Getting DEI on the Agenda [PODCAST]

Phil: We underestimate the impact of the stories people have been telling themselves for years. For instance again in this organisation, in fact every organisation that I think we’ve worked with in this space, there’s some story about some event at some corporate function that happened three years ago that people still bring up.

In this organisation there was the story about inclusive hiring when they tried to do this a couple of years ago and it fell flat on its face because it wasn’t executed in a particularly skillful way and people from underrepresented groups ended up coming in having a bad time and leaving.

Kerry: Welcome to Thinking Differently About DEI series, where we’re looking at new ways to solve some of DEI’s most persistent challenges. We’ve already run two podcasts on this. The first was looking at how you can make sense of the large level of complexity that exists in the world of DEI. And the second about how do you, how do you Really, truly embed DEI into your organisation.

If you miss those and they sound interesting to you, you can find links in the show notes. So today’s question, we are looking at how we get DEI on leadership and employee agendas. I’m Kerry Boys and continuing the conversation with me today is Phil Cross.

Phil: Hi everyone. So why is this a challenge? Why is it hard to get DEI on people’s agendas?

So. First, let’s talk about what we mean by getting on somebody’s agenda. A few points to raise here. First of all, it’s taking the time to understand the needs of other people. So having DEI kind of front of mind in thinking about people’s different accessibility requirements, people’s preferences. It’s attending and engaging in learning and development opportunities that are provided by the organisation, and it’s taking the opportunity to practise those inclusive behaviours.

So to sum that all up, it’s individuals taking a deliberate approach to DEI, and Why is this difficult? Why is this challenging for people? Well, for a start, many people are busy. They have very full diaries and there’s a perception that DEI is just another thing that they have to think about. That it’s not something that I personally have time for.

It’s a story we hear. People may have had negative experiences with DEI training previously, that they previously attended, they might have a negative perception of DEI because of something that they’ve heard in the media or podcast they’ve listened to. So they’re coming in with a bias with a preconceived notion about what DEI is and what it means for them.

A huge one. And we see this all the time is the complacency, which is often founded in a really positive intent. So we hear the trope, you know, I treat everybody the same, and packaged in with that is a belief that this isn’t for me, the DEI training and the need to focus on this is for the people over there, the people who are, you know, have got these really strong prejudices or, you know, the people who are racist or sexist or whatever it might be, and I don’t need to do this because I have good intent.

Which of course, misses the, you know, the opportunity we all have to practise more inclusive behaviours. But we’ll get into that later on. And lastly, I think here.

People are confused about what DEI actually is, and what’s expected of them. This is super common and often a consequence of things like an unclear DEI strategy from organisations where the specific behaviours are not communicated well. Maybe there’s a focus on many different underrepresented groups with different languages, different messaging.

And we’ve talked more about this in our previous episode. So if you want to dive deep into that, just jump back in there. And this really leads to people just having this fuzzy, unclear view of DEI. So those are some of the reasons why I guess getting buy-in and getting engagement from people is difficult.

Kerry: And of course, that’s really important, because if we can’t get engagement and we can’t share DEI related messages and what we believe as an organisation, then there’s some very real consequences. So I guess the first one is engagement. If we’re not able to help teach and help people learn how they can be more inclusive, individuals risk unintentionally excluding.

So we talk about this a lot in the DEI space, that we, unless we’re actively including, we risk unintentionally excluding, which sounds like a bit of a mouthful, but it’s basically the level of focus that’s needed to ensure that we’re bringing everybody on the journey and including people in the way that everyone wants to be included.

The second area is then that people aren’t aware or looking to mitigate personal and team bias. So if we don’t see that there’s a problem if we haven’t understood our organisational perspective and we don’t understand topics like bias then we’re not going to be putting that into place and we’re not going to be able to start to look at ways that we can mitigate challenges specifically for underrepresented groups as well as people more broadly within the organisation.

Another consequence here is That we’re just not developing our skills and inclusion. So we talk about inclusion fundamentals or foundations at a broad level rather than by specific groups, but things like coaching, decision making, giving and receiving feedback. All of those skills have an opportunity to make a big difference from an inclusion perspective.

