Picture the colour palette of a Bentley social gathering and you would be forgiven for imagining a world of tweed and restrained tones.
A sparkling red Continental GT Convertible with a rainbow pinstripe might seem like an interloper of the highest order. Yet that’s exactly what was driven in Manchester Pride’s bustling 2022 parade, more than 50 Bentley employees on its coat-tails, in a first for the 103-year-old car maker.
It's the brainchild of the company’s BeProud network, co-founded by Tom Dawes, an exterior engineer who has been with the company eight years. Bentley’s first physical appearance at a Pride festival was something he had been cooking up for a while.
He explained: “This all started about five years ago when me and colleague Adam White went to Manchester Pride and said ‘we’ve got to bring this to Bentley’. We put together the BeProud network at the start of 2020 to bring together our LGBTQ+ colleagues and straight allies.”
That last bit is important: everyone in the company is welcomed to BeProud without prejudice.
“It’s making a safe space for people to be themselves at work,” Dawes says. “The bit that has been humbling about organising this parade is the number of allies from across the business who aren’t necessarily LGBTQ+ but who see it as a symbol of hope.
“That’s exactly what we wanted to do. The BeProud network has had a ripple effect: we’ve helped set up four other networks, covering gender balance, ethnicity and race, veterans and armed forces and health and wellbeing. We’ve now got five colleague networks with over 300 colleagues engaged in them, which is nearing 10% of Bentley’s workforce.”
Proving that inclusion isn’t limited to those perceived as minority groups, BeAccessible – Bentley's wellbeing network – is the most attended of all. Its work has included a rethinking of the traffic-light structure used in company presentations to make sure colourblind employees aren’t left out of the loop.
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Go woke - go broke...having worked in positive-discrimination (via legislation or company policy) companies in both South Africa and Singapore the results can be alarmingly bad....you get the boxes ticked but quality and efficiecy can drop spectaculalry...recruitment should be based on ability. I bet Bentley won't push this agenda in those middle east super rich countries that discriminate based on sexuality for example.....and bear a thought for those able individuals who lost out on a job because of box ticking......