Inclusivity Week: Driving Inclusion in Media

In late February, we celebrated our annual Inclusivity Week, honouring our diverse workforce and educating ourselves on how we can be more inclusive in our work and daily lives. As an agency, we deeply value creating a welcoming and inclusive culture for people from all walks of life, and this initiative – spearheaded by our Inclusivity Team – enables us to continue discovering new ways that we can improve in doing so.

For this year’s celebration, we ran three events throughout the last week of February, beginning with an insightful panel discussion – hosted and led by the7stars' employees – exploring how we can be more inclusive in our various campaigns. This ranged from a discussion on how we can continue utilising inclusive planning (led by Emma Ramji, Hannah Partington, and Eve McGladdery) to how we can better use audience insight to ensure we reach a diverse audience (led by Rob McLaren and Melike Dogan). Following this, Tommy Gleadell explored how we can activate more inclusivity and consider more niche partners, highlighting the importance of supporting these businesses. The panel was a resounding success and sparked important conversations throughout the agency about how we can actively improve going forward.

The following day, we were fortunate to have the esteemed John Ayres OBE leading a session on how we can assess our progress as an agency when it comes to inclusivity in policy, practice, and culture. In this thought-provoking workshop, John provided actionable insights relating to what ‘good’ should look like and how to achieve it, giving us much to think about and more insight into areas for improvement.

Finally, this year’s Inclusivity Week came to an end with our International Food Festival (hosted by Biren Datta and Megan Bennet), which was sponsored by Captify, celebrating the wealth of cultures that exist at the7stars. We set up a station in our Reception/Bar area filled with delicious foods from a wide range of countries, accompanied by information cards that enabled our team to learn more about each food, country, and culture. The event was a hit! People from across the agency came to try the various snacks and were equally eager to learn more about the different cultures.

While these three events captured our team’s attention, we also recognised the importance of sending out agency-wide educational communications every day throughout the week, teaching our team more about communities and topics such as the LGBTQIA+ community, social mobility, mental health, race and ethnicity inclusivity, and accessibility for people with impairments.

Overall, our Inclusivity Week initiative is particularly important for the agency as it raises awareness about diversity and equality, while also encouraging much-needed dialogue among our team. Not only this, but it also addresses unconscious bias, discrimination, and microaggressions through our impactful events and communications, providing a platform where people can work together to promote positive change and create a more inclusive workplace for all the7stars’ employees.

Moving forward, we look forward to continuing to create opportunities such as this to educate ourselves and celebrate diversity. Every year, we hope to grow and learn from previous events, taking feedback from colleagues on what worked well and what we can do more of.