WSP receives Stonewall's Silver Employer Award

WSP has achieved a Silver Employer Award in the Stonewall UK Workplace Equality Index 2022. WSP's proactive leadership empowers the company to be client-focused, agile and responsive, while at the same time being accountable to its clients, peers and shareholders.

WSP makes extraordinary efforts to attract, develop, engage and retain the best professionals in its fields of expertise. The company cares about individuals and their progress, offering the fulfilling career development for its professionals.

"Congratulations to clients and industry peers who received recognition for their own actions in the push for a more inclusive sector," comments WSP.

Recognition for inclusivity

Stonewall’s Top 100 Employers is the definitive list of workplaces who’ve dedicated themselves to supporting LGBTQ+ inclusion inside and outside the organisation itself. The Workplace Equality Index (WEI) is a wide-ranging and intensive LGBTQ+ inclusion benchmarking tool and is designed to acknowledge and evaluate employers’ inclusion work, as well as allowing them to measure their progress over time.

The WEI places a focus on non-binary and bi inclusion, and work that supports people with a range of identities, such as disabled LGBTQ+ people, or LGBTQ+ people of colour. There are criteria around maintaining a focus on LGBTQ+ inclusion in dispersed workplaces, since working from home has become normalised for many.

The Workplace Equality Index is marked by experts in the field of LGBTQ+ workplace equality. All markers undergo extensive training to ensure that every organisation is marked to the same high standards.

Leaders in LGBTQ+ inclusion

There are nine broad categories for the WEI criteria. These are:

Policies and benefits - how an organisation supports its LGBTQ+ staff with anti-discrimination, family leave, and trans inclusion policies, or benefits such as private health insurance
Employee lifecycle - it’s important that LGBTQ+ inclusion is embedded across every stage of an employee’s journey through an organisation, everything from recruitment and induction, to training and internal communications, all the way through to exit processes
Network groups - the amount of support that’s given to an organisation’s LGBTQ+ network, the kinds of activities the network has done, and any action the network has taken to ensure it’s inclusive of, and accessible to, all LGBTQ+ employees
Empowering individuals - how an organisation engages individuals across the workplace to create a more inclusive culture and how LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ employees alike are empowered to step up as changemakers and allies
Leadership - how senior leaders have shown understanding of, and support for, LGBT+ inclusion, and how all managers make LGBTQ+ inclusion part of their day-to-day jobs
Monitoring - organisations are asked how sexual orientation, gender and trans identity data is analysed to understand recruitment, pay grade and staff satisfaction trends, as well as steps taken to ensure colleagues feel confident enough to share sensitive data with their employers
Supply chains - organisations are asked to show their commitment to inclusion not just within their own processes, but to demonstrate how they’ve affected change in their supply chain too
External engagement and service delivery - organisations are asked to show how their organisation supports LGBTQ+ communities beyond its employees, such as how they ensure customers, service users, members or audience members experience an inclusive environment when using the service
Staff feedback questionnaire - an anonymous questionnaire that employers share with their staff, helping to generate the employer’s WEI score, and providing a deep understanding of employees’ experiences at work