The Victoria & Albert Museums, “the V&A”, are an Internationally renowned family of art, design and performance museums, where everyone is invited to enjoy the power of creativity.
In 2021, the V&A created a new organisational strategy, which included an objective to create an inclusive workplace culture and a refresh of the organisation’s values and behaviours. This refresh included equity among the five values which have become an important focus for all of the EDI work.
We interviewed Ali Jafarey, the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead within the Victoria & Albert Museum since 2021, to learn more about the EDI activity at the V&A. We home in on the Inclusivity Ambassador programme designed and built for senior leaders, delivered with the support of an external consultant. We learn more about the rationale behind focusing on senior leadership as a critical group to drive change and the need to embed EDI work into both wider strategies and everyday decisions.
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What are your motivations for addressing diversity and inclusion within your organisation?
There are a number of motivations, both internal and external. Obvious external factors are the societal changes happening within the UK and across the world. There have been a few points of escalation that have been pivotal moments including the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
These external factors have driven not just the V&A, but a lot of organisations to look internally at their support for and promotion of equality, diversity and inclusion within not just the organisation but also across the sector. There is also an overwhelming moral case in that it's not just something that's essential, but it's the right thing to do.
What are you aiming to achieve through your EDI work at the V&A?
We're aiming to do a number of things. One of them is to reach more audiences that we've not reached before—principally those under the Equality Act described as protected groups. We've realised that some of those audiences and also people that work for us aren't fully represented. So, we need to increase the diversity of our workforce and then support an inclusive practice, organisation and culture.
We are a publicly funded organisation and as a museum, we need to be able to demonstrate that we are inclusive across all of the products and services that we deliver via exhibitions, collections, and learning opportunities etc.
What are some of the more practical drivers for the V&A to deliver its EDI work?
If we're not compliant on a legislative basis with all practice—good practice—around equality, then it would be detrimental to the organisation.
So, in order for us to promote EDI in the sector and across the whole of the country to our new audiences or to the audiences that we haven't fully included, we need to be transparent in what we do and we need to be able to show that we are doing this from a position of authenticity and genuine drive.
There is also the financial aspect, which isn't the main reason why we're doing this. However, it's always good, as a public-funded organisation, to be able to generate income, either through ticket sales or just people coming to the organisation and spending in the institution. It's not the biggest driver, but it certainly helps us to be a much more independent organisation and be able to deliver a wider range of activities that support the work we do around EDI. It means we can do this as a much more holistic enterprise.
We are one of the most influential museums in the world and as such, we have a duty and a responsibility to be not just accountable on all the areas that I've mentioned, but to be a beacon of best practice. We need to be pioneering new initiatives, pioneering new work and going into areas we haven't necessarily been before.
Could you tell us more about your EDI work around leadership?
There are a number of areas of good practice that are evident across many organisations such as EDI leads or directors of EDI. What we did was to take a long view to see what is working and identify which changes have made impacts across the organisation. With our leadership, like the leadership across most big institutions across the UK, there is disparity and this disparity is evident across a few areas. both those I described in terms of representation and those in terms of EDI cultural intelligence. Also, we progressed this work in a methodical, pragmatic way that has meaning and value rather than one that is simply done because everybody else is doing it.
As a project in development we needed to gather evidence and to provide a coherent strategy and plan. What we found was needed was to identify senior individuals across the organisation who could champion EDI. We wanted to engage the people who are making decisions around programming, curating, learning, the wider work we do, and representation so that EDI is embedded throughout the organisation and not just through our EDI practitioners.
So, we enlisted senior leaders from across our different divisions to participate in an Inclusivity Ambassador programme. There were 12 people from across all divisions, all in senior management positions. It was a year-long programme that involved multi-form training, online and in person. It also included coaching, mentoring and additional resources to support learning. One of the most important aspects was carving out time in senior leader’s schedules so that they could participate. This took both expert planning and buy in from all that were involved.
What are some of the outcomes you’re seeing from the Inclusivity Ambassador programme?
There were two main outcomes. One is empowering the participants to have conversations with both internal members and also externally so they can now position the EDI conversation confidently. For example, we had a senior leader who had an employee who they found had specific needs around EDI. The senior leader initially felt apprehensive in managing that relationship and didn't really know how to respond. The senior leader told me that the confidence they got from being on the programme completely shifted the dynamic of the relationship in a positive and significant way. That's the kind of impact the programme can have.
The second one was really pragmatic and practical. I developed an EDI strategy in 2021 and part of that strategy was a delivery plan detailing how we were going to deliver on the strategy and objectives. Each Inclusivity Ambassador was tasked to design their own divisional EDI action plan with a set of objectives, time frames and outputs related to that delivery plan for their own area of the business. A lot of the Inclusivity Ambassadors are now working together to look at how to translate and deliver on the common themes they have focused on.
What challenges, barriers or limitations have you experienced when delivering this programme?
As I said earlier, for this programme, we only recruit from our senior leadership. So, initially I recruited through an open recruitment process to the senior management team. One of the key learnings from the first cohort is that we need to recruit more people who don't want to put their hand up.
We need to engage people who aren't like me and who don't have the same way of thinking as me. So, if we run a second cohort, my advice is that we ask people who haven’t yet got a focused intent to come on board. It will be interesting but it will be a challenge.
How did you engage senior leaders with the programme?
Firstly, the business case I mentioned. This was outlined in all the discussions I had and the presentations I gave to the executive board and the senior leadership. I demonstrated that there's a moral case and there's also a financial business case.
Secondly, we did a full employee engagement survey in 2022 and within that, I incorporated a number of EDI and wellbeing questions, which meant we were able to understand people's thoughts and feelings about EDI in real detail. The survey covered 1,000 people across the organisation. We did a presentation to the whole of the organisation to give a snapshot of where we were on a range of EDI related matters. It was actually a lot better than was thought before we had the data, but nevertheless, it was a useful benchmark. We then started the whole programme of work around the delivery of the EDI strategy.
What methods are you using to measure the success of your EDI work?
When our pulse survey came out in 2024, there was an overwhelming increase in the number of people who were much more confident about the EDI work going on. This is a practical manifestation of the mitigating actions we've put in place.
Also, each participant on the Inclusivity Ambassadors programme, took part in live, full-day training sessions around a particular EDI topic, a coaching session, a mentoring session and action learning sets. Each action learning set had a built-in evaluation and each one was tracked. Monitoring the change in peoples’ perspectives about our EDI was remarkable.
We used a mentimeter, which is a very dynamic and useful way of measuring a person's immediate reaction— and from a psychological perspective, your immediate reaction is believed to be your most authentic. So, it was really important that we had a mechanism to judge authentic responses within our evaluation process. The diagrams and the graphics that we've produced in the evaluation show that the shift has been huge on an individual learning basis.
What advice or key learning would you share with other organisations considering delivering similar initiatives?
When you’re working with senior management, there is always going to be a something critical happening somewhere else —"I'm afraid I can't attend because". So, consider the time levering senior management will take and plan for their engagement well in advance. Also, if you recruit somebody to deliver your leadership development, ensure that they are experienced and multi-skilled. A lot of people working in this space are quite fresh and new, so find somebody with a bit of longevity where experience and maturity can be brought to the table, our senior leaders appreciated this deeper level of understanding and engagement with their development.
Feeling inspired and want to learn more? Click here to dive deeper into the V&A’s ever-evolving EDI strategy.
