Recently I facilitated a workshop for D&I professionals as part of our ongoing series of workshops with d&i Leaders – Helping organisations embed inclusion into everyday work systems. The session was entitled, Re-imagining our inclusion strategies for the modern world of work.
For me, this was an extremely timely session considering the rapidly changing, ever-increasing and complex external environment. Inter-connecting factors, such as the continuing rise of identity politics, the continuation of an anti-DEI narrative by the political right, global pressures on local economies and businesses, and the movement toward human and AI integration, are without question reshaping the work of inclusion professionals across the west and beyond.
To help navigate some of these complexities, it is critical that professionals working within corporate life adopt a robust framework that helps to steer them through the global headwinds.
We at FAIRER have identified five fundamental enablers that will help organisations to mainstream their efforts. These are:
Perhaps an obvious starting point is a focus on fairness and opportunity for all. However, the very idea of what is fair continues to be a contested concept within the current political landscape. There is an urgent need for businesses to define the principles and practical applications of fairness and opportunity for all at work.
Clearly, there needs to remain a focus on bias mitigation and embedding data-led inclusive decision-making across the employee lifecycle, including fair recruitment practices, learning opportunities, fair work allocation and visibility of diverse talent to key business stakeholders. The focus here should be an ‘in and up’ approach with a radical focus on the allocation of stretch projects, supported by the principles of amplification and sponsorship. For me, organisational leaders should ask themselves five simple questions:
With the rise of global identity politics, the emotional tax on individuals and diverse communities also increases. The stress of frequently being ‘othered’, aligned with a new strategic silence from many of our corporate leaders, adds to the burden of representation amongst many diverse colleagues.
The key principles and actions here include developing a workplace culture where everyone, regardless of who they are, feels that their voice matters and that curiosity, learning and healthy debate are viewed as contributing to the collective wisdom and growth of an organisation’s overall health. Here, perspective-taking over tribalism and echo chambers should be promoted as contributors to group harmony, business innovation and performance.
Here are four questions to reflect on when considering the extent to which these values play out in your organisation:
Perhaps the most important of our five fundamental enablers is the need to promote a one-community mindset, supported by activation programmes that intentionally promote inter-group harmony and team cohesion.
Far too many organisations do not have a strategic approach to community building and cohesion mapping. Many organisations mainstream a focus on embedding inclusion and belonging at work for all. These ideas are, of course, fundamental, but without the development of a foundational, intentional and strategic approach to inter-group bonding, community building and human cross-cultural connectivity, the rise of identity politics within the social space will continue to disrupt harmony and performance within the corporate environment. Therefore, the need to ‘layer up’ towards a model of corporate cohesion should, without question, be the number one priority of any inclusion professional. Heads of HR, people engagement and inclusion professionals should consider the following:
Individual and community energy levels and wellbeing factors are often influenced by those around us. The attitudes, behaviours and actions of team members can increase – or decrease – levels of emotional tax, which is fuelled by inter-group interactions. Being aware of how our behaviours impact others allows us to focus intentionally on building cultures underpinned by the principles of respect, inclusion and co-worker support. By positively and purposefully adjusting our daily interactions, as part of our personal choice architecture, we can leverage the principles of behavioural science to drive inclusion and wellbeing at work.
Role modelling positive energy and wellbeing means encouraging colleagues to adopt the inclusive E.N.E.R.G.Y. model:
E – Empathy for others
N – Notice and appreciate contributions from outgroup co-workers
E – Enable growth and learning through fair work opportunities
R – Respect boundaries and wellbeing by not glamourising overwork
G – Give purpose and direction to things that colleagues do
Y – Yield space for diverse thinking and for diverse team members to contribute through cross-team ideation
How and when we work – and the levels of autonomy we have – impacts the psychological contract between employees and employers, especially within a post-COVID work environment. Freedom to work in ways that meet the demands of our modern work-life integration model supports inclusion through the flexibility of work patterns. This flexibility opens up access to work opportunities for otherwise marginalised communities, such as working mothers, disabled people and carers.
Businesses that seek to drive fairness, inclusive leadership and high team performance should develop policies, processes and practices that include:
Understanding the importance of language: Many organisations are now renaming and reframing the description of the profession from D&I (or DEI) to inclusion and impact, or associated terms such as workplace belonging and culture. For some, this may be viewed as a negative reaction to the current D&I backlash, as the risk of renaming supports a policy of de-prioritisation, but the need to continue to focus on increasing representation as a strategic business priority remains. For others, this reframing provides a useful ‘in-road’ to leadership buy-in and engagement, as inclusion and impact, for instance, does not carry the same associations as the now contested term of ‘diversity’.
Re-articulating the business case: There is a need to continue to re-articulate the business case for inclusion and impact. This is not to simply re-rehearse the old narrative which aligns diversity with business performance, but to stress the nuances between inclusion, psychological safety, individual levels of engagement and motivation, team cohesion and the positive impact of these cultural behaviours on wider business performance.
Keep KPIs relevant to local markets: For businesses working at international or global levels, the need to have a mixed approach to goals, targets and KPIs is a key imperative in this new landscape. While some markets’ KPIs may be loosened due to political pressures, in other markets, regulatory requirements demand a continued focus. To mainstream global consistency, businesses should consider developing a set of global principles – designed to set behavioural and decision-making standards. This point aligns with the view that global businesses should maintain strong governance and accountability frameworks to drive and measure any desired outcomes.
Inclusive leadership is a skills and performance issue: Businesses should maintain a focus on developing the skills of managers and leaders to promote the principles of inclusive leadership. These inclusion future-proofing skills will need to be developed within a context of an AI-human-led co-working environment. Specific investment should focus on skills that include critical thinking, perspective-taking and curiosity, together with associated ‘Power With’ leadership principles (vs ‘Power Over’ leadership principles). Skills development should take the form of a multi-layered approach focusing on common development points and also specific developmental areas, balancing the concept of decentred leadership while maintaining existing layers of authority.
Team connectivity: With the rise of workplace conflict, fuelled by psychological distancing due to identity politics and renewed in-group activism, as well as a structural disconnect based on the current set-up of ERGs and BRGs, there is now an urgent need to develop activations designed to foster cross-group contact and connectivity – a principle of bias mitigation. This is an area of work that we at FAIRER are stressing as an urgent policy point.
Our Inclusive Leadership programme helps organisations develop the skills and behaviours needed to make inclusion part of everyday leadership, from perspective-taking and bias mitigation to psychological safety and fair decision-making.
We’ll be continuing this conversation at FAIRER Conference London on 22 October, bringing together senior HR, L&D, wellbeing and inclusion professionals to explore what human-centred and inclusive leadership means in the modern world of work.