Hallam Agency

The organisation is committed to creating an inclusive and diverse environment for its employees and aspires to being a workplace of choice for people from diverse backgrounds and with different identities.

The team at Hallam approached NBS, and after a little discussion, created a brief, challenging a team of MSc Human Resource Management (HRM) students to conduct research and to identify changes the organisations might make in order for it to deliver a ‘gold-standard’ Diversity and Inclusion Policy.

The project challenge allowed a team of five postgraduate students a chance to work on a real-life project as part of their degree. It allowed them a chance to conduct primary research with staff members at Hallam through surveys and interviews, and also to examine and distil a range of secondary research on the topic.

After analysing their findings, the team delivered a presentation to their client outlining a range of ideas and recommendations that might be introduced at Hallam, backed up by their own research findings and statistical evidence drawn from their literature review.

Senior Account Manager, Kiorhte Aghoghogbe, who set the challenge with NBS, said, “The research project Hallam underwent with these NBS postgraduate consultancy students was a fantastic experience. The students were engaged, driven and shared the same level of enthusiasm for the project we did. Each member of the team was professional, knowledgeable in their area and delivered the aims to the best possible standard. The end of the project report and presentation not only gave us answers to some of the questions we were looking for, but also taught us things we didn’t know about our company and educated senior member of the business. The recommendations we received from the students have all fed into Hallam’s D&I policy and targets, recruitment strategy and job adverts, and also contributed to publications which are in the public domain such as the transparency report and our D&I research report”.

Hannah Northam, one of the student team who has now graduated from the MSc HRM programme, reflected, “It’s really great to know that our research managed to provide real world practical value and has been of use to Hallam Agency. This consultancy project was for me really fulfilling. I was able to see how our ideas and the work we did, and the theory we applied, could really help the company implement change.”

Kiorhte has remained in contact with the NBS course team, and delivered a talk to its HRM students on organisational equality, diversity and inclusion, which was very well received.