Change the culture: our 2025 focus

Our Equality and Diversity Manager, Elaine MacGlone, explains our theme for 2025 and why it's so important to businesses.

We want to start 2025 by sharing our overarching theme for the year – change the culture. You will find it peppered throughout our work this year, as we endeavour to explore what it means and how we can all work together to make change.

This is particularly timely with equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives being rolled back by some organisations and governments. Yet, we remain fully committed to helping all our members to thrive within the profession and this year's theme reflects that.

Our research and engagement with the legal profession in Scotland consistently highlights that workplace culture has the biggest impact on EDI in the sector. In our 2023 Profile of the Profession research, workplace culture was cited as an issue across a number of areas, including:

• The impact on work-life balance: The “always available” work culture is problematic and causes a negative impact on mental health. 69% of respondents reported poor work-life balance as a reason why they considered leaving the profession.
• An unsupportive environment: This affects the reporting of instances of bullying, harassment, and other hostile behaviour in the workplace, with respondents feeling discouraged from reporting due to a fear of reprisals.
• Women leaving the profession: 20% of respondents identified the established structure and culture of organisations as one of the top three reasons for women to leave the legal profession in their 30s and 40s.

Why does workplace culture matter to businesses?

Workplace culture has a significant impact on attracting and retaining a motivated and productive workforce. The workforce in any organisation is the key to a successful business, particularly in the legal profession, which relies on teamwork and great interpersonal relationships.

A negative or unsupportive culture can lead to people being unable or unwilling to change and adopt new ways of working. Processes and policies intended to improve diversity within an organisation require a work culture that supports and enables colleagues to adopt these. Workers who are discouraged from, or afraid to try, new ways of working will stifle innovation.

Making the change

While changing a workplace culture sounds daunting, small steps can start the change.

One area to consider is  fostering a culture of transparency within the workplace. This could include adopting a culture of  pay transparency, with salary information included in job adverts when recruiting.

Research by Reed suggests as many as four-fifths of potential candidates are less likely to apply for a role if the salary range is not included. This means  organisations that don’t could be missing out on the best candidates for their vacancies.

For existing employees, publishing information on salary bands and the factors included in setting them provides clarity to all and fosters a culture of trust between employees and the employer. It can have a positive impact on reducing a gender pay gap and may help retain staff who can see a clear pathway to developing their careers with their current employer, rather than moving to a new organisation.

We’d love to hear your experiences of changing the culture in your workplace to help keep the conversation flowing around this important topic. Please do get in touch at diversity@lawscot.org.uk.