Case Study: Most Improved Organisation

Alessandro Storer, Head of Belonging, at OVO

I am incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made on ethnic diversity here at OVO over the last 12 months. We’re a community of around 5,000 people and in the last year we were able to increase the representation of Black, Asian, and other ethnic minorities from 7% to almost 14%. And it’s not just about numbers, it’s also about ensuring the experience of our ethnic minorities at OVO is a great one. We’ve introduced multi-faith rooms and flexible bank holidays, and we’ve started to roll out our anti-racism training to all our senior leaders. And, led by our amazing OVO Embrace Network, we’ve continued to listen to the voices and experiences of our ethnic minority colleagues, and we acted on them.

We are working with partners like the Aleto Foundation to increase our ability to engage with talented people from ethnically diverse backgrounds, both at entry levels (via our Aleto x OVO10 programme which is now in its third year) and at senior level with the recent launch of a trailblazing new initiative: the Aleto x OVO Black Leadership Academy.

These are just some of the things we’ve done to make sure everyone feels like they belong here at OVO. Being an Investing in Ethnicity member and going through the Matrix exercise has been instrumental in accelerating these changes. The audit gave us a clear benchmark and highlighted the areas we needed to improve on; and improve we did!

It’s an honour to be recognised as the “Most Improved Organisation” that took part in the 2023 IIE Matrix exercise. But we know there is still a lot of work to be done, and we take this very seriously, because we know that it takes all of us to solve one of humanity’s biggest challenges, the climate crisis. Without truly diverse and inclusive teams, we simply won’t be able to achieve our mission.