Hello Learning & Diversity!

In 2019 we developed our ‘Precis Principles’; these are 8 principles that guide our behaviour, define our culture and challenge us to constantly develop. In early 2020 we set up an aim to work through every single principle during the year to ensure we were not only aligning with it but also pushing ourselves to develop further. During January to March, we have been deep-diving into two of the principles and this is our retrospective of what we did and how things went.

The two principles we decided to focus on during Q1 were, “we have curiosity at heart and strive to always learn” and “we know excellence thrives in joyful and diverse environments”. How did we do it?

• We challenged our management team to come up with at least one solution to increase learning within Precis.
• We challenged our culture group to investigate and understand better how we are doing as a company when it comes to Diversity, Inclusion and Gender Equality.
• We challenged all our teams to find their own way of increasing learning within their team.
• We challenged our managers to reflect on how prejudice and pre-made up perceptions can influence leadership and how to work to counter these potential themes .
• And we challenged each and everyone at Precis to reflect on their own position in regards to norms and majorities in society.

Quite a lot of challenges going on within different groups and areas of the company and on top of that, we decided that we wanted to use different types of media to highlight these principles even more. We did that by:

• Starting our very own internal podcast wherein the first episode our Copenhagen CEO got interviewed on his view on the two principles and why they are important to us. The second episode is an interview with our group CEO on why our partner group is mostly comprised of white men.
• Having one of our mentorship pairs writing an internal blog post about how and what they have learnt from being in the mentorship program.
• Organising after works at all our offices on the theme of learning – which resulted in everything from that Stockholm was trained in the art of magic and Copenhagen visited
• Exprimentarium to have a play around with all the experiments available at the site.
• Hosting Precis Academies (where we invite interesting speakers to host session) on the topic of Diversity & Inclusion. Here, corona has set us back a bit, but we are looking forward to having these the coming weeks.

With all that (mostly) behind us – it’s time to reflect a bit on how things went. All in all, it’s been a quite intense quarter with a lot of things happening but at the same time, it’s been great to see a lot of people being involved and pushing us to get closer to our principles. Some learnings that we have drawn are:

• While it’s been great to have an ambitious plan for our work with the principles we will change things up a bit for the next period to allow for more organic initiatives. As we are a company that is comprised of a lot of engaged people we need to adjust our way of working to use that strength even more. For the next round, we will gather people from all our offices to be engaged as cultural ambassadors with the aim to bring our principles to life in more locally tailored ways.
• Having worked with both Learning & Diversity quite intensely – there is more to be done! While solving our challenges and focusing on the areas has brought us forward, we have also realized how much more there is to get to. For as many things we have worked with, there is at least an equal number of things we have to discover that we should put on our todo list. And even though we will move on to work with a new set of principles in the coming months those discovered tasks will continue to be worked on. We are for example looking forward to launching a fully new Precis training platform and creating an in-depth diversity & inclusion report and action plan.
• When we focus – we get somewhere. It’s very obvious that having this focus together has to lead to a lot of new initiatives that will bring us closer to our principles. This goes to show that putting something in focus and working on it jointly generates results, hence we feel very sure that keeping this workup for the rest of the year will push us to not only do great work for our clients but also to do so for ourselves.

A big thanks to everyone at Precis who has been engaged in this during Q1, you have all done stellar work and ensured that we truly have taken on the responsibility to make Precis a really nice place to be, work and develop within. If you are working with a similar project in your organisation – feel free to reach out if you want to discuss or exchange experiences and ideas!