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When Julie Mernagh, Group Chief People Officer walks around the various offices that her organisation – facilities management company, Bidvest Noonan services – she says the one thing she’s immediately struck by, and is the one thing that “never ceases to surprise me” is – in her words: “just how diverse we are as a business.”
Starting out life as a small cleaning business, the organisation currently employs more than 27,000 people across the UK and Ireland. Staggeringly, half of these people have joined in the last five years alone, but it’s the fact that 150 nationalities are represented there that Mernagh, the former Global Head of Leadership and Talent Development at Vodafone says is really what makes this organisation so arresting. “There is a real richness in our business,” she says, “it’s what really amazes me.”
But here’s where this CPO isn’t resting on her laurels. According to Mernagh, having lots of different, languages and cultures present in a workforce is no automatic guarantee that diversity is ‘truly’ alive and kicking [particularly in more senior roles]. And so it’s why it’s this highly diverse (on paper) organisation is still leaving nothing to change when it comes to actually making equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) a real, living and breathing component of the Bidvest Noonan employee proposition.
Accreditation creates action
“Despite being visibly very diverse, in some of our business areas, such as in our security personnel side, you have to be more involved,” she says. “I’m a firm believer that we need to be as representative of society as a whole as we can – at all levels, and this requires appropriate HR oversight.”
According to Mernagh the larger corporate aim of the business is to create an environment where inclusion is at the heart of everything it does, where diversity is celebrated, and where every voice is heard. But statements like this are easy to make. The hard part is actually translating this into reality – but through specific HR interventions, Mernagh says she’s actually making this happen – realising a turnaround from women feeling 10% less engaged than men to parity in engagement levels.
I’m a firm believer that we need to be as representative of society as a whole as we can
So how? Mernagh would be the first to admit that lots of elements contribute to the entire whole, and already – for instance, the company already had its own ED&I Council (it was launched in 2021, with Mernagh joining in 2023).. But what Mernagh has being doing is turning its ambition of setting the overall way ED&I should be consistently embedded into lived experience for employees. And one of her major drivers has been establishing where the business could first improve, through learning by accreditation.
“When I joined the business I think there was a feeling from the EDI Council and myself that we need validation about some of the things were doing, and planned to do,” says Mernagh. “What followed was us going through an extremely thorough process to achieve the Diversity Mark Accreditation [which was again retained in 2025[ – involving evidencing targets; sharing feedback surveys and other essential information.”
