Trade Association Update: February

The Textile Services Association (TSA) is the trade association for the textile care services industry, representing commercial laundry and textile rental businesses. Their membership ranges from family-run operations through to large, multi-national companies.

Here Membership Director Emma Andersson talks about how TSA works with their wider membership to promote diversity and inclusion, and the results from their first laundry culture study.

Our laundry culture study with Brands with Values

If you look around at any of our big events and conferences, you’ll notice that as an industry we’re white male heavy.

That said, we didn’t want to make assumptions about our membership and knew that for any new diversity and inclusion initiative we’d need to start by looking at the data.

We decided to work with an external partner, Brands with Values, on an industry-wide culture study, having been impressed by the work they’d done on UK culture and inclusion in the past.

Inclusion is broad, and we knew that the data we gathered should reflect that. We worked with Brands with Values on the questions that would be relevant to our industry, around demographics, but also digging deeper into culture and inclusion. The survey was sent out to our members via a link with QR codes and was shared with our people steering group too.

What we learned

Absolutely key was involving members from the start. Doing so meant they felt greater engagement and ownership of the survey and were more likely to encourage their employees to complete it.

And next time, we’ll make the survey multilingual. Many of the people who work in our laundries on the factory floor don’t have English as their first language.

Key findings:

• Community is the most important set of values to the laundry industry
• Employees think 80% of industry values are healthy; the top 3 ‘personal value’ words were honest, friendly and loyal
• The top unhealthy values highlighted were ‘demanding’ (23%) and ‘long hours’ (30%)
• 61% of employees felt welcome, accepted and part of their organisation
• TSA members see their company cultures as healthier than the UK overall
• Over 500 employees contributed to the survey, across all roles and demographics.

Future Plans

We’re committed to tracking our progress in ED&I and plan to run the culture study as a regular event. But we need to be mindful of the fact that many of our members also have their own engagement surveys. The last thing we want to do is overwhelm employees.

And our challenge as a Trade Association is that all our members are on different ED&I journeys; some are already doing great things in the ED&I space, and some are just at the start of their journey.

For now, we’re focusing on our smaller members; they’re the ones that need the most support. The larger corporations are more likely to have HR teams, and the resources to run training and workshops.

Being part of Change the Race Ratio as a Trade Association

We’re a Trade Association, and although we’re quite small, our membership isn’t.

Being a signatory to Change the Race Ratio enables us to support and encourage our members, to help them to figure out what they should be aiming towards.

In fact, I’d describe Change the Race Ratio as a reassurance – a guiding light to help.

Diversity and inclusion can be a challenging topic; people don’t always know where to start. Which is why it’s been so helpful to have that guidance on what we and our members need to do to move in the right direction.

It also means that we can influence the whole industry and help facilitate for some of the smaller companies. This is where we have that membership benefit.

Read the full laundry industry culture study.

The CBI, Trade Association Forum and the FSB are joining forces to champion the role of Women in trade bodies, celebrate their achievements and encourage the next generation of women into the association sector.

On International Women’s Day we will be launching the inaugural Women in Trade Associations powerlist. Our list will celebrate the best, the most brilliant, and the most formidable female business and sector champions in the UK.

WiTA Powerlist networking event (London): w/c 20/03/23

Contact me for more info or to register!

We are delighted to welcome Society of London Theatres, Freelance and Commercial Services Association and the Association of Translation Companies to the CBI network.