Culture+ is your pathway to an inclusive culture

In today’s competitive engineering landscape, growing businesses face challenges that can stall progress. We know that a focus on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) can be a powerful strategy to navigate these obstacles.

That’s why we created Culture+; a tailored solution designed with industry leaders to help businesses like yours cultivate an inclusive, high-performing culture.

With practical tools and real-time insights, Culture+ guides the development of inclusive behaviours and uses 360° feedback to track progress, offering actionable data to address organisational risks and drive lasting change. It’s the only EDI solution designed specifically to meet the unique needs of engineering startups, scale-ups, and SMEs.

How can Culture+ help you build a world class team?

• Inclusive Hiring: Attract top talent with equitable recruitment processes, helping you build a diverse and talented team from the start.
• Boost Employee Growth: Develop your team’s skills with personalised, bite-sized learning modules that fit seamlessly into their busy schedules.
• Expert Policy Guidance: Create fair, effective workplace policies aligned to your values and industry best practices.
• Measure Impact: Demonstrate ROI with quarterly reports that track progress and provide data-driven insights to refine your initiatives.
• Create a Sense of Belonging: Foster a culture of psychological safety where everyone feels empowered to contribute, challenge, and problem-solve, without exception.
• Leadership Transformation: Equip leaders and managers with the tools and insights needed to adopt inclusive behaviours.

Your pathway to an inclusive, high-performing team

Inclusive teams are innovative teams. Research has consistently shown the benefits of diversity and inclusion:

• Organisations with diverse and inclusive leaders are 70% more likely to have captured a new market in the past 12 months and 45% more likely to have increased market share compared to organisations with few or no diverse and inclusive leaders.
• Over 90% of the employers asked by PwC about the value of LGBTQ+ to businesses believe that being out in the workplace has had a positive impact on their talent's ability to do business and engage with customers.
• The potential benefit to the UK economy from full representation of Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups across the labour market through improved participation and progression is estimated to be £24 billion a year, which represents 1.3% of GDP.
• When employees feel their organisation is committed to diversity and they feel included, the ability to innovate is increased by more than 80%, responsiveness to changing customer needs is increased by more than 30%, and team collaboration is increased by more than 40%.

Culture+ will help you on your journey to creating and maintaining an inclusive team by helping you to identify any barriers you and your organisation may be facing, giving you practical tools to help overcome those barriers, and measuring your progress. It’s a platform designed to give you holistic support, growing and evolving with your company.

About Culture+

Developed especially for the engineering industry, Culture+ supports startups, scaleups, and SMEs as they embed diversity and inclusion best practice. The simple, interactive platform encourages and supports employees to develop everyday habits that are essential to build inclusive cultures and puts a range of useful resources at your fingertips.

To create this ambitious new product, we have partnered with The Honeycomb Works. Their mission is for everyone at work to feel like they belong and are free to invent. Using science, technology, and data, they focus on behaviour change. Together with the Academy’s understanding of the specific needs of engineering companies and ways of working, it is a transformative partnership.

The Royal Academy of Engineering subsidises the first year on the platform to all company employees for Enterprise Hub Members and awardees.

Background

In 2019, the Royal Academy of Engineering embarked on a research project looking into the diversity and inclusion needs and resources available to small and medium sized engineering organisations in the UK. The research suggested SMEs and micros (start-ups and scale-ups) have very different needs and a different level of understanding of diversity and inclusion when compared to larger companies. They often lack resource, have significant competing priorities and struggle to understand how to make diversity and inclusion the focus of their work. Despite accounting for 99% of all private sector businesses our analysis suggests that SMEs and micros are underserved when it comes to diversity and inclusion support, meaning that a huge proportion of workers and companies are not realising the benefits that greater diversity and inclusion can bring.

Culture+ empowers engineering startups, scaleups, and SMEs to build inclusive cultures that drive sustainable growth.

Our platform is designed to fit seamlessly into your day-to-day, fostering inclusive habits that don’t demand extra time and deliver exceptional rewards: better employee experiences, more innovative products, stronger partnerships, and reduced risks.