We are committed to ensuring our practice provides an inclusive environment that enables all our people to be the very best they can be. We strive to be a role model for positive change across all the professions we represent, and across the wider built environment industry.
The principles of equality, diversity, and inclusion are fundamental to HTA’s mission to be a great place to work. We believe this is essential to ensure we attract the very best talent from the widest possible pool and a necessary component of delivering on our goal to create the very best places to live. We have established a culture of collaboration across all of our creative endeavours, and have built a reputation for establishing policies and practices that demonstrate a genuine care for its people.
We know that supporting an inclusive environment and having a diverse workforce leads to better outcomes for both our practice and for our work. Harnessing all the talent we have within HTA and embracing a wide range of identities, lived experiences, and perspectives enable us to better understand the challenges facing our clients and the communities we serve.
In 2021 we launched our first Inclusive Leadership Programme, facilitated by Danna Walker from Built By Us, which has given leaders a richer insight into the lives and experiences of colleagues from diverse backgrounds. We have also over the past 6 years improved the diversity of our graduate intake through our partnership with Blueprint for All (formerly The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust) and Urban Recruitment.
We acknowledge that we have a continuous, and ever changing road ahead of us in evolving our approach to inclusion, but we are nonetheless proud to highlight and celebrate our work so far. This is documented through our D&I Journey timeline and editions of our annual ED&I Newsletter, ‘The Neighbourhood‘ which we have developed since its launch back in 2017.
Our ED&I Strategy
Our ED&I Strategy was is designed to guide our journey towards creating positive change in how we manage, develop, and support our people, as well as our impact in the industry and on society through our work. It presents an assessment of where we are currently and sets out the actions we will take to address areas for improvement over the next 5 years to 2026.
Our actions will be data-driven and employee-led, focusing on the areas we feel are in most need of improvement. Setting targets and holding ourselves to account for progress will ensure that we remain focused on our ambitions. But we will also need to ensure our plans are sufficiently flexible to respond to a changing external environment and to the feedback we will continue to seek and receive from our people through our annual Staff Opinion Survey and consultative forums.
We aim always to improve the way in which our projects are designed and delivered, leading to more meaningful outcomes in our community consultation and Post Occupancy Evaluation activities.
Our ED&I groups
We involve individuals from across HTA through our ED&I groups and consultative forums, which exist to support our staff and to help form a community through commonality and shared characteristics.
At the centre of this is our People Forum, which includes representatives from every HTA team, discipline and studio, to provide an opportunity for representatives to share ideas that can be promoted for implementation across the practice.
Our EDI Sub-groups
Our sub-groups develop and promote programmes specific to their individual needs and experiences to helps foster inclusion across the wider practice. By respecting and valuing the unique backgrounds and cultures of all our people, the sub-groups play an important role in making HTA a truly inspiring and inclusive place to work.
The Black African Caribbean Collective (BLACC@hta) is a forum for members identifying as Black. The Forum provides a safe and supportive space for black colleagues at HTA to discuss issues around racism and equality within the workplace and wider society. BLACC seeks for the continuation of education and discussion on racism and its impact upon black people and through support of our allies advocates the adoption of an anti-racist stance in behaviour and practices at HTA. BLACC will promote with its allies the further diversity of the wider built environment sector.
HTA’s LGBTQ+ network group - incl. – was launched in May 2017. The formation of incl. was prompted by staff who identify as LGBTQ+ and wished to establish a network to support and inform within the practice. Inclusivity is at the heart of the group’s ethos and a space is created for allies to join and participate in discussions and events.
We actively support and enable the progression of women at all stages of their careers at HTA. We are growing strong, diverse teams where women can thrive, and have a range of women and family- friendly initiatives and policies to underpin development. Women at HTA are mentored by colleagues to help them flourish and ensure they achieve their full potential and we have a long-established equal gender balance across the practice.
Our ambition now is to increase the number of women at senior levels within the practice. Our strategy is to mentor, grow and promote the talented women from within the organization, alongside targeted recruitment at senior levels. We promote a positive work-life balance and discourage long-hours culture typical in many practices, to reduce the number of women leaving after maternity leave and have implemented a programme of mentoring and training to provide useful skills and improve confidence in engaging with the often more challenging environments associated with development and construction, whilst promoting a better culture across the industry.
We launched our Neurodiversity group in September 2022 to promote increased awareness and understanding of neurodivergence, as an asset not limitation, both in our own workplaces and practices, the places and homes that we create and how we engage with communities in the design process.
The group explores some of the additional challenges that neurodiversity present, and ensures that HTA, as an employer, considers the character and quality of its studio environments, and promotes behaviours and practices across the business, that broaden accessibility for all.
Our aim is to expand the influence of this groups findings and recommendations to more positively impact on the buildings we design and the places we shape, to ensure we are creating more healthy, lastingly sustainable places for the health and wellbeing of all.
HTA are committed to supporting social value on our projects and in the outreach work we do with local communities. We develop strategies which are priorities for local residents, with our clients and project teams, led by our dedicated Outreach Lead.
We have developed activities for people of all ages, to add value to the community, and support and encourage people from marginalised and disadvantaged backgrounds. We give young people opportunities to develop employment skills and experience through varied programmes of careers advice and interactive workshops, work experience, apprenticeships and mentoring support. We review and measure outcomes, including on our projects through Post Occupancy Evaluation.
The Neighbourhood
The Neighbourhood is our ED&I round-up newsletter, collecting together a summary of all of our activity throughout the year.
Student - Drummond High School