George Floyd’s Murder Has Had Little Impact On Racial Diversity. What More Can Companies Do?

Improving ethnic and racial diversity and social mobility in the business world has been a painfully slow process, and that is particularly true for real estate.

That doesn’t mean that change isn’t possible, but the data for real estate is stark.

Only 3% of a group of real estate pros surveyed by recruitment firm Granger Reis thought real estate is more diverse than other industries. And when it comes to pay, Black real estate pros fell further behind, continuing a trend of the last several years, a Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors-backed survey found. 

Global news events that many hoped would precipitate change have come and gone with little impact.

“One thing I've been tracking for the last two years are the companies that made statements back in June and July 2020,” British Land Head of Employee Relations, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Ade Onagoruwa told the audience of the Bisnow Rise UK event last week, referring to the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the protests that coalesced around the Black Lives Matter movement.

“It's kind of an obsession, actually,” Onagoruwa said. “And many of them have done nothing since those statements.”

Since 2020, Bisnow has pursued a multi-year investigative project that examines the diversity of the boards and executive leadership of the biggest companies in U.S. commercial real estate.

The project found CRE made limited progress on diversity In 2022. The percentage of people of colour in the C-suites and executive teams across 89 of the largest firms in the industry — spanning brokerages, lenders and asset managers, REITs and private developers — rose from 10.9% to 11.6% year-over-year. People of colour now make up 18.3% of board seats, up from 16.4% last year.

The event, held at The Office Group’s Black & White Building in Shoreditch and attended by a diverse mix of more than 150 professionals from across the built environment, heard about many of UK real estate’s shortcomings when it comes to ethnic diversity.

It also witnessed an open and honest conversation about the areas that need to be addressed. Crucially, it also heard some of the solutions that are providing tangible success in addressing the shortfall in workers from ethnic minority and lower-income backgrounds. 

Multiple firms were honoured as part of the Bisnow Rise initiative, which seeks to highlight those firms at the leading edge of improving ethnic and social diversity in real estate. (Read about the firms highlighted here.)

Many of the programmes spotlighted provided live examples of how to get a more diverse array of people into the industry and stop them falling out of the sector when they reach a pinch point in middle management. 

The audience heard from companies at various stages of the diversity journey. The advice for those just beginning was to start small and start collecting as much data as possible to measure if the strategies put in place are actually working. 

“The worst thing you could do is pretend everything is amazing,” Granger Reis Head of Technology and Innovation Esmeé Vermolen said. “Acknowledge where you currently are and say, 'This is our plan.' And then along the way, be transparent about what is or isn't working.”

Becoming a more diverse organisation can seem a daunting and distant goal, the audience heard. Better to break the process down into small steps that are more easily achieved — collect data, decide what your ambitions are, set a small target, start a conversation in your company — to bring that larger goal within closer reach.

“I saw it with a previous employer where over a number of years, more and more people came onto the programme, and the word spread,” CBRE Investment Management Senior People Business Partner Steven Sinclair said.

CBRE IM’s partnership with ELBA Eagles, a social mobility recruitment programme run by the East London Business Alliance, was one of the initiatives honoured at Rise.  

“The people themselves, they go back to their communities, talk about our company, talk about the previous employer and say, 'Look, you can get opportunities in these environments,'" Sinclair said. "And these jobs can be life-changing, both for those individuals and for the companies that hire them. ”

In 2022, 30% of junior staff joining CBRE IM came directly from the ELBA Eagles programme, Sinclair said. 

Both Onagoruwa and Vermolen said involving the whole company in the process of improving diversity was key, rather than it being the job of an individual or small group. Getting everyone involved means that diversity does not become a separate issue from the rest of the business and helps make the widespread cultural change critical to ensuring diverse staff are recruited and retained as well. 

“At British Land, we have 10 employee networks created by employees,” Onagoruwa said. “All we do as a business is give them the framework to start.”

Attendees heard from panellists and honourees who have been working hard and seeing success in broadening the base of talent from which they recruit, particularly in junior positions. 

CBRE was honoured for a work experience programme, Gensler for a bursary programme, Mount Anvil for an outreach programme to children, Savills for an apprenticeship programme, and Seaforth Land for a scholarship award.

“I think apprenticeships are a great way to grow your own talent,” Savills Professional Apprenticeship Manager Serena Phillips said. “I think it is a real way to diversify your business because you can start very young with an apprentice.”

The number of divisions of Savills that offer apprenticeships has grown from two to 15 in the past eight years, she said.  

Gensler offers a £10K Diversity in Design bursary for students, cognisant that seven-year architecture degrees are long and expensive.

As part of a suite of measures, Gensler’s new-hire statistics for people from diverse backgrounds and people of colour was 17% in 2020, a figure which has risen to 51% in 2023. 

The event also addressed the fact that while the intake into real estate may be broadening, senior levels are diversifying at a slower pace, with many diverse professionals not advancing into and beyond middle management. 

Panellists put this down to the unconscious bias and those doing the hiring being drawn to people like themselves. 

“Stop hiring people that have either the same name as you or look exactly like you,” Granger Reis’ Vermolen said.

That can often be easier said than done, especially in market-facing roles like investment sales, where there is very little time to learn on the job. If someone is hiring an investment broker, the company needs the new employee to hit the ground running. The safest way of doing that is to hire someone already doing something similar. Given the current demographic makeup of real estate, that is probably a white man. 

But there are strategies that can help with this. Unconscious bias training can be useful, and Onagoruwa said that those doing the hiring, whether they are middle managers or hiring professionals, need the support of senior managers if they are to do things differently from how they have always been done. 

“Sometimes they make decisions without the full support of the organisation, and they are left on their own,” he said. “And so there is something to be said about supporting the hiring manager, so he or she has that power to make key decisions that will have an impact on the organisation.”

The JLL diversity programme honoured at the event, JLL Thrive, seeks to address failure to help diverse staff advance to more senior roles. It is a coaching programme that focuses on engaging people approaching the director level or senior profession level, where representation tends to drop off.

Individuals accepted to join the scheme are paired with a senior sponsor and take part in individual and group workshops as well as coaching circles, and their line manager is included in the programme as well.

To date, 120 people have participated in Thrive and 22% have moved roles internally. 

“Don't be afraid. Get out there, make some waves, challenge people,” JLL Head of Learning & Development UK and Ireland Jennifer Jones told the attendees. “Some people won't like this. But hey, you just move forward, and that is how we achieve change.”