And of course, all of that leads to less inclusive organisations. And for the vast majority of organisations, we’re looking to drive diversity. We’re looking to create more diverse, inclusive and equitable organisations.

Phil: I just tack another couple on to the end there as well. And one specifically relating to leaders.

When we see leaders specifically not engaging with DEI, not attending training, not practising inclusive behaviours. That’s role modelling a particular mindset in a particular way of being to the rest of the organisation. So, you know, if the messaging is going out that, hey, we take this seriously and we’re committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace and then leaders on role modelling that has a really powerful cascading effect on the rest of the organisation.

So I think there’s a particular point here to be made about leadership. And then, of course, that feeling of disingenuousness from the organisation. If again, it’s being espoused that we are striving to create this kind of workplace, but employees aren’t seeing that come to life that can lead to real sense of disengagement and, a real sense of disenfranchisement as well from some people too. So, yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of downside because I think organisations talking the talk, but not walking the walk, so to speak, you know, really is, is very apparent to the organ, to the people who work there.

Kerry: I think this is a challenge that we hear so much from people teams and also heads of DEI or DEI leaders, which is they’re trying so hard. They’re putting out all these communications. They’re doing all this activity, but they just can’t get through. So I think that’s the crux of this challenge.

There’s all this frustration. There’s people trying really, really hard to get messages across to do the right thing, but somehow it’s just not working. And That’s what we really wanted to explore today was how do we do this more effectively? Great work being done. There’s great intention. What can we do that’s actually going to enable this to cut through and really connect with individuals?

Phil: Yeah, perfect. So we’ll get on to some specifics in a second, but we wanted to introduce the core concept here, and it’s kind of referred to as designing for resistance. So the majority of DEI efforts we see in a lot of organisations are designed and the communication is focused on the portion of individuals in the organisation.

And this is usually a smaller pool of people who are already fully bought in. They’re the people who understand DEI they’re passionate about creating a more inclusive organisation. They may already be consuming some materials that they’re practising inclusive behaviours. And this isn’t the group of people that we need to reach.

A great example of this is if you look at the voluntary attendance for most, say, International Women’s Day events, you’ll look around at the audience and you’ll see that it’s 80 to 90 percent women. So again, the people who were brought in are already there.

Kerry: And I guess I’ll just build there, I don’t think many organisations are actually designing for that group. I think what organisations are doing is designing for everyone. And the result is that they tend to hit that group because they hit the people that are already predisposed to this communication. So I think organisations are designing for everyone.

And what we’re saying here is actually we need to be. Designing for resistance instead.

Phil: And it’s not to say that those efforts are entirely bad. The people who are going along, the people that are engaging, are certainly gaining some valuable knowledge and skills from that, but we’re missing out on that opportunity to talk to the majority of people who potentially sit in this apathetic middle.

And that might seem a bit of a judgmental term, and it’s not intended to be, but these are people who are just, they’re not opposed to DEI efforts. There are potentially a group of people who are on the far end of the other spectrum who are going to be harder to reach. But they are individuals who haven’t heard compelling reasons to take action on this topic.

It doesn’t seem relevant to them and perhaps they haven’t been given the tools that seem actionable in their day to day. So, even if they are kind of in agreement that we do want to create a more inclusive environment, the how is not particularly clear or what their role in that is not particularly clear.

Kerry: Or they might not even Be aware, I guess, of a lot of the challenges. I think that’s what we often hear. People don’t, don’t, I think because we work in the DEI space and we talk to a lot of heads of DEI about this, we think that everybody has the knowledge of why it matters. Everybody cares, everybody’s brought into that, but actually there’s a huge gap in understanding.

And again, that’s not people’s fault, but it’s a job that we do need to make sure we’re doing as organisations.

Phil: Yeah. So, So we’re gonna get into specifics in a minute, and Kerry’s gonna walk through an example, kind of real life example with one of our, one of our clients, but a core concept here that kind of cascades and applies to everything we’re going to talk about from here on in is designing with, not for, the individuals we’re trying to reach now.

The concept of with not for is something that gets talked about in the world of DEI quite a lot. So for instance, if we’re thinking about accessibility, we want to do that with the people who have those specific accessibility requirements and not just for them to fully understand the challenges and how we might effectively create solutions for those.

