CEO Today Global Awards 2025 - UNITED KINGDOM - - 9 - How does your vision as CEO, to create an open and inclusive culture where everyone can flourish and shape their future, influence your approach to leadership at DPD? When I became CEO I had a variety of things I wanted us, as a company, to focus on and do better. Inclusivity was high on that list. I worked with the People and Talent team to refresh our approach to diversity and inclusion, such as through the creation of a dedicated D&I team headed by a specialist. The job of the D&I team isn’t so we can simply delegate the changes we want to make, but also so that they can hold us, in the senior leadership team, accountable as well. Every one of us has our unconscious biases, and so by creating a D&I team who are experts in recognising these, they’re able to highlight things that might have otherwise been missed by myself and the leadership team. This then shapes how we run DPD, and filters back down to the rest of our people. Can you elaborate on how DPD fosters an inclusive culture? One of the big initiatives driven by the D&I team was the creation of our D&I Forum. Established in early 2022, the Forum is chaired by a Senior Leadership Team member, and attended by our ten D&I Ambassadors. These Ambassadors, volunteers from across the business, draw on their lived experiences and meet monthly to discuss and develop D&I strategies. Their work includes raising D&I concerns, creating training materials, and recognising our celebrating our successes. The Forum helps organise inclusionary-related events, such as our attendance at Pride marches, and also hosts ‘All Aboard’ sessions across the business. These are seminars which discuss inclusionary topics, such as neurodiversity and gender identity, available to any staff who wish to join. We hope that the D&I Forum’s ongoing work helps maintain our inclusive culture. on Leadership, Inclusion, and the Future of DPD UK Elaine Kerr Something that’s important to recognise is that everyone’s needs in a working environment are different. It’s not on employees to conform to DPD, but for DPD to support its people.
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