicities, when you start to attract them, then you need to be able to look after them as well once they arrive.
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Alex: Absolutely.
Janet: So, we mentioned earlier about the shrinking candidate pool, and that all businesses are facing at the moment, but when looking to attract and build diverse teams to reflect the communities you serve, do you think it’s important to be bold and intentional to include under-represented populations?
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Alex: Yeah, I absolutely, I do.
Janet: And why? (laughing)
Alex: (laughing) I think if we rely on, I mean, as I just said, if we rely on other people or the organisations that we’re working with - our recruitment agencies or the universities that we feed from - to, if we rely on them to be diverse, we’re just, we’re just slopey-shouldering the problem actually, so we really need to be intentional about it. We really need to put a line in the sand for the recruitment agencies that, you know, you need to supply this level of diversity in the candidate pool that you’re sending across. When we do that, it does work, it actually works, we do get a diversity of candidates, that people do actually listen to that. So, we do need to be more, much, much bolder and more intentional about it, we do. It’s very easy to say it’s not my problem, it’s the universities, or it’s the schools, the schools are not getting enough women into tech, you know, well actually, that’s not actually true (laughing), actually it’s not their-. We can do better: we can own, we can own the pipeline from a much earlier stage, you know, we can pay, we can do scholarships, and we can do, we can help people to go to university, we can help them through university, we can pay them, do all of these other things that will give us benefits longer term. And these are all things that we need to, and are looking at, at the moment.
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Janet: Yeah, for me, I always remember that saying: if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.
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Alex: Exactly.
Janet: So, if you look, go, and you’re recruiting from the same pools, or from that little pond, you’ll always get those, you know, the same fishes that come out looking exactly the same. So, for me, it is about looking at much wider, in terms of what’s out in that sea? (laughing) There’s a sea out there, let’s look at it, and look at different places, and consider things that we never would have thought of before, because there are people out there that absolutely, in terms of - you know it from experience in the hiring process - that there are people out there that, you know, they may not have a degree, but they’ve got that life experience.
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Alex: Absolutely.
Janet: And they absolutely can serve in some way. So, yeah, and that’s an area I find, in terms of recruitment, that there’s lots going on at the minute, I know Waterstons have got lots in the pipeline that’s going on, so that’s kind of, that’s great as well. So, what’s your take on Waterstons’ DEI journey so far then?
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Alex: It’s been weirdly exciting and slightly scary, and in some ways it’s moved rapidly, and in other ways it hasn’t moved as quickly as we would have wanted. I think we’ve done a lot, but there’s always a sensation that we could have done more actually, that always is the way. I think we have seen some benefits in what we’ve been doing: there has been some positive output of what we’ve been doing; people have been talking about it more internally; we’ve had fewer conversations about why ‘people first’ isn’t enough, actually we had a lot of those at the beginning; we’ve had, people have come and talked to me about how we do better recruitment, people have come and talked to other ,members of the DEI group about how to do better recruitment; we’ve brought you in; we’ve done a lot in that time, we really have. But, yeah, it always feels like you could do more, there’s always something else that could have - you know, oh God we should have done this, we should have done that, we could have focused on this. And I spoke to someone in DEI from a law firm last year, and it was very interesting talking to them because they were like: it’s, you have to have some patience with this; and patience is kind of a, it feels a bad word for me (laughing) as well. I’m not a patient human being at the best of times, but when it comes to making sure that we’re doing the right thing by people, I think patience is a difficult thing. But also, I can understand that sometimes impatience is counter-productive, sometimes. You know, you push harder and the rock pushes back.
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Janet: (laughing) Yeah, yeah.
Alex: Yeah, it’s really difficult. I, yeah, I’m not a patient human being (laughing).
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Janet: Do you think that there’s a danger that the organisation views DEI as more a HR-initiative?
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Alex: I really hope not, I really hope not. I think there is a risk of that, for sure, I really hope that doesn’t come to pass. I know the board is very much on board with what we’re doing, or what we need to do. Michael, the CEO, is part of our DEI group; we have representation at the board as well through our People and Culture team. You know, part of moving from HR to People and Culture was to actually try and help with this problem. But, no, I f-, you know, we have, I can’t remember, I mean we have too-, we have so many people in our diversity group at the moment that the meetings are difficult because we have so many people in there, which is a wonderful sign (laughing), I mean, that’s a good problem to have, it truly is. And representation is from across most of Waterstons at this point. So, I hope it doesn’t get, you know, it doesn’t get pushed into a box like that. It is on the table at the boardroom, so I don’t think it will, it gets talked about a lot, questions are asked about how will this affect diversity when we want to do new things, and that’s a good sign as far as I’m concerned.
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Janet: Yeah, well that’s great to hear that it is on the board’s agenda. For me that, it’s critical that the board is seen, and from the top-down that everybody absolutely sees that the board and senior managers, all the way down, are on board on that.
Alex: Absolutely.
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Janet: So, what do you feel then in terms of keeping it on everyone’s agenda? Because I am very much aware that everyone’s busy.
#00:27:05-2#
Alex: Right.
Janet: When you talk to everyone, that everyone’s got so much on, and the D-, you’ve got the DEI group, everybody, that’s a voluntary thing, everybody does that. How do we make sure that we keep DEI then on everyone’s agenda, and keep up the momentum to drive change? Because that sometimes can be quite tough.
#00:27:23-9#
Alex: Yeah, for sure. So, there is a quote, I forget who it’s from, my dad uses it all the time, but about how a board needs to keep talking about its strategy until it believes fundamentally that everyone is absolutely sick-to-death of it, and then you need to talk about it some more. This is part of our strategy, diversity is part of our strategy, it is baked in there, we need to be talking about it until we are blue in the face, we need to bang the drum forever and never stop, we can never become complacent about it. It has to be in all of the conversations that we’re having about big things: if we do an acquisition, we should be talking about the diversity of the company that we’re acquiring; if we open a new office, we should be talking about how we make sure that the diversity in that office is good; if we start a new service, we should be making sure that we are, you know, looking at diversity for the new service offering that we’re creating; when we bring clients in, we should be talking about diversity with them. All of these things should be happening, and it’s going to be hard, it’s difficult, it’s very hard, at the best of times, to talk about our strategy as it is anyway, so adding this to it and making this part of the thing that we’re doing is adding to that. But it is crucial that we do that, the visibility of what we’re doing is so important; the visibility of the strategy as a whole is massively important, and the visibility of this is just part of that.
#00:28:38-0#
Janet: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. Wow, so the time has flown (laughing). Alex, thank you so much for a great conversation, sharing your insights; it’s been a pleasure talking to you today. We absolutely do need to be brave, embrace diversity, equality and inclusion to remain relevant. If agreeable, I’d love to have you back at some stage (laughing) to talk more about some of the more difficult DEI conversations, if you’re up for it?
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Alex: Yeah, sure, of course, yeah.
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Janet: That’d be great. And to our listeners, thank you for taking the time to join us. As you know, DEI is such a broad and deep subject, and from today’s session I’m hoping it will have provided you with food for thought on the role you play on our DEI journey. Do let me know if there are any topics that you have that you’d like us to explore in more details on these podcasts. But, in the meantime, thank you.
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