But the same applies to people in this apathetic middle as well. What don’t they understand? What are their specific challenges with engaging? Why might they be disengaged with this? And I think involving them in the process can be super, super powerful in both making whatever the intervention is, whether it’s a strategy or learning and development more relevant and also creating that sense of ownership as well.

So, again, a really, really important concept here.

Kerry: Okay. So let’s make this a bit more real rather than we know we can often sound a bit theoretical. So. How do we go about designing for that apathetic middle to being really specific about where our comms are focusing and we’ll use the example of one of our clients, which is a large utility company, and it’s really interesting because of the breadth of range of stakeholders.

So we’ve got half, I guess, of the team sitting in a head office type environment. And then we’ve got another large, large chunk of people that are more field staff. So two quite different audiences in terms of how to interact. And The first starting point for us with any comms is a really basic ‘think feel do’.

And we think about that on two levels. So current state, so how are people currently thinking? What are they feeling and what are they doing? And then what do we want them to get to ‘think, feel and do’? So what’s the outcome we want to achieve? So let’s think about this utility company, and we were launching a new DEI strategy for them.

So, the starting point is, where do we want to get to? What’s the outcome? So we wanted people to think, DEI is really important, and I can make a real difference. So being able to take personal accountability. We wanted people to feel really clear about how they can make change, and we want them to be really motivated to do something and take action.

So effectively to be more inclusive in their day to day and what we want them to do is engage with all our DEI activities and actually take this more inclusive action. So we had a really clear outcome. Makes sense. But then when we look at the current state and we did a whole load of research as part of the strategy and What we discovered was this was actually the third time they tried to launch a DEI strategy and every time they’d launched them previously nothing had happened Then they’d come out a couple of years later with a new DEI strategy and people were kind of over it.

So from a ‘Think’ perspective in terms of current state and where they were now, people just saw DEI as a tick box exercise and getting involved was a waste of time. We’ve heard it all before. They were feeling pretty negative about DEI. They were feeling frustrated and they were feeling overwhelmed. And what they were doing was just not engaging with DEI comms or activities.

So they weren’t even opening emails from the DEI team. So, When you start to understand that context, you realise that actually the challenge is quite different in terms of how you communicate, and therefore we need to think a bit differently. So, there were three key things that we did here in terms of how we thought about trying to make this more effective.

So the first one was about positioning it as a fresh start, or a DEI reset. So actively acknowledging all of the DEI work that had been done before, and being really transparent and honest about this. We know we’ve tried this before, we know this hasn’t worked, we’re gonna do things differently and this is how.

Another gap there that sat under that was that there’d just been, this had sort of sat in isolation, DEI strategy. So we linked into the corporate strategy and the corporate values and talked about how those things were really interconnected. We involved the team in terms of how we designed the communications, yes, but also how we designed the strategy.

So rather than this being something that was pushed down on them, they’d had a chance to be involved. And then we thought about to what extent team members should have this within things like KPIs. So is this something that we can look at so we can make sure every single person in the organisation understands the importance of it because it’s part of their deliverables?

So that was the first thing was this DEI reset and sort of positioning it in a different way.

Phil: Interesting there. I think when we’re talking about the people who might be resistant this pool because, the organisation had kind of had a failure to launch several times with their the strategies, actually, some of the most passionate people about this topic with the most cynical, I think, in this process, because they just, you know, we’re coming into some of the focus groups and interviews we did with the attitude of we don’t believe things will change. We don’t believe anything will happen. So, yeah, this reset became Super, super important to get the most passionate advocates and the biggest champions on board as well.

Kerry: Yeah, and I think sometimes just transparency that, yeah, we know this hasn’t worked in the past. We hold our hands up and this is how we’re going to do things differently, I think is really powerful. So the second area then was who talks about this DEI strategy. So what had happened previously was it had always come from the head of DEI, it had come from the DEI at this organisation email.

So it felt very one way and very top down and pretty generic. So what they decided to do this time was to really focus on leader led comms and that’s important because things like field staff have a very different way of working to head office staff. So each of the leaders delivered the new DEI strategy.

