Building an inclusive organisation

Leaders need to see a lack of diversity and inclusion as a crisis for the intrinsic culture of the company, to be assailed at the highest levels.

In increasingly polarised times, diversity in the workplace is more important than ever.

Our lives are made poorer by homogeneity. They produce fewer original ideas and are ill-prepared for the future.

We must confront unconscious bias to transform our workplaces.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to work out how much unconscious bias affects candidates from underrepresented groups in the workplace. They’re less likely to get interviewed, or hired, or promoted within a company.

If you’re a recruiter who hires mostly white candidates, you can start doing an anonymized selection process, and make sure you have a diverse hiring committee. Once these practices become second nature, you’ll have moved to the final stage: unconscious competence.

It’s easy to see the winner’s strengths. They were fast and nimble and demonstrated their sporting prowess. It’s much harder to see the value of the losing cyclist. But the loser demonstrated different qualities that are no less important, such as perseverance, stamina, and determination. As a team, the winning and losing cyclists complement each other, each bringing different strengths to the table.

Valuing diversity is about recognizing the importance of having different voices at the table, and doing everything necessary to create a company culture that allows them to bring their full selves to work.

Creating truly inclusive organizations means changing the culture of the organization from top-down. So, how can business leaders achieve this? Well, first they need to try to understand how their employees actually feel about working in their organization. Do they feel that their ideas are heard and respected? That they’re given credit for their work? That they have opportunities to grow professionally? Gathering this information can help organizations create an Inclusion Diagnostic that uncovers which behaviors help and which ones hinder employees’ perceptions of inclusion in the workplace.

Transformation happens through action. Culture is something you do.

The key is creating a workplace that promotes psychological safety too, so that people know they’re genuinely free to express their views and perspectives.

Rotate the meeting chair to make sure that those often-silent team members will have a chance to take the lead. You could also appoint a rotating “devil’s advocate” tasked with asking difficult questions and challenging the group.

Diverse organizations think more innovatively, are more engaged, and even make more money. To achieve truly inclusive teams, policy changes have to be enacted by leadership across all levels of the organization. We must reframe diversity as a problem the majority have to tackle, and not the minority.