The Quality Mark (IEQM) will put RICS at the heart of the profession leading on rewarding and sharing best practice, and recognising the work of firms of whatever size who are striving towards creating a fully inclusive work force for our sector.
In 2015, RICS launched the Inclusive Employer Quality Mark (IEQM) as a response to the sector being behind other professions in moving towards a more diverse and inclusive workforce.
177 companies are now signatories of IEQM, representing over 300,000 people. This exceeded the 175 firms, targeted by 2017/18.
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Following the feedback by professionals and firms across the sector, we are reviewing the IEQM, to ensure that it remained fit for purpose and was a worthwhile quality mark that carried both esteem and value for signatories.
The decision was taken to review the survey to see where it could be improved, and we have based the improvements around four core principles:
Leadership
- Demonstrable commitment at the highest level to increasing the diversity of the workforce.
Recruitment
- Engage and attract new people to the industry from under-represented groups; best practice recruitment methods.
Culture
- An inclusive culture where all staff engage with developing, delivering, monitoring and assessing diversity and inclusivity.
Development
- Training and promotion policies that offer equal access to career progression to all members of the workforce.
This enabled a revision of the self-assessment, a reduction in the number of questions, and a tighter set of principles in line with current issues and challenges.
Key to this is the inclusion of culture as a principle. Construction and property have been sectors where an un-inclusive culture has been prevalent. RICS is committed to raising the awareness of surveying as a career of choice, with the ambition for the profession to be more diverse, however, this is only possible if a more inclusive culture exists. There must be a measurement of this to determine how inclusive organisations are.
We are now in the process of collecting feedback from a small group of internal and external stakeholders. It’s one of the key stages of the revision process which will allow us to re-launch an improved IEQM assessment later this year.