And the leaders were all pretty trusted within that organisation. They had some good levels of psychological safety within teams, and they were able to make it really highly relevant for them team members. So what does this mean for us specifically in our roles in our day to day? We also got those leaders to have one on one with people that they would describe as resistors, and it looks like some pretty harsh conversations.

But effectively, this is where we’re moving, this is important. This is going to be part of KPIs. You’ve got to get on board. Otherwise, we look at things like performance management. And That leader led approach worked really, really well. We had to do a lot of work to prepare the leaders to make sure that they were ready to have those conversations, but the feedback, both from the leaders and their teams, was really strong.

They finally understood what it meant for them and the willingness to get on board and make change was significantly higher. And the leaders actually really enjoyed being involved, involved in that process as well. And then the final area demonstrated, action. So we talked about that, sort of, thinking, people just thinking it was a tick box.

The only way to avoid that was to demonstrate that we were taking action. So we did a whole load of action in advance. So that included some activities like ensuring more female bathrooms. In some of their field locations, it involved getting the structure set up for some ERGs so that people could join those as soon as the comms was launched.

And then when the strategy was shared, we were able to share with action. We also looked at getting learning in the diaries immediately. After the sessions and introducing some basic feedback mechanisms so that we could understand what people were thinking and feeling and then responding, of course, to that feedback as well to make sure that we were demonstrating ongoing change.

So we really love this as an example, because I think the easy option here would have been to do all organisation webinar launching DEI strategy. But we knew that just wasn’t going to work, whereas by saying actually rather than just communicating to everyone in a generic way, how can we think about the people that we need to really focus on, which is this apathetic middle, which was big at this organisation for a whole load of reasons, understanding them, And then designing the comms in a way that was actually going to connect.

Phil: At Leaders for Good, we have a proven track record of helping clients from a wide range of different industries create lasting culture change. We achieve this by developing impactful diversity, equity and inclusion strategies, by delivering highly effective workshops and programs, and by leading change initiatives that truly work at scale. So if you’re enjoying this conversation and would like to talk to us about accelerating your organisation’s DEI efforts, please reach out at [email protected].

And of course, this example focused on the rollout of a DEI strategy, but A lot of the same thinking and a lot of the same mechanisms can apply to things like learning and development opportunities.

And one thing to think about there was should training, should workshops be mandatory? This conversation of motivating versus mandatory comes up quite a lot in the in the world of dEI And there’s a school of thought that DEI training should never be never be mandatory because, because, you know, people with entrenched beliefs or entrenched kind of resistance will come in and kind of, disengage with it and it can cause more harm than good.

There are circumstances, though, where we want to think differently about that and maybe challenge that, recognising that, for example, in the, with the client that Kerry just talked about, the If training in this instance, or if workshops were purely, voluntary, they were purely optional, and we tried to make them motivating.

It’s really hard. In that circumstance to push against the years of failure to launch and stories that people have told themselves with just the comms. So no matter how much we try and get across, it takes some time in a room to really unpack and show people that we’re taking a different approach, that we’re thinking differently about this and give people an experience of that.

So in certain circumstances, actually getting people into a room, you know, if you’ve got a real fresh approach and giving people an experience of that is super, super beneficial because you’re just not going to get that with the very small snippet of people’s attention. You can get hold of by sending out email and especially that applies to things like field staff again thinking situationally about different employees.

People who are barely on email, who don’t, who, you know, there are communication challenges there, just, just because of, logistics and structure, no fault of, of the individuals. It’s really hard to get them when you’re not in a room with these people. So, we would. Challenge that motivating, all mandatory.

I think it should be both, Kerry.

Kerry: Yeah, I think I agree. It should be both. But I think our thinking on this has really evolved over time, right? So I think when we first started talking about this, we were like, nah, it has to be motivating. Let’s get people really excited. We don’t want people in the room if they’re not pumped.

The more work we did, the more we saw that it’s not just Like, it’s real hard to motivate someone via an email. And maybe, yes, sometimes we can get the leaders to try and motivate them, but that’s really hard. Until we are in a room, until we can really bring to life the why, when we’re thinking about this apathetic middle, it’s really hard.

So, yes, we’re going to get those people that are already on board if we do the motivating approach. Where we’ve also Built on that thinking, yes, motivating and mandatory, but if we’re saying our organisation believes this is really important, this is part of our values, this is part of how we operate, then of course it should be mandatory.

