Inclusion Front and Centre

Clovis Rondineli Silva, specialist in leadership and organisational development at Alumni, looks at the current state of EDI in business today and explores how we might challenge our current ways of thinking and pivot to put a culture of inclusion at the heart of the effort to drive positive change. Clovis highlights some of the areas where companies should take far bolder action to create a long-lasting inclusive culture and to promote inclusive behaviour at every step of the employee journey.

Diversity Stagnation

Equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) continues to be propelled into the media spotlight periodically, through new legislation or horrific news stories driving moral and social outrage, particularly in recent years. Yet despite all the research efforts and organisational and policy initiatives to promote it, a lack of diversity still persists across the board.

The fact is that the case for establishing a truly diverse workforce, at all levels within an organisation, grows more compelling each year. The moral argument is weighty enough, but the financial imperative as proven by multiple studies by the likes of McKinsey [1] and others - makes it an essential consideration for business.

In this era of globalisation, diversity in the business environment is about more than gender, race and ethnicity. Consideration must be given to employees with diverse religious and political beliefs, education, socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientation, cultures and disabilities. Individuals with valuable and relevant lived experience that can greatly benefit their organisations are often overlooked and undervalued. If a business is to truly represent and maximise the potential of the people and communities it is designed to serve, it must start valuing lived experience and not just protected characteristics.

Business Diversification and Diversity Strategies

Many of us know instinctively that diversity is good for business and can buy into its theory. This narrative, however, is one that is seen largely from the legislative perspective; a new narrative can be created if companies are willing to build from the lessons learned from their business diversification strategies and apply them to the employee experience journey.

Many companies have successfully introduced diversification strategies to future proof their businesses, for example: re-evaluating their customers’ buying journey, with the support of technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. The results then influence their decisions for new products and brand repositioning. These same businesses insights could and should be used to create a new narrative for diversity; but how?

In the same way companies address ‘awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy’ in the customers’ buying journey, they can re-evaluate their employee journey through the lens of EDI.

What are the moments that matter within the ‘recruit & hire, onboarding, engagement, development and offboarding’ that might influence internal policies to successfully advance EDI in the organisation?

Re-evaluating the employee journey requires a laser focus on inclusion. A commitment to create a working environment, where all voices can be heard and where insight and innovation can come from any direction, any department and any level. The employee journey map can be invaluable in driving change in this emerging narrative.

“In the same way companies address ‘awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy’ in the customers’ buying journey, they can re-evaluate their employee journey through the lens of EDI.”

Recognising progress and measuring improvements

It is important to recognise that EDI has come a long way. In addition to increased legislation to support it, many companies introduced internal training programmes aimed at creating awareness of unconscious bias and recruitment practices. These initiatives led to ‘difference’ being more fully and positively represented in broadcast media. Yet, the status quo of diversity remains largely unmeasured within business, primarily because HR processes are not fully integrated and too many initiatives are driven without a cohesive employee journey narrative from recruitment to offboarding. How can organisations know that they are improving without an accurate baseline?

Many organisations have awareness forums and support groups for minority representations in their business and these can be useful tools to raise the profile of EDI and kickstart conversation. Unfortunately, they are isolating by definition and generally lack the power to make decisions and influence policies. The key performance indicators for EDI are too many, widely dispersed and sometimes conflicting at different steps in the employee journey.

To achieve a more comprehensive narrative, companies will need to move beyond a focus on diversity for its own sake, and towards providing a safe, open and inclusive work environment that is underpinned by a sense of belonging for all employees, at all steps in their journey. Business has significant power to change and contribute to a more open, diverse and inclusive society but only by starting from within.

“To achieve a more comprehensive narrative, companies will need to move beyond a focus on diversity for its own sake, and towards providing a safe, open and inclusive work environment that is underpinned by a sense of belonging for all employees, at all steps in their journey.”

Rethinking the Impact

A classic command-and-control approach to diversity boils expected behaviours down to dos and don’ts that are easy to understand and defend. Yet this approach also flies in the face of nearly everything we know about how to motivate people to pivot and change. A recent study by us and Harvey Nash Group [2], harvested the opinions of more than 2000 senior leaders, and they pointed quite markedly to the failure of a mandatory approach to EDI and firmly towards developing a culture of inclusivity. The illustration below is an extract from Women in the Workplace 2021 report by Mckinsey and clearly shows how white males still dominate senior roles despite improvements in the balance of diversity at entry level positions. Diversity is currently not ‘sticky’. This shows a clear failure on businesses ability to develop inclusive cultures, that retain, develop and promote minority groups.

Source: Women in the Workplace 2021, Leanin.org & Mckinsey

The motives behind EDI initiatives are important as they will influence their outcomes. This is because targets do nothing to address underlying attitudes and beliefs. Releasing the potential of diversity requires more than a target, it requires engaging leaders in solving the problem, exposing them to people from different groups, and encouraging social accountability for change.

Some Practical Steps

Attract me and get me started: the first step to creating a culture of inclusion requires the accurate measure of an organisation’s baseline for each step of the employee journey and measurements in recruitment and onboarding is a good place to start. Each organisation will be at a different stage of maturity for EDI and success and progress can only be measured relative to their individual starting point. Broadly speaking, many established organisations will have policies in place but will require hands-on solutions to turn policy into culture. How do your policies, procedures and processes make people feel at every step including before joining or after leaving the organisation?
Development, engagement and motivation: the second step is to bring together a range of voices. Understanding the problems employees face and knowing how to be part of the solution are the two biggest hurdles in the fight for diversity and inclusion. Honest conversations can lead to finding a direction in which to move forward as a unified group to dismantle barriers of difference. A simple way to create more exposure to diversity and helping move the dialogue forward is to have teams that work across functions, geographies and levels of seniority. Are there instances where you can help create a melting pot of perspectives and insights in your organisation?
Recognition: the third step is to centre conversation around the need for respect for all parties involved. Giving employees a specific space to grapple with these subjects outside of their workspace and home life allows for a stable environment in which everyone can voice their thoughts and opinions while continuing to respect the different perspectives of others. It is great that employee forums are becoming a common way to recognise difference, however these forums need to be empowered to drive change. Driving a culture of diversity requires leadership that is allowed to influence policy. If organisations want a whole movement of inclusion and not just a culture of fragmented good intentions, they need to change from lip service and box-ticking exercises to creating real change and momentum.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

— Maya Angelou

In summary, the key to inclusivity is to truly understand your unique employee experience journey focusing on EDI. This includes recruitment practices which go above and beyond to challenge old truths, onboarding programmes that focus on team dynamics, performance appraisals that balance ‘what’ and ‘how’ and development programmes with an emphasis on cross-business, cross-location partnerships as well as external relationships with outside influences including academia, clients and suppliers.

Alumni

We have more than 30 years’ experience in recruitment, leadership assessment and development and we are passionate about diversity and inclusion. We also practice what we preach within our own organisation. We have some of the most diverse networks of potential candidates across many geographies. We understand fully how to maximise inclusion at all levels of within the organisation and particularly in the recruitment processes. We have tried and tested, formal methodologies for creating inclusive approaches to attraction, selection and onboarding. We also work to develop the leaders of both the present and future, with assessment, training and awareness programmes. If you would like to explore how to make your organisation more diverse, more inclusive and ultimately, more successful, then please get in touch.