Read time: 3 mins
21 May 2021
By the People Team
These are the words that we wrote across our social channels, almost a year ago, in the wake of the untimely and tragic death of George Floyd. In the days and weeks that followed, the world finally woke up. And at Butternut, we got to work.
We often remind ourselves and our customers that we’re changing dog food for good. But that change for good, to us, goes beyond the fresh food we serve. And it’s not enough to just say these things - we actually have to do the good stuff too.
And so, last year, we made a commitment to ourselves, our employees, and our customers, that we would be the change we wanted to see, and start by making Butternut a more inclusive and diverse place to come to work. The changes we were committing to weren’t things we could do overnight, and by writing this blog post we aren’t saying that we are anywhere near finished. We suspect we never will be. But this is the start, and in order to make this start, we’ve used these three guiding principles and pillars to help steer us in the right direction:
1. Examine
2. Unlearn & Relearn
3. Act
In order for us to know where we needed and wanted to get to, we needed to take stock and take account of where we were at. So, in May 2020, we launched Butternut’s first Diversity & Inclusion report. We now send a survey to all employees every 6 months covering 14 different topics. We’ll be sharing the results of our annual report to our customers and followers in June.
Over the past year, we’ve worked with external training providers, such as The Other Box to not only learn from them but to understand how to actively unlearn from them too. The whole Squad attended different half-day workshops on allyship in the workplace, bias awareness, and one on inclusive language too, as well as attending talks led by some really inspiring voices from different lived experiences and backgrounds.
The Ally Network
In September 2020, the Butternut Ally Network was founded. The Ally Network exists to support, champion and listen to every single voice within the company and as well as communities beyond Butternut too. The group is made up of 25 Squad members (including Kev & Dave) who meet monthly to challenge us all to strive for better when it comes to inclusion and educating ourselves on experiences outside of our own.
Recruitment
In the last year we've focussed on our hiring processes to make sure they are as inclusive and supportive of diverse candidates. We've increased and diversified our job boards to reach a wider pool of candidates. We’ve changed how we communicate with candidates to make sure that each person feels comfortable to discuss neurodiversity or other disabilities upfront. Each hiring manager receives in-depth training on interview bias now too.
If you're interested in taking a look at our open roles, you can find them here: https://butternutbox.com/careers.
Accessibility
We've turned on Accessibee on our website as well as introducing certain tools to our Squad like Loom and Grammarly.
Being accessible encapsulates a load of criteria, including descriptions of images for screen readers, how navigable our website is without using a mouse, is it suited to people with colour blindness too!
Although there's no legal requirements for us to be accessible, we of course want to give the best possible experience to as many people as we can. Accessibee is a tool we installed, which adds a little widget people can turn on, and they can then customise our website on their browser to suit their needs.
