You’ll have heard us talk about how working with us could generate over £400,000 in monetised social value, but how exactly have we come to that number and what does it mean? This article will take you through the numbers and the reasoning – which is why it’s on the long side!
At Simply Equality we are big believers in showing your workings. However, we’re also aware that when you’re reading a proposal it can be overwhelming to have several pages of appendices telling you how we’ve come up with our figures. That’s why we thought it would be a great idea to show you how we have calculated our social value in this blog post. It’ll give you an understanding of our work, and also provides a helpful framework for your own measurements.
What is the claim?
Working with us moves organisations from awareness to acceptance, going beyond simple understanding of an issue to actually generating change. As an organisation, the social value of working with us will vary and we can work with you to more accurately calculate your social ROI.
In an organisation of 1000 people, working with us could generate over £400,000 in monetised social value. And if you look into specific elements of improved job quality, that number grows.
How did we get here?
The first thing we needed to do was try and get a rough estimate of the number of disabled and LGBTQIA+ people at an organisation. In an ideal world and for a more accurate idea of the value we could bring, organisations should use existing data on disabled and/or LGBTQIA+ people in the workplace. If you want to work with us to do this, get in touch!
Without access to concrete data, we needed a way to come up with a realistic estimate of the amount of disabled and/or LGBTQIA+ people in an organisation. An easy metric, would be to use the statistic that around one in four working age adults in the UK have a disability. So to find the number of disabled people, we would simply work out ¼ of 1000.
However, we also know that disabled people are twice as likely to be unemployed as non-disabled people in the UK. So let’s assume that you only have about half of that in your organisations – this gives us 1/8 of 1000 people which is around 125 disabled employees.
Figures on LGBT+ people of working age vary depending on age group from 9.2% to 1%. So we decided to use 4% as a our estimate to keep things reasonably conservative. That would give us 40 LGBTQ+ staff. We could simply add 125 to 40 which would give us a total of 165 disabled and/or LGBTQIA+ people, except that this doesn’t account for the overlap between the two.
According to the 2021 UK census data, LGB+ people were more likely to be disabled than the general population of England and Wales. Though the age profile for LGB+ people was younger than average, 28.8% of LGB+ people were disabled compared to 20.1% of the population. However, within the community, 34.1% of bisexuals and 36.1% of people who selected “other sexual orientations” were disabled. When we look at young people, the differences are even more stark. Among 16 to 24 year olds, 32.4% of LGB+ people were disabled compared to 12.6% of the general population at the same age. Trans people are almost twice as likely to be disabled as their cis counterparts.
A general percentage is that about 24% of LGBT+ people are disabled, and in the UK around 6% of disabled people identify as LGBT+. So of our 40 LGBTQIA+ staff, there are probably around 10 who are also disabled and in terms of disability around 8 who would identify as LGBT. Therefore our conservative estimate is that we’re dealing with around 147 disabled and/or LGBTQIA+ people in an organisation of 1000 people.
When we are creating inclusive workplaces, we have to think about all the elements of someone – especially with disability and LGBTQIA+ inclusion. Younger people look for inclusive workplaces, but all of us benefit from a workplace where we are supported.
Back to the calculations.
According to data from Measure-Up (and accounting for 2023 inflation) the monetised wellbeing value for an improved Workplace Quality is £4,300 per person over the year.
So in this example, we assume that around 147 people are either disabled or LGBTQAI+ or both. Therefore, at bronze level of Measure Up, we can estimate the monetised social value as:
147 * £4,300 = £632,100
This assumes we are responsible for 100% of the change, which is unlikely. There will be factors from within the organisation as well as national and global impacts. That’s why we opt to calculate our initial estimate at 70% of that value, giving us a result of £442,470. That’s still a hefty impact. This gives us our bronze level estimate of monetized social value.
But we decided to go one step further.
The silver calculation is more involved (and we’ll still be using the population numbers from the previous estimate) and allows us to dig into the impact of tackling the measures individually and then combines this to get the full sum.
The positive monetary impact vs the potential loss
The silver calculation explores the different components of Workplace Quality, each with their own negative or positive monetised wellbeing value. The nine components of workplace quality are:
- Job is secure (£3509)
- Good opportunities for promotion (£3784)
- Job has high autonomy (£3509)
- High variety in work (£3830)
- Co-workers are supportive (£3830)
- High time pressure (-£1684)
- Job prevents giving time to family/partner (-£7461)
- Worry about work when not working (-£4821)
- Job is dangerous (-£5661)
Our work aims to foster cultures where there are good opportunities for promotion, individuals have supportive co-workers, the job is safe (psychologically speaking) and no one has to worry about work when not working.
Good opportunity for promotion
Our interventions aim to improve opportunities for promotion by tackling systemic and attitudinal barriers that prevent disabled and LGBTQIA+ people rising within an organisation. 85% of LGBTQ+ people have experienced at least one significant barrier in their career due to being LGBTQ+.
In terms of career progression in the UK according to 2021 data, 50.5% of disabled women felt there were no opportunities for career progression compared to 43.4% of non-disabled women. 50.6% of disabled men felt there were no opportunities for career progression compared to 39.4% of non-disabled men.
It’s clear that both disabled and LGBTQIA+ people (and remember there is significant overlap between these two groups) need things to change. Creating good opportunity for promotion often requires cultural and systemic change. Without an inclusive culture, organisational policy and procedures fall flat. You can have policies that promote inclusive recruitment practices, but if you aren’t challenging bias in reward process or you aren’t even aware of them in the first place then none of that will matter.