But it’s about doing it in a way that isn’t mandatory compliance based. You must be there. It’s doing it in a You should be here because this is part of our organisation and it’s a chance for you to get to know more about yourself and each other. So I think it’s a framing thing back to the comms. It’s what’s the framing that’s going to get people there but also motivate that big chunk of people in the middle that might not be aware of why this is so important.

Phil: I think so much of this comes down to that. You know, the old saying, you give me three hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first two and a half sharpening the saw or axe. Clearly I spend a lot of my days chopping down trees. But. The thought that goes into an exploration with the people in the organisation, what is going to make this land is the thing that makes it work, because I think it’s when very well meaning consultants, people and culture teams, HR teams put something together in isolation.

That’s when we often miss those really big marks and those really big points of resistance. And. And we underestimate the impact of the stories people have been telling themselves for years. For instance, again, in this organisation, in fact, every organisation I think we’ve worked with in this space, there’s some story about some event at some corporate function that happened three years ago that people still bring up in this, in this organisation.

There was the story about inclusive hiring when they, when they tried to do this a couple of years ago, and it fell flat on its face because. We won’t go into the details, but it wasn’t executed in a particularly skillful way. And people from underrepresented groups ended up coming in, having a bad time and leaving, but that was the one of the number one comments.

So it had to be put front and centre or else again, we’re not, we’re not addressing what people are thinking and feeling. And we’re not able to shift unless we, unless we understand where people are. So with all that being said, maybe we jump into a few key questions we get from, from clients on this.

A big one is what about the detractors? So we talked about, you know, the people who were already bought in, we talked about the vast majority of people who may be on the fence, but what about that very small cohort at the other end of the spectrum who may be just actively undermining DEI efforts?

Kerry, what are your thoughts there?

Kerry: Yeah, and I think it’s either actively Undermining, yes, absolutely. And we do see some of those, or it’s the people that are, would truly fit in the terminology of sort of prejudice, racist, judgmental categories, which we don’t see many of the vast majority of people have absolute positive intent.

And once you understand why they want to get on board. So this is a very, very small group of people. And I think our perspective here is we have to give them every chance to get on board, but if they don’t, and if we truly value diversity and inclusion as an organisation, then this becomes a performance management piece.

So for me, it’s relatively simple. We do everything we can to bring them along. And then we, yeah, we look at the detrimental impact to the organisation.

Phil: And I think it’s been. Really clear on the expected behaviours on what’s okay and what’s not okay inside of the workplace. Because again, we can’t see what’s going on inside of people’s heads.

But for instance, We can be absolutely crystal clear about, you know, racist or sexist jokes are not okay in the workplace. And if somebody continues to do that again, that becomes the point of the performance management conversation. So I think it’s being very clear again, if these individuals are not bought in.

What’s the point? You know what? What are the points which are very much not okay again? Did this? This is on the performance management end of the spectrum, not the sort of generative, How do we help people? How do we help people along? But as Kerry said, giving these people every opportunity to, you know, present them with some different ways of thinking, some different arguments, some tools.

And then if that doesn’t work, it becomes a different conversation.

Kerry: And we’ve had some instances of this recently where we’ve been working with leadership teams that’s had one on a couple occasions more detractors within it. And that’s where it becomes really hard and really important because of course this is role modelling across the whole organisation.

And if a leader can do some of these behaviours, then you can see how it flows down. So, in that scenario, the way that we work with the leaders is exactly what Phil said. It’s about bringing that team together, setting really clear expectations at a team level. Then it’s about one on one conversations that really transparently call out what hasn’t been okay.

We’ve done some one on one coaching around it to help people understand more about the why. And then an organisation we’ve worked with recently has just let someone go because they were not okay. But they were not getting on board. And the risk to the rest of the organisation of seeing a leader acting in some of these ways was just not not okay.

So it is going to come down to an organisational level decision about your values and what you prioritise. But I think especially thinking about this at a leadership level becomes a really high priority.

Phil: Another question we get all the time is sustainment. How do we keep this on the agenda?

