A few weeks ago we committed to make public the materials we use at Monzo as part of our privilege awareness training and other diversity and inclusion work. And we’re sharing them here today.
For other people and organisations looking for ways to support Black people and educate non-Black staff about anti-Black racism, we hope they might be useful.
They’re constant works in progress: we update them as we go, based on what we learn and the feedback we get. So they’re definitely not perfect.
But if you’re looking to create your own training program, feel free to use any of these materials or incorporate them into your own work.
And if you have thoughts, suggestions or feedback about them, please share them with us if you want to!
Mandatory training on privilege awareness, for all senior leaders
Everyone in a leadership role at Monzo has to do training about privilege awareness.
This training is an introduction that we use to get everyone up to the same level of understanding. From there, we can have more nuanced conversations and help people take the next steps in their learning.
This training covers:
Why we’re here
What’s a biased shaped society?
What’s unconscious bias and how do you challenge yours?
What’s the effect of getting D&I right from a business perspective?
What’s the difference between equality and equity?
What’s Monzo's inclusion mission?
What is privilege?
A privilege walk – an activity to raise awareness of privilege, and both the benefits and obstacles people can face at work. We make it clear these aren’t the only facets of privilege, but we use these questions to start a conversation and get people to reflect on their own privilege.
Things to read and actions to take to be a better ally
This training is a workshop, and we’re sharing the slides we use to run it. They give an outline of what we cover and discuss during the training.
Training for all new hires on privilege and inequality
Everyone that joins Monzo also has to do training about privilege and inequality as part of their onboarding. This helps people join the company with a shared, consistent understanding of historical and current inequalities in society.
In the future, we’d like to make sure every single employee at Monzo has been through a version of this training.
We call this training ‘Making Monzo work for everyone.’ Just like our privilege awareness training, this is a workshop. And the slides are an outline of what we discuss during the training.
Other resources and spaces for discussion
To aid and bolster the ‘Making Monzo work for everyone’ and privilege awareness training, we also have:
An online learning pathway dedicated to privilege and privilege awareness. It links out to extra resources and helpful articles, to add to your learning.
An #allies Slack channel, which we use to share insightful pieces and kick-off discussions around how we can be better allies and better informed about what this means in practice
A #weekly-inclusion-updates Slack channel – where we make sure to keep everyone up to date on our work on inclusion.
Inclusive interviewer training
This is mandatory training for anyone taking part in interviews. It’s crucial that we educate our employees to reduce unconscious bias as much as possible, and this is very important for anyone interviewing potential new staff.
It covers:
Why is inclusion important during interviewing?
What biases can be at play in the interview process?
Dos and don'ts across all stages of the interview process. From reviewing CVs, doing the interview, debriefing and onboarding – actively consider how people from underrepresented groups have been treated and viewed differently
Practical ways to make the interview process better for folks who may have different needs.
This is a transcript of the training session.
Challenging Black inequity and being a non-Black ally
In light of George Floyd’s murder, police brutality, anti-Black racism and the Black Lives Matter movement, we’ve recently developed some resources to help non-Black staff understand how to be better allies to our Black colleagues.
These learning materials cover:
The historical context of Black inequity and how has this shaped society – learning about slavery, police brutality, the Windrush generation, employment rates and housing income inequities, and how the coronavirus pandemic is disproportionately affecting marginalised communities.
Ways to learn about Black allyship and be a better ally
How parents can raise anti-racist children
Here are some of the resources we’ve used in our training:
75 things white people can do for racial justice - Corinne Shutack
20+ actions for the Asian community to step up for Black people - Michelle Kim
About race - Reni Eddo-Lodge
We must step up for Black people right now - here’s how - Sheree Atcheson (that’s me!)
20 things you can do right now as an ally - Miranda Briana Epler
Raising little allies to be - wander and wonder studio
Elmo and his dad Louie talking about racism and protests - Sesame Street
Black Lives Matter collection of resources, donation links, education and more
Our diversity and inclusion handbook
This is a source of truth for all our diversity and inclusion work. And we use it to create a shared understanding of where we are and where we want to go. It summarises what inclusion means to all of us at Monzo, the work we’re doing now, our plans for the future, and how to get involved.
It lives in our knowledge management tool, Notion, so that anyone at Monzo can find it any time and get updates. And it’s embedded into our onboarding process and progression here, meaning when people become managers at Monzo, we signpost it to them as a useful resource.
We find it's helpful to collect all our diversity and inclusion work in one place.
We see all of these training materials as live documents, that we can iterate and improve on over time. So if you have any suggestions or feedback for us on them, please share them with us if you’d like to. In the meantime, we hope they’re useful for other organisations.