When we work with organisations, we want to enable a cultural shift. We want people to “actively reflect on plans and intended requests from [their] teams … to ensure [they are] considering possible neurodiversity” (quote from feedback received at 3 month survey). This shows that people are taking steps to build inclusive practice in their day-to-day lives.
If we create good opportunity for promotion, the social value for that is:
147 * £3784 = £556,248
As before, there are likely to be external factors that influence this so we can’t take 100% of the credit. 70% of the value will give us a result of £389,373.60. That is what your organisation stands to gain by work with us.
82% of LGBTQ+ people received no training to enable them to address barriers specific to their career progression at work. That’s why we offer a coaching service to support disabled and LGBTQIA+ individuals. We give them the skills to be able to work with their identities, not against them.
Of course, it isn’t just about individuals, but also organisations. Employers need to ensure that staff are appropriately trained to not just recognise but challenge their own biases. They need to invest in training and education that empowers individuals to take action, and that builds inclusive cultures.
Individual has supportive co-workers
Many of us have at one point or another said something along the lines of “I hate my job but I love my coworkers.” We spend a huge amount of our lives at work, it’s no wonder that our coworkers have a huge impact on our wellbeing.
The benefit of co-workers being supportive is huge. For each person that has supportive co-workers, there is around £4,059 of monetised social wellbeing generated.
According to survey data, following training from Simply Equality, survey respondents consistently indicate that they feel empowered to support their colleagues in the workplace.
The monetised social value of our work in this area is:
147 * £4059 = £596,673
70% of this value would give us a final result of £417,671.10. We all deserve to feel supported at work, but often LGBTQIA+ and disabled people aren’t. That’s why we work with organisations to change this.
Worry about work when not working
When we look at social value, it’s not just gains but also potential losses. When work starts to bleed into our personal lives, it can be hugely detrimental on an individual and organisational level.
The loss in terms of monetary social value when people are worrying about work outside of work, is £4,821 over the course of a year per person. For 147 people, that amounts to £708,687 per year of loss. When we create inclusive cultures and practices, people can switch off – they don’t have to worry about work when they aren’t working.
There are certain factors outside of our control, and a large reason people think about work outside of working hours is down to workload. As marginalised people, often it’s not just workload that stays with us. It can be microaggressions in the workplace, the odd comment here or there that is ableist or transphobic or both. It can be not having the support you need to thrive. It can be attitudes and culture.
Therefore, we estimate that our work addresses about 50% of the worry, which means we could save you £354,343.50 per year.
Job is dangerous
When we think of danger, many of us think of physical danger. But in this context, we’re talking about psychological danger as well. Employers in the UK have a duty to consider both psychological and physical wellbeing (and as two disabled people, the two can rarely be separated).
Without adequately considering the systemic and cultural barriers disabled and LGBTQIA+ people face in the workplace, we make work dangerous for them.
Someone who is non-disabled, cisgender and straight has significantly less to think about than a disabled, trans, LGB person. Firstly, as disabled people, we have to think about mobility aids, accessible transport and access to medication. As LGBTQIA+ people, we need to know if the environment is safe to be ‘out’ in and if it isn’t what the impacts of being temporarily closeted might be on our health.
If you see senior leadership posting ableist comments or anti-trans hate and this is allowed to go unchallenged- all of this can make people feel unsafe. And often, if you do not have the lived experience, it can be hard to spot ableism, transphobia, homophobia etc. Working in an environment where you are constantly worried that you will be judged or bullied for some part of your identity is not safe.
According to the TUC report of “Bullying, Harassment and discrimination of LGBT people in the workplace” over half of respondents indicated they had experienced at least one form of bullying or harassment at work in the last five years. 79% of trans respondents have experienced bullying at work. Four-in-ten respondents who had experienced bullying said that it impacted their mental health.
The biggest issues disabled people face at work is not getting the reasonable adjustments they needed according to “Bullying, harassment and discrimination of Disabled people in the workplace”. Over a third of polled disabled workers indicated that they did not feel comfortable talking about their health(including disability, impairment and long-term health conditions) with their manager or supervisor, with 29% indicating they were not comfortable talking about these things with their colleagues. Not being able to talk about these things, will result in workplaces being less safe for disabled people.
When a job is dangerous it results in a negative social value of £5,661 per person over the course of a year. If we look at a sample of 147 people, that could amount to a loss of £832,167 per year.
Improving safety at work for disabled and LGBTQIA+ people is heavily influenced by organisational culture and policy. We know that there are external influences that cannot be understated. So if we adjust for that and assume that our interventions will address 60% of the issue, then that leaves us with preventing a loss of £499,300.20 a year.
Limitations
An obvious limitation of this data, is that we’re extrapolating based on national trends and estimations of the amount of disabled and LGBTQIA+ people in an organisation of this size and assumes a fairly consistent distribution of disabled and LGBTQIA+ people across industries and sectors. We know that this isn’t the case, and that often when we look at actual organisational data, the numbers will look wildly different.
It’s our hope that this post not only provides insight into our own calculations but an example of how you can use this within your own organisation. Equity, Diversity and Inclusion work often get treated as an add-on, a “nice to have” rather than something that’s integral to your business.
But without it, you could be missing out on millions.
So what next?
If you want to make meaningful and lasting change, why not get in touch to see how we can support you? A partnership with us is just £5,000 + VAT but makes a big difference.
How are you measuring your social impact? And what do you want to improve in your company?