EY’s purpose is to build a better working world, for everyone. That can’t happen without a deep commitment to diversity, equity and inclusiveness to drive sustainable change for greater social equity.

To address discrimination, bias, racism and advance social equity in every area of our organization, we developed a global campaign and task force that would raise awareness, change behavior and start conversations on the importance of these challenges.

We leaned into the power of storytelling to create a dialogue that recognized people’s different starting points, circumstances, backgrounds, identities, experiences and needs. Through a series of brave personal films told by EY people, we are raising awareness and inspiring action among our 365,000+ people.

Recognizing the need to drive sustainable change, we supplemented our campaign with tangible tools, training and resources that equipped our people with the skills and knowledge needed to create a more inclusive and equitable workplace.

Equity considers different starting points. It’s about removing barriers to opportunity and giving each person what they need to thrive. Real change requires deep understanding and ‘uplifting’ actions.

Therefore, only through the lens of our people’s real stories could we inspire new actions, behaviors and commitments to advance social equity. We created ‘Uplift social equity’, a platform to uplift voices, create greater awareness and understanding of social equity, encouraging conversations, learning and critical action for all.

At launch, the campaign told 13 stories of brave EY people from across the globe. Stories of being mistrusted, underestimated and how both conscious and unconscious bias and language affects their daily lives.

These stories drew people in emotionally, offering insights that may differ from their own and persuaded them to adopt more inclusive behaviors through the educational and training services provided at the hub.

We needed to address the issue head-on, so we recognised it had to start with our people – all 365,000+ of them.

Through an ‘inside-out’ strategy we set a plan that would educate, inspire, and drive action to accelerate social equity from the organization to the individual, to clients and the world. The key? Emotional human storytelling - the throughline for everyone in our audience - transcending borders and cultural norms.

Achieving this authenticity would require stories from each of our regions. Without box-ticking and with an inclusive approach, the outcomes needed to cover a variety of experiences, so everyone could find something of themselves within the stories.

We understood we could not just ‘talk the talk’. To create positive, sustainable impact we developed tools, resources and training before launching the emotive campaign, to equip and help everyone find their way to advance social equity.

The content was created using documentary techniques - allowing each of our 13 storytellers share their lived experiences, non-scripted, to create an emotional, human to human connection that could give others better understanding.

We gave storytellers control of their styling and edit - inclusivity at every step of the process was just as important as the outcome.

We created a custom global hub that would host not just interviews and questions from the storytellers, but tangible tools, resources, and information, like our masterclass on social equity storytelling, to help others raise awareness of the subject, what EY is doing to help and how they could get involved.

Launching on a global webcast to all 365,000+, we then strategically released individual stories within EY’s internal news channels at key events and other activities. The stories were aligned to key moments in culture; industry events, International Women’s Day and other observance days.

We didn’t expect instant transformation on the first step of this journey, yet positive impact was immediate.

• One-third of the organization attended the launch global webcast.

• Over 118,000 visits to date on the social equity hub and over 300,000 engaged with the campaign.

• EY’s regular people barometer, showed that 85% of EY people felt “EY provides a work environment where I feel free to be myself”.

• 3.1 million organic social reach & 95% positive comments

• Over 167,000 EY people have completed Inclusive Leadership for All training, a 25% increase over the previous year

Following the campaign, EY’s Global DE&I Tracker shows an improvement in diversity balance and inclusiveness across all 31 organization units and 25 metrics. Social equity has been included on leadership agendas more often than ever and our storytellers have been asked to speak at meetings, events and roundtables globally.