Reflecting on 2024: Milestones, Lessons, and the Road Ahead

Each year we take the opportunity to reflect on how the past 12 months have unfolded—evaluating the market, our progress, and the challenges we’ve faced along the way. This process seems to become increasingly complex each year. In the context of this increasing complexity, it's important to be a lot more honest in this reflection than ever before. This year has been tough and it would be disingenuous to ignore this fact. 

In 2022, we shared the team’s thoughts on the strides (or lack thereof) made in the EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) space that year (it was largely a positive year, albeit ‘post 2020’ tensions were starting to emerge). By contrast, in 2023, our reflections centered on the clients we collaborated with, while also acknowledging the difficulties being faced (2023-24 signalled a change in priorities for EDI with an anti-EDI narrative fast emerging). 

A lot of focus in the last 12 months has been on the ‘death of EDI’ and whilst we don't think EDI (when done well) is dead, we think there are people and organisations causing harm / issues and labelling it EDI. Having been through a period of 12-18 months internally challenging our structure and operating model, we have reflected on the people, clients, sectors and general environments that allow us to do our best work, both as individuals and as an organisation.

Within this reflection comes a statement of clarity - not everywhere or everything can be for everyone, all at once. In order to be effective, in anything in life, tough choices and priorities need to be set. I came across a post a while ago that declared an EDI vision and drive to make sure that ‘everyone is invited to the party’. Whilst that sounds like a good EDI sound bite - quite frankly it’s nonsense. Thinking in practical terms it is impossible to invite ‘everyone’ to the party, especially when the ‘party’ isn’t a party, it’s a business, organisation or any other formal body design to achieve a specific purpose. 

Starting with an internal focus - the last 24 months has sharpened our focus to ensuring we are attracting and retaining those individuals that help us achieve our goals as quickly and effectively as possible. We are not here to have a ‘party’ but to achieve a specific vision. Over the last few years The Equal Group have made a number of great hires, but also many hiring mistakes, ill-guided by the concept that ‘everyone’ and ‘anyone’ can do this work - which is not true. However, the reality is that as a small, bootstrapped business, we have to make some very difficult decisions about where to prioritise our time and attention. The Equal Group isn’t currently (nor may it ever be) an organisation where ‘everyone’ can flourish and while that might seem ‘uninclusive’, it’s the reality of being a small business. Trying to adopt a broad focus made our core business worse for everyone - our staff, our partners and our clients; and honestly, we are still dealing with the aftermath. 

Our assumption that anyone and everyone can work at The Equal Group meant that we often compromised on our standards in the conviction that we were being inclusive. We weren’t, we were damaging the quality of our work and setting an unsustainably low bar for ourselves and our clients. 

The result of allowing lower standards is that everyone sees them and seeks to meet them, with the impact being that those capable of more aren’t motivated to deliver more. This then led to the loss of key members of our team and we were not in a position to replace them due to the time, energy and resources that had been expended trying to fit square pegs into round holes. This then meant that we weren’t in a position to meet the high standards that our clients had come to expect. 

Another area where we've failed has been in not ensuring we were explicit about the time and resources (financial and other) that it would take to deliver to our desired standards. This led to us stretching ourselves too thin, taking on too many clients that weren't well aligned and as a result our ability to deliver was reduced. This brings us full circle back to the limitations of trying to serve ‘everyone’ and subsequently diminishing the experience for all. 

At this point we’d like to apologise to any clients if there have been occasions where our service provision hasn’t met your standards. We’d also like to thank you for your patience, kindness, partnership and continued support.  

This year, it became clear that the time had come to go #BacktoBasics in EDI. Like many others, we at The Equal Group have faced challenges, prompting us to revisit fundamental questions about the role of EDI in today’s workplaces - as well as our place in that landscape. This year, we returned to the drawing board to better understand EDI's true significance for businesses and how to maintain its importance amidst competing priorities.

Spending a lot of time with leaders, we find many of them are pulling their hair out because of the issues they are facing - often after having been pushed to do or say things that they didn’t want to, by people that are no longer in their business - the consequences of this has been businesses committing to things that they didn’t fully understand (like being an anti-racist organisation), hiring folk they don’t know how to manage and an overarching fear of being labelled an ‘ist’ (racist, sexist, misogynist, ableist, etc).

One of the fundamental flaws we observe with EDI as a discipline is that a lot of those operating in this space fail to understand the realities of the business landscape and the clients they take on, but rather focus on the sound bites and conjure up images of how things should work, in overly simplistic, shallow and ill thought through concepts.

The sector is awash with people that theorise about how business should work, without a fundamental understanding of how business actually works and how it can be improved. The EDI landscape has lost the ability to reason and understand nuance. It has now become favourable to ‘innovate’ and drive forward pandering policies that gain headlines, rather than getting the basics right and building on solid foundations. 

As we move forward to 2025, we aim to help our clients integrate practical equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) into their businesses. Our focus is on enabling them to become the best and most inclusive versions of themselves—not simply on ticking EDI boxes, conforming to EDI buzzwords or collecting shiny badges and plaques that may ultimately create more issues than they solve.

In 2024, we’ve learned the importance of resilience and the power of solid foundations. We’ve navigated tough decisions and stood strong in the face of growing anti-EDI rhetoric. This year hasn’t been without its difficulties—both as an EDI consultancy and as a small business—but it has provided us with the chance to return to the basics of EDI, focusing on what truly matters: delivering meaningful value for our clients while building a stable and sustainable business. 

We would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank our clients. Your trust and collaboration have been instrumental in our journey. Because of you, we look forward to stepping into 2025 with renewed purpose and optimism, cutting through the noise and concentrating on the core drivers of business success and fundamentals of EDI. 

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