Campaign to Better Understand Our Ethnic Profile

Understanding the profile of our employees allows us to monitor the diversity of our workforce, and track our recruitment, progression and promotion practices to measure the effectiveness of our plans, identify any barriers to full participation and take subsequent action. The engagements comprised the following:

• Monika Khullar, VP HR UK, communicated to more than 1,000 UK line managers the expectation for leaders to hold team discussions on race and ethnicity in the workplace. A message was also sent to more than 5,000 UK employees outlining the week’s activities and calling for colleagues to voluntarily share their ethnicity.

• Shared videos from UK leaders explaining why declaring ethnicity is important to them and how the data will be used.
  

•  Organised a panel discussion with the theme #EmbraceTheDifference including internal and external panelists. The panel discussed topics such as progression of people from ethnic minority backgrounds and how to have a conversation about race and ethnicity at work.

• Parminder Kohli, one of our UK leaders and ethnicity sponsors, wrote a blog called ‘Let’s Talk About Ethnicity’ sharing personal reflections on his own challenges of being an ethnic Asian employee and what we can all do to embrace our differences, and help each other to feel a sense of belonging.

• Our employee networks amplified the message that ethnicity data allows us to understand the challenges that ethnic minorities face, and that the data can be used to inform actions to overcome these barriers and build a more inclusive workplace.

• Following the week’s events and campaign, there was an increase in ethnicity declaration from 52.6% to 58%. Shell in the UK’s 2019 annual employee survey scores for D&I across ethnic minority colleagues also showed a two-point increase on the previous year, with Respect and Trust showing a one-point increase.

We recognise that increasing ethnicity declaration rates requires sustained campaigns over an extended period of time. In March 2022, we continued to encourage colleagues to disclose their ethnicity in our human resources system. This proved successful; our ethnicity declaration rate increased significantly to 84% in Q2 2022, providing us with more meaningful data to publish our ethnicity pay gap and better monitor and evaluate our progress. Leveraging best practice from Shell UK, Shell Energy Retail Limited’s (SERL) declaration has improved significantly from 40% in 2020 to 92% during 2022. Driving a higher disclosure rate came from a commitment in SERL’s Diversity and Inclusion agenda supported by senior leadership. SERL have also supported employees in understanding that building a view of the workforce will enable opportunity to form meaningful plans and conduct targeted interventions if appropriate.

We will continue to encourage our employees to voluntarily declare their ethnicity. Without a near 100% declaration rate on ethnicity, we cannot currently provide a complete picture of pay and bonuses across Shell in the UK from an ethnicity perspective. We continue to encourage employees to voluntarily declare their ethnicity to build a more complete workforce profile to track trends better, take more targeted action and create an environment where everyone can be proud of who they are and our culture for inclusion.