CLIENT: Ardent
INDUSTRY: Land Management Consultancy
SERVICE: EvolveLAB
Ardent, a rapidly growing company with big ambitions, engaged us at the start of their EDI journey. Working towards B-Corp Certification, they sought support to define practical and impactful ways to develop their EDI strategy and plan.
We began with a systems, symbols, and behaviours audit, hosting focus groups across Ardent’s key offices with a cross-section of employees. This helped us understand employee perspectives, highlight strengths, and identify areas needing communication and transparency.
Focus groups revealed themes that confirmed leadership’s knowledge and introduced new insights. This allowed for reflection on the desired employee experience and necessary changes. In partnership with leadership, we defined what EDI means at Ardent, set priorities, and created an EDI strategy and action plan.
We presented findings and EDI priorities at a full employee event, ensuring maximum buy-in by having employees vote on priority delivery order. We focused on inclusive leadership development, delivering interventions for the top 10% of leaders, introduction of a diverse shadow board to allow for upwards challenge and feedback on organisational strategy, and supporting the HR team at Ardent in delivering interventions through coaching and guidance for cost-effective, sustainable delivery.
Cultural change requires both a top-down and bottom-up approach. Leaders’ direct culture through strategy and behaviours, but the lived experiences of employees is the real test of whether the intent of the leaders translates to reality. Understanding the employee experience at Ardent helped us to identify where leaders needed to focus their resources and investment, and translate this to practical, implementable interventions. This moves topics like EDI from discussion points in leadership meetings, to practical change in the culture and organisation.
We’ve been working with BehaviourLAB for six months and in that time, they’ve invested in really getting to know our senior team, understand our EDI baseline and worked with us to develop a plan that will ensure EDI issues are central to our culture as we continue to grow. Laura and Sam both balance the ability to be subject matter experts with being highly personable and capable of explaining complex and challenging issues in an accessible manner. I would highly recommend BehaviourLAB, and we look forward to continuing to work together over the forthcoming months and years.
Jon Stott, Group Managing Director, Ardent
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