As part of the EDI team’s activities, Mike Thakoordin, TransFIRe Post-doctoral Research Associate at Durham University, undertakes a number of site visits to companies within the foundation industries. This month has been extremely busy with several visits across the country.
With each visit, as well as getting to know more about the company and its inputs and outputs, Mike looks to determine the level of awareness of EDI within the organisation, what the main challenges are, if and how they have tackled these, what the outcome of this has been and what the future plans are.
Over the past few weeks visits have been made to Tandom, a specialist metals recycling company, Breedon Cement, Almath Crucibles, the Materials Processing Institute (online) and Constellium. Each organisation has its own unique approach to EDI and set of plans, some with little activity and others with some impressive ideas and ways of working.
Often companies within the foundation industries tend to attract employees from a traditional demographic and a change of mindset is required to create a more dynamic image and sector. We hope by speaking to a range of different individuals and organisations that we can pull together the very best case studies and examples of best practise and collate these in an EDI Playbook to share across the board to help address these challenges.
Following on from the site visits, some of the organisations become members of the TransFIRe EDI working group. The working group guides our priorities, captures best practices and helps us to build connections to organisations and people championing EDI within the foundation industries.
If you are interested in having a site visit, becoming part of the EDI working group or finding out more about EDI, then please contact us on michael.thakoordin@durham.ac.uk.