Why was a change needed?
When I first joined the Police Service over 25 years ago, let’s face it, it was a different time. There was a lot that went on in terms of the way women were poorly treated. However, as women’s roles in society progressed, I thought that women’s treatment in the workplace, and especially within policing, had progressed too and that outdated attitudes had disappeared.
Then Sarah Everard was murdered by a then-serving police officer, and of course there have also been other high-profile cases like the publishing of vile WhatsApp message exchanges among officers at Charing Cross Police Station.
To me in the Met, it felt like examples of bad behaviour, breaches of our really high standards, surfaced one after another. It was clear that not everyone in the Met held and lived by the same high standards that I know the vast majority of my colleagues do.
Not only did many of us feel unbelievably let down, but there was a sense of shock and even anger. When you’re faced with colleagues – in that period of shock – denying there’s a problem, it’s important to get the data to back up what I knew was the lived experience of many Met women.
Not only did many of us feel unbelievably let down, but there was a sense of shock and even anger. It’s important to get the data to back up what I knew was the lived experience of many Met women.
In policing we heard loud and clear from women that they were afraid to go out in our city. Internally we also heard loud and clear that some completely inappropriate behaviour was still happening, behaviour we believed we’d long left behind.
In 2018 I’d set up a group called the Network of Women, which was the Met’s first women’s network to support our officers and staff. This network helped me to bring together over 570 women from across the Met just two days after the vigil for Sarah Everard. I asked this group: how do we make women in London feel safer? Because the best ideas come from those actually on the ground.
While they came up with many good suggestions, during these conversations they also spoke about the challenges some of them face within the Met due to personal experiences of sexual harassment and misogyny. These women lacked trust and confidence in our reporting systems, hadn’t experienced supervisors managing these situations well and didn’t feel they were taken seriously by the Met.
After hearing this, I wanted to check to see if these opinions were truly representative; we’re a huge organisation of well over 45,000 people. I organised listening circles with far larger numbers of women and gathered more comprehensive data. This data showed this was in fact a very real problem.
I presented this information to the gender equality steering board chaired by our Deputy Commissioner, who’s a strong advocate for equality and standards, and I spoke about just how recent some of the stories were. I personally want a workplace environment that people enjoy being in, and I know the Met’s management board want this too. A place where people feel valued and can flourish, which couldn’t be the case if this culture wasn’t challenged.
How did you go about making a change?
I knew I’d have to bring everyone with me on this journey and not just let them know what the problem was, but also give them the tools to fix it themselves. Plus, I found a huge range of volunteers who wanted to be part of the solution for everyone in the Met and importantly the people we protect.
Thankfully, the Deputy Commissioner was really supportive of what I wanted to do. At that time, I was part of the Forward Institute’s Fellowship programme and Kate Simpson taught us about Systemcraft as part of this programme. I’d tried to bring about change in the past that hadn’t landed, and Kate opened my eyes to looking at this in a different way including by asking: what are the blockers of this change?
In the past in policing, I’ve often heard the answer suggested to a problem of “let’s write a policy” and “create a comms plan”, and now we’ve solved the problem. But that doesn’t bring about long-term change. We had to do something different.
I went to an action learning set with the Forward Institute where I was able to share this problem, and the group gave me great advice, which I put into practice. I knew a policy and strategy weren’t enough, and that we’d need to bring the majority of people with us to change a culture. We’d need to truly unpick this problem and it wouldn’t be resolved quickly. We’d need to address resistance as it arose.
Thankfully, the Board agreed with me and allowed me to move forward and take the reins on this work. With their support, I gathered a team of committed volunteers to spearhead this project. Many of the team had been personally impacted by these issues, including a team member who used to work with Wayne Couzens (Sarah Everard’s killer) at the Met. This team member wanted to be part of creating a solution so this didn’t happen again.
We called our project Signa, which is Latin for ‘standards’, and worked to capture the experiences of women within the Met and use these stories to educate others. We collected stories, anonymised them, then shared them with the whole organisation. At that point the Met didn’t use apps, but we know its people use apps, so we created a Signa app for training purposes.
