Moto Hospitality is the UK’s leading Motorway Service Area operator with 55 sites across the country and 5,800 employees. One of the four strategic pillars relating to their people strategy is championing diversity and inclusion, and a strong focus is placed on targeted development and inclusive leadership to ensure a diverse and equitable workplace.
“We know that a workplace that accurately reflects the communities we serve is better for everyone and we won’t stop until we achieve this.”
CREATING A SOLID BASE FROM WHICH TO RELAUNCH MOTO’S DE&I AGENDA
Moto are deeply committed to their DE&I agenda and, in People Director Louise Hughes’ words, a deep dive into their employee life cycle was key to establishing a solid base from which to create a robust action plan for the future. Working with inclusion in gave them the opportunity to review and improve their policies and processes from an outside-in perspective.
CREATING A SOLID BASE FROM WHICH TO RELAUNCH MOTO’S DE&I AGENDA
inclusion in’s Employee Lifecycle Audit is specifically designed to work in partnership with HR leadership teams and senior leaders to undertake a critical review of key processes, policies & tools through a DE&I lens. The audit with Moto was broken down into four key stages over a 6-8 week period after which a report was produced with the results and prioritised recommendations to put in place.
Moto’s brief specifically requested more profound information on identifying levels of conscious and/or unconscious bias within their business which might have a negative impact on how employees from diverse backgrounds are able to progress professionally. inclusion in structured the audit to include Moto’s vision, values and strategies, their culture and networks and how these fed into their data, processes and policies to add real clarity and priority around action points to take forward.
“It was really clear from the start in terms of the approach they were following – which was really helpful for us”.
WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS DONE
A lack of data can impinge an organisation’s DE&I goals and inclusion in worked with Moto to highlight the importance of goal setting in line with their already well-established census data, and how to best use it to start measuring year on-year DE&I progress. While clear goals have subsequently been put in place to achieve by 2025, the audit recommended feeding these goals into senior leaders’ objectives – a process which has been in place since January 2023.
The recommendations to implement equality impact assessments and establishing impact assessment criteria has been a particularly useful tool when applied to the Moto engagement and happiness scores which have continued to improve each year: 11% happier than the hospitality score and 7% happier than the retail sector score. The two highest scoring areas in their Happiness Survey were on how Moto supports all colleagues and equal opportunities for all colleagues, and that colleagues can be their true selves at work. Moto have recognised that although their level of diverse employees is good, there is still work to be done and using available data has been instrumental in holding them to account in terms of broader inclusivity goals.
For the first time, Moto recently produced an annual diversity monitoring report on the back of one of the inclusion in recommendations which received fantastic feedback internally and they are now taking the first steps to producing an Ethnicity Pay Gap Report.
COVERING DE&I FROM ALL ANGLES
DE&I can only claim true effectiveness if it is baked into an organisation’s culture which means considering every function and every angle of that function and how they positively affect a diverse and inclusive workplace. inclusion in challenged the Moto leadership on best practice around employee resource groups and the governance surrounding them; they verified how effectively DE&I came through in their visions and values as part of their handbook, and scrutinised user experience on their website. The three-year action points which came out of the audit also looked at succession planning.
“We use the reports once a year in our steering group and board sessions, to see what we’ve done and to make sure we’re making progress against what was recommended – it’s almost been our Bible.”
DE&I is now also embedded into Moto’s broader ESG strategy and their progress in terms of female leadership levels has been remarkable: they report 60% of senior leadership across the company is female, mirroring the overall demographic of female employees. Their operating board is made up of three men and four women.
“We engaged inclusion in to undertake a review of our colleague lifecycle through a diversity and inclusion lens and to identify areas for improvement. To say that we were impressed with the work that they did, the recommendations they made and how much they cared would be a complete understatement. They helped give us a springboard to really set the bar high to accelerate our journey in this space.” Louise Hughes, People Director.