So getting on people’s agenda is one thing, but we see this. We see this a lot with kind of failed strategy rollouts or strategy rollouts, which didn’t take place if there’s an initial spike of activity after the launch. Maybe there’s some learning development. There’s some events and then it kind of wanes over time.

Any thoughts there, Kerry?

Kerry: Yeah, and I think this is kind of twofold. It’s getting on the agenda. But to be able to do that, you have to be doing it in a strategic way. So we need this strategy. We need to know what we’re doing over time as an organisation and what our key touchstones are. And that’s what will help keep it on the agenda.

So some organisations do this, for example, by celebrating different events. So maybe they have four events and A year, such as International Women’s Day, people with disabilities, for example, and then they become pillars to try and raise specific underrepresented groups’ issues throughout the year. Another way some organisations do it is through their ERGs, so employee resource groups, again, that tend to focus around underrepresented groups and raising awareness there.

But I think for me, it all comes back to the strategy. And a really important part of that is who owns DEI. So, of course, we want everybody across the organisation to be responsible for their own behaviour and to drive inclusion. But where we see it go wrong, from a strategy perspective, from a getting on into employee agendas, from a comms perspective, is when you don’t have someone that is driving it.

It is going to take headspace, especially for the first couple of years to make sure that this stuff is happening. It doesn’t mean they have to do everything, but there needs to be someone that is responsible for that strategy that has the headspace to say, what are we doing next? That has the headspace to say, let’s make sure we’re thinking about these comms and we’re doing them in the right way.

So I think having, having someone that has that, that time and that headspace, one or more people having that time and headspace to make sure that things happen.

Phil: Yeah. And, and I think it’s the, the other thing to to, to sort of emphasise there is that it’s baked into a lot of the day to day that it’s baked into how we run meetings, that it’s baked into, like the behaviours and, and the examples and the, the bringing it to life that we’re, that we’re advocating for and that we’re setting expectations around isn’t, in the vast majority of cases, something on top of peoples day-to-day kind of ways of working, it’s just a different way of approaching that, those ways of working. So it’s, it’s again, when we send out meeting invites, asking for accessibility requirements, it’s, it’s all the one percenters that we, that we talk about ad nauseam.

And if you want to hear us talk about that in more detail, I think it was the last episode, but, yeah, one of the, I think we’ve talked about this, quite a lot, but it’s all of those little ways in which it’s, Just woven into the fabric of the organisation, and it’s not seen as something separate.

I think when DEI is something separate, and we talked about this last time, that’s when it falls off the agenda. So there’s a, there’s a big overlap here.

Kerry: Perfect. So I think we’ve covered a lot in that episode, but I guess the key points for us here are, while we’re thinking about communicating DEI, we want to actually take the time to make sure that we’re communicating.

In the right way, and I guess really this goes for anything that you’re communicating in an organisation, but it’s so easy for communication to be an afterthought. Okay, so we’re doing some L& D. What’s the comms? Quick email. Or we’re launching a DEI strategy. Okay, quick webinar, quick email. But actually, what we’re saying here is the comms is a huge part of it and a huge part of actually connecting with people and helping them understand and therefore helping them make change and helping our organisations make change.

So when we’re doing that, the way we do that in the most effective way is to move from the sort of generic. Just communicating to everyone which risks just really speaking to those people that are already super bought into actually thinking specifically about those people that are going to be resistant and we’ve talked about that as the apathetic middle, maybe different in your organisation, but that’s what we’ve seen in the vast majority of organisations.

How do we think about those that are going to be resistors and how do we actively design the comms for them because we know that comms will then reach those people that are already brought in. Hopefully will be more appealing to our detractors and going to mean that we. are higher on on busy people’s agendas.

So in the next episode of this series, Thinking Differently About DEI, we’ll be discussing the challenge of measuring the impact of DEI work effectively. And how do we think about that to make a bigger impact?

Phil: Awesome. So If you got value from that episode, make sure you subscribe, share the episode with a friend or a colleague.

And, yeah, that way you won’t miss out on the rest of the Thinking Differently series. And of course, if you’d like to discuss anything related to leadership or diversity, equity, inclusion, you can get in touch at [email protected]. Thanks so much for listening. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Inclusion at Work podcast.

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