Inclusivity at CMR
Our mission is to make the benefits of minimal access surgery available to everyone who needs it. We care about our patients, customers and colleagues. We respect and value each other’s opinions and we embrace our differences making them our strength.
We are committed to focusing on diversity and inclusion. We have started the journey and will learn together, as we grow and as society and the world changes around us, to embed and nurture an authentic culture of diversity, inclusion, and belonging ensuring that everyone feels comfortable to bring their authentic self to work.
What we stand for
Our diversity, inclusion and belonging commitments
Attracting a diverse candidate pool
We need to have a workforce that can meet and understand the needs of a diverse range of customers. We are proud to have a diverse group of employees from around the world supporting our work globally. By all coming with our different perspectives, we can think differently and deliver stronger innovation and progress to CMR and the community we serve.
We are actively working on ways to recruit people from different backgrounds, including ensuring job descriptions use inclusive language, utilising tailored job boards for all vacancies. As members of the Disability Confident Scheme, we’ve committed to thinking differently about disability, ensuring that everyone who wants to work with us is given equal opportunity through inclusive and accessible recruitment and development initiatives.
Ensuring all employees have a voice
We want to hear everyone’s views, opinions, and questions, we want to make sure we are challenged, and we want to make sure that everyone is heard. We can’t be an inclusive place of work until every individual feels they have a voice, which is why we conduct regular engagement surveys to ensure we have a continuous feedback loop with our people. We have also established active employee resource groups (ERG’s) covering gender equality, disability, ethnicity, social mobility, LGBTQIA+ and the environment for our people to champion meaningful change within the organisation.
Showing respect to one another is at the core of CMR’s values and is an essential element of an enjoyable and productive working environment. Everyone should be able to be heard and contribute, no matter what their role, background or personal characteristics.
Having leaders who champion inclusivity
We encourage our leaders to lead by example. We pride ourselves on our open, honest, and transparent culture, a culture where we are open to challenges. We support our current and future leaders by providing dedicated leadership and inclusion training, to ensure they are well equipped to cultivate a supportive and inclusive working environment for everyone at CMR.
Our leaders embrace our company culture of openness and transparency, with regular open forum Q&A’s during our monthly company meetings and CEO updates. Our leadership team champion the efforts of our ERG’s at the highest level, and ensure DIB is regularly built into and prioritised on their meeting agendas.
Providing employees with tools and support
We want everyone to feel welcome and supported at CMR, which is why we have introduced inclusive policies globally to support an improved work-life balance. Under our global leave policy, employees can take a personal leave day annually, and time off for things like fertility cycles, miscarriage, and mental health, and are proud signatories of the Menopause Workplace Pledge. We also offer all employees enhanced parental leave for both primary and secondary caregivers to support them as their families grow.
We are proud to offer mental health support in the form of access to Headspace for all our employees and have Mental Health First Aiders trained through Mind across the organisation, providing care for those that need it, when they need it. The tools and support may vary across the globe, but everyone should be able to access what they need.
Learning, sharing and educating
We know that we are only just beginning our diversity, inclusion and belonging journey and we want to make sure we keep striving to learn, grow and better ourselves as an organisation. We want to make sure we know how we are doing and are transparent about our progress, so we will share how diverse and inclusive our efforts are making us, and be honest about where we still have work to do. We conduct employee engagement surveys and have begun collecting voluntary employee demographic data, which we will use to benchmark ourselves and ensure we are continually working to make CMR a more diverse and inclusive workplace.
We warmly welcome a regular rotation of inspiring guest speakers, who educate us, challenge our perspective, and drive the conversation about representation and inclusivity in the workplace. We have introduced mandatory unconscious bias training to all staff to make sure the entire CMR team is well equipped to be as inclusive as possible, and our ERG’s are leading the way in driving change within the organisation to make CMR a better place.
Human skill, redefined
CMR Surgical is proud to be a Gold Partner of ParalympicsGB. We are passionate about pushing boundaries – enhancing immense human skill with technology to deliver the best surgical care.
All of the ParalympicsGB athletes inspire us with their ground-breaking accomplishments and commitment to always doing more, and push us to reset our expectations of human ability.
Disability Confident Employer Scheme
The Disability Confident Employer Scheme encourages us to think differently about disability and requires us to change how we recruit, retain and develop people with disabilities, through inclusive and accessible recruitment initiatives. These include expanding on how we communicate vacancies, providing reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process, supporting candidates with disabilities to get to the interview stage and supporting our existing employees where needed.
While this is just the start, it is an exciting step forward for us as we strive to be as inclusive as we can be in everything we do and are looking for comparable schemes to support our recruitment efforts globally. You can read more about the scheme here.