Equality, the Job in Question

Hollie Cregan has been appointed head of Inclusion, Fairness and Respect at construction giant Graham. She talks to Emma Deighan about why the creation of the role will make the company a leader in marrying diversity initiatives with everyday business.

Prior to joining Graham, the Hillsborough-headquartered building and civil engineering firm, Hollie Cregan worked at Dutch firm VolkerWessels, a contractor that delivers engineering solutions across the civil engineering and construction sectors.

A quantity surveyor in a male-heavy sector, she progressed into a project management role, delivering high-profile rail projects all while working on separate CSR projects to drive initiatives to narrow the gender gap in the business as well as challenging stereotypes.

Her hard efforts saw her spend four years as the company’s head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI).

Today Hollie is Graham’s first ever head of Inclusion, Fairness and Respect, a post that sees the company lead the way here in important inclusion matters.

“When I joined the company there was no-one doing this role. It didn’t exist. We had certain individuals doing it as part of their day jobs – everyone was doing their bit – however, it was the foresight of our civil engineering managing director, Leo Martin, who thought if we’re going to drive this forward we need to appoint someone to lead that,” she begins.

EDI is a passion for Hollie. Her goal to make the workplace a more diverse environment stretches outside of GRAHAM where she is also a Network Rail Diversity and Inclusion champion, STEM and FIR ambassador and sits on the Board of Governors at her local primary school – a position that fits perfectly with her passion to inspire future generations, particularly girls, into the construction industry.

Graham has more than 2,500 employees and a presence in 17 UK

locations. That widespread geographic presence sees Hollie carry out bespoke research and plans for each location.

She continues: “We have to tailor our approach as not every place is as diverse as the next. We make sure that we’re representative of the communities that we’re working in, wherever we’re working.

“We will have carried out research on where we work even prior to the tender stage and we also focus on communities and what they need.”

She says there is no one main priority area for her and her colleagues but rather a group of priorities.

She explains: “High-level focus originally was about gender and we are looking at how underrepresented women are in construction.

“That conversation in gender opened up conversations in disability too. So we look at those areas in terms of UK averages and that applies to LGBT and race too. We look at the averages in those communities within which we are based and how that reflects in our various UK locations.

“What we do find is some areas are really diverse and some are not so we want to be representative of the areas we represent and we always look at those locations with an inclusion lens.”

On the gender subject, she says the firm is looking at its recruitment process, seeing who applies, who makes it to the interview and who gets offered the role. “It’s about that whole life cycle and we’re driven by data.”

Contrary to common opinion, Hollie says there is a greater volume of female applications into the industry than ever before. “People think women don’t apply but they do.

“We’re always bettering what we do. We’re looking at UK averages and working with those figures rather than targets.”

Selling construction as a career choice to the younger generation is another priority for Hollie and her team.

She talks of an ageing workforce and how fewer people are choosing construction as a career pathway and adds: “Construction is less attractive than the likes of digital so we look at how we sell it, how do we make our processes slicker, how do we attract people into our ageing workforce; it’s a whole retention piece.”

Having Hollie in her role will play a part in the attraction of new workers. It will help the company drive its equality agenda, a corporate responsibility that not just clients but new talent is demanding.

“We want to be an ethical organisation and our employees and incoming talent want that too and ultimately clients are asking can we support them with that. The government is asking for it and it’s more important than ever for all parts of the business.

“Historically tenders were about the cost of a project and when you can deliver. Now clients want to know what you’re doing to give back and what you’re doing to improve the cultural diversity of the industry.

“We see it too, first hand when interviewing potential staff. For example, in a recent graduate recruitment process, without me saying what my role was, I

was amazed by how many were asking what we were doing around diversity and inclusion.

“You only need to look at universities to see that they have all these networks for race, LGBT and disability and more, and those graduates expect to see that replicated in the workplace.”

To drive the equality agenda the company will celebrate four key events every year covering gender, race/culture, disability and LGBT.

“We could do more but we picked four and we do them very well,” Hollie says.

Culture Week, Disability Week and Pride are among the events that bring colour and cultural intelligence into Graham’s locations.

To ensure its efforts are paying off, the company is in the process of gaining external accreditation from the National Centre for Diversity.

“They will come into the business, look at what we’ve identified and help us survey staff,” Hollie says. “They then come back a year later and review our work and if we’re doing well and the surveys are good we will be awarded.”

She says the company has progressed halfway through that accreditation with the interim review due later this year.

“One of the best things about this is you get to ask staff, ask our people if they think Graham is an inclusive place to work and that provides us with really rich data.”

As Ambition went to print, GRAHAM was placed 41st in the Top 100 Most Inclusive Workplaces Index 2022.

The National Centre For Diversity (NCFD) placed the company following its intensive efforts to promote inclusion, fairness and respect throughout the business.

Hollie concludes: “We started with our leadership, embarked on training programmes about inclusivity from the MD down and then we worked out what we do next. We have a lot of FIR ambassadors and we will bring the two together so inclusivity is business as usual, rather than a bolt on.”

“To drive the equality agenda the company will celebrate four key events every year covering gender, race/culture, disability and LGBT.”