As people read the stories of what their colleagues had experienced, we could hear them saying “have you seen that some bloke did this – what was he thinking?”. They started having these conversations that weren’t happening before, which have been really powerful.
Some of the women involved were happy to have their stories recorded, and we put together a brilliant video that included the voices of women at the Met. The video we created is really hard-hitting and it brings tears to your eyes listening to these stories, but that was the point. We needed people to connect emotionally with what their colleagues had gone through. One thing I believe about policing is that we care about each other, and we want to look after our colleagues so we can look after the public.
We’ve created a toolkit to enable staff to know how to have difficult conversations – what to do if you see something and how to manage it. We created a training pack that tells the story of one particular woman, and it’s interactive, and people use their app to vote on what they’d do.
The idea is that there’s lots of intervention points along the way that were missed by this woman’s supervisors, so it’s enabling people to better understand and relate to this, and it’s suitable for both internal and external audiences. We knew we’d got this training right when I sat in a room full of officers and their jaws were literally dropping. They're so connected with these women’s stories, and they’re saying “I want to be part of this, I want to help.” That’s when you know the training has hit home in the way it needs to.
What did you learn?
I’ve learnt the power of both resilience and persistence in bringing about change through this process, and to also not take things personally. When people say no, then I’ll work to still find a way. I just need them to explain to me why it can’t be done, then I’ll be able to find a solution to that particular problem.
The Signa app is a great example of this. I was told it’d take months to build the app and then get it approved, and my team built it within a week and got approval quickly too. There can be so many reasons people block the change you’re fighting for. It’s too difficult. It’s going to require resource they don’t have. It’s protectionism. It’s something they should’ve thought of themselves or they just don’t want things to change. But once people became part of the solution, they could see the positive impact our work was having.
In hindsight, I wish I’d taken the time to really consider what the blockers would be earlier on. Who has the most to lose from this change? Who could this change negatively impact? I’d tell others who are trying to bring about change to get their heads around Systemcraft, as this has really explained change management to me in a way nothing else has.
And get a good team around you and value them – it’s not about you, make sure to share the platform. Give them the nice jobs and take the hard ones yourself as their leader. Always remember that you can achieve anything if you don’t care who gets the credit. Also know who your top sponsor is and be ready to play that card when it feels like your project is grinding to a halt.
What have been the outcomes of this change?
One outcome of Signa is that I recently began a new role as Head of Professional Standards at the Met and I’m part of the key team helping change the wider culture. The Signa training has been mandated for all Met officers and staff. Signa is also going from a local to a national level, and I’ve given one of my Signa team members the responsibility of being the national link, which is great for her career.
Another outcome is we’re now talking openly about sexism and sexual harassment within the Met. At senior leader events it’s on every agenda, and leadership know it’s a problem and everybody’s starting to really take ownership of it.
Tangibly there’s been an increase in women reporting harassment. There’s now a special unit that just deals with internal complaints of this nature, and they’ve seen a real increase in reporting since Signa launched in November 2021. Met supervisors are asking team members if there’s anything that makes them feel uncomfortable in the workplace, and they’re reporting that more team members are coming forward to speak about their experiences now the culture feels safer to do so.
When I first began doing these calls with women working at the Met and they shared their concerns about coming to work because of the way they were being treated, I promised them things would change. I’ve run events over the last 12 months to keep them up to date with progress and seek their feedback and support.
People now trust me because I’m doing what I said I would and that’s really important. These women have made themselves vulnerable to me, and because they’ve done that I feel absolutely committed to deliver this change.
Any final thoughts?
One final thought: if you’re part of the Forward Institute’s network, lean in. My cohort’s full of brilliant, successful people from a range of industries. When you’re facing a difficult and challenging problem within your organisation, you believe thinking differently is the answer and your cohort come together as this giant brain.
You know there’s nothing between them they haven’t dealt with, and their ideas and solutions were incredible. I’ve leant on them a lot in my efforts to drive change. When it comes to the Forward Institute: grab it, embrace it, take it for all it is, and you can achieve so much.