You may have seen that last week Cemex have been celebrating Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) across our business. Our UK DE&I committee would like to share some further information with you around this topic to help promote the subject of DE&I within our workplace, explain what we mean by DE&I and why it is so important, create awareness of the resources that are available to support our learning in this area, and provide the opportunity for you to share any feedback or offer any thoughts you may have to how we can better promote DE&I across our UK business.

What do we mean by Diversity, Equity and Inclusion?

DE&I is an important and wide-ranging topic that covers many different characteristics such as age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation and disability to name just a few. These characteristics make us who we are and are unique to each of us.

• Diversity is the presence of characteristics that make us different from each other.
• Equity is fair access to opportunities for everyone.
• Inclusion is acknowledging, accepting, valuing, and celebrating differences among people.

We’ve created a short visual to show how these topics work in practice, you can view this using the following link.

How does Cemex embrace diversity?

Embracing Diversity is one of our core values and our aim is to foster an open, respectful and collaborative workplace which empowers everyone to achieve their full potential. We actively encourage and embrace diversity in our teams, recognising the huge value that this brings.

We aim to respect and value the differences among individuals and promote an inclusive and safe environment where everyone feels supported, respected, and valued.

Why is DE&I important? 

DE&I is an important subject for a number of different reasons, and there have been several studies that demonstrate the benefits of diversity within the workplace. We’ve listed some of these below:

• A diverse workplace helps people to feel welcome, valued and more connected to their peers and to an organisations purpose
• Diverse workspaces create an improved employee experience and sense of belonging, both of which are known to increase productivity and quality
• An organisation which embraces diversity has a far wider talent pool, allowing companies to attract and retain individuals with a more diverse range of skills, knowledge and experience
• Diversity provides improved decision-making, leading to more creative and innovative solutions through the consideration of a variety of perspectives and lived experiences
• Companies who promote diversity are shown to have a better understanding of the needs of their customers and tend to outperform their industry averages financially (study by McKinsey & Company)

What can you do to help? 

• Our ‘Inclusive Leadership’ training course has seen a successful take-up across the UK, and we would encourage everyone who hasn’t already, to use the link provided to complete this course and learn about how we can become a more inclusive organisation. 

• If you’d like to get involved in coordinating future events, let us know of any topics that we may not have considered, or share your experiences of how we can better promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion across our business, we’d love to hear from you – you can leave any comments you may have using the following link.