Empowering our people

Our Inclusion, Diversity and Belonging (IDB) Strategy provides us with the foundations to continue to innovate and empower our people to build the future. This strategy reflects our firm's relentless focus on enabling the ambition and potential of our people, which is key to our success.

Our strategy is guided by two principles which inform our actions: accessibility and intersectionality.

The strategy focuses on:

• Our people - Increasing the representation of diverse communities across our global workforce.
• Ensuring our people have a thriving inclusive experience by:
  • building capability to increase inclusive skills and awareness, and demonstrating leadership on delivering an inclusive and high performing culture; and
  • collaborating in a manner which creates a psychologically safe, respectful, inclusive and distinctive environment.
• Partnering with our clients and our suppliers for change; increasing diversity of client teams and partnering with suppliers promoting diversity.

We have developed six strategic priority areas in our IDB strategy which are part of our DNA. These cover:

1. Caring responsibilities – empowering our people to balance their caring and family roles;
2. Disability and wellbeing – embedding accessibility and inclusion in everything we do;
3. Gender equality – championing gender equality for opportunity and advancement;
4. LGBTI+ inclusion – pride in our LGBTI+ community;
5. Multiculturalism – recognising, respecting and celebrating our rich cultural diversity; and
6. Social Inclusion and mobility – forging pathways to opportunity.

We are building these priority areas into our recruitment, induction, development, mentoring, change management and performance and reward frameworks, policies and practices.

We have ambitious global diversity targets for 2026, including:

• To have representation at senior leadership levels of 40% women, 40% men and 20% flexible (women, men and non-binary persons)
• 4% of LGBTI+ representation at the partner and senior leadership level. Within the UK to have 15% of partners and senior business leaders to be ethnically diverse, of whom 6% will be black; 30% of staff to be ethnically diverse, of whom 13% will be black; and 35% of our trainees each year will be ethnically diverse, of whom 13% will be black.

We are focused on the wellbeing of our people. We recognise that creating a culture where people can perform at their best has to be based on strong foundations that support physical and mental health. The two most impactful actions we can take to support good wellbeing at work is ensuring people have access to high quality leaders who are proactive in managing their team and their own wellbeing, and that they have access to the right balance of great quality work.

Our firm's 2027 strategy is enabled by growing and encouraging leadership development capability, which supports adaptive, diverse and thriving communities across the firm. The programmes and initiatives that support this objective enhance the wellbeing of not just our leaders but all of our people.

Ashurst was one of the first law firms to become a signatory to the Mindful Business Charter, which represents a collective commitment to identify and remove unnecessary sources of stress and promotes better mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. We use the charter's four pillars of Openness and Respect, Mindful Delegation, Smart Meetings and Mailings, and Respecting Rest Periods to promote and enable conversations on these topics and to encourage positive change in the relationships we have with our people, clients and suppliers. We promote and enable sustainable working practices through our in-house resourcing tool, ART, and by employing resource managers to better manage workloads within and among teams.

As part of building a culture of wellbeing, we have an active network of wellbeing allies, who are trained to support colleagues experiencing distress and guide them to further support. That includes our global employee assistance programme, access to medical support including on-site counselling and doctors in some offices, and a range of other health benefits.

Our governance bodies are regularly apprised of our actions and the effectiveness of both our wellbeing and inclusion and diversity programmes.