4.Know Your Colleagues

Learn about your colleagues through group mentoring, 1-2-1's, creating employee networks and encouraging staff to engage in volunteering and community activities. Employee engagement can increase retention and also inspire your staff.

Actions you can take: 

• Talk to five people you don’t know and find out five things about each of them and tell them five things about yourself. Then encourage them to do the same with five different people. Here are some suggestions of what you could ask: Where did you grow up? What is the biggest challenge you are facing now? What are you most proud of? What would you like to do for your next career or development experience? What would be your ideal job? Where do you see yourself in five years?
• Include questions in your employee survey to monitor how people feel about the way they are being treated by the organisation and their colleagues.
• Discuss the feedback of the Know Yourself Toolkit  in appraisals/focus groups.
• Take part in coaching and mentoring activities, and actively encourage colleagues to do so. This will benefit both mentor and mentee.  

Remember, it is knowledge about the people that we work with that helps to remove stereotyping and misconceptions and can have a real impact on making a cultural change within an organisation.