Effectively Embedding DEI [PODCAST]

Kerry: Yeah. And of course that maps with what we know from the world of agile and design thinking, which is this small incremental approach. And the other benefit of that is it allows us to really tweak and adapt and learn. So when we go out or we do big, big changes, we don’t necessarily know what’s working. Whereas here, if we can do small things, we can see what’s working, then we can put greater focus on. Those areas that are working. And I think this is also really important in the world of DEI because we know it’s often the small things that make the big difference. Welcome to the inclusion at work podcast. And we’re currently in the middle of our thinking differently about DEI series. And this is where we’re looking at new ways to solve some of those really persistent and regular challenges that we hear about in the space of DEI. If you missed our first episode in this series, which was called making sense of DEI complexity. You can find a link for that in the show notes. And in that episode, we also talk a lot more about why we need to think differently. So if that was of interest to you, head over and start there. Phil: So today we’re answering the question, how can we think differently about embedding DEI into our organisations? I’m Phil Cross and the voice you were just hearing is my co founder and partner, Kerry Boys, and let’s get straight into it. So why is embedding DEI a challenge? Now, There are a few prevailing attitudes towards diversity, equity and inclusion that make embedding so difficult. Firstly, DEI is often seen as a something that operates in a silo. It’s viewed as a kind of bolt on and not really built into ways of working in a business. And this is especially true for organisations who are more early in their maturity journey around diversity, equity and inclusion. Secondly, DEI is often seen as a nice to have, not a must have. Something to focus on periodically, when there are time, resources available, and there is perhaps a specific need, or an event’s happened. Rather than seeing it as a true driver of well being, performance, and motivation, and something that should be really an always on in the organisation. And lastly, but probably not exclusively, DEI is seen as the responsibility of one department. So DEI is not seen as everybody’s job. It is seen as something that the people in culture or HR team are responsible for. So it’s not viewed as a collective endeavour in the organisation. And the consequences of these viewpoints in organisations are efforts end up being inconsistent. So DEI can feel very stop start. To people in the organisation with occasional workshops or occasional celebrations of specific days, et cetera, it can feel detached from people’s day to day as well as the goals and missions of the business. So people and primarily those from dominant cultures inside the organisation don’t end up, connecting the dots and seeing how it relates to them and how it can apply in their in their work and their day to day. And there’s no sense of shared ownership and shared responsibility. So overall, the net effect is progress is slow, progress is stilted, and we perhaps need to rethink how we how we go about this. Kerry: And I think that’s frustrating both for sort of DEI leads within organisations as well as people day to day. So we hear this challenge a lot from our clients. And I guess the question that we’re here to answer then is, well, how might we think differently about embedding DEI and how might we effectively embed DEI into an organisation? And I guess the core shift that we talk to our clients about here is moving away from seeing DEI as a sort of large program or a large transformation initiative. And even though that’s really good intentions, yeah, we want to throw everything at DEI. Actually, as with many transformation initiatives, and we saw this in digital transformation as well. This really often fails and that’s because they require so much resource, and when we talk resource, we’re talking yes, budget, but we’re also talking people’s time. And what’s really important from that perspective is how much the vast majority of people in the business world have on their day to day plates anyway. So when we’re trying to add all of these extra elements on top, people just can’t cope. They don’t have the mental capacity to be able to do it, which is totally understandable. So it becomes overwhelming and the result is people don’t end up making the change. And actually we see this as quite a cycle. So often what will happen in organisations is the engagement results come out. Maybe that’s twice a year or once a year if they’re doing the big surveys and then there’s really pressure from the board or pressure from the leadership team that we have to sort out this DEI issue. And there’s a renewed focus. We try and throw everything at DEI doesn’t work and then we’re back. Into that, into that same, same cycle. So rather than these big transformation initiatives, what we recommend and the approach we work with our clients on is one of incremental change. And the way we see that working is around small little 1 percent changes that we can stack. On top of each other, but that make a big difference. And the inspiration for this actually comes from the world of cycling. And that’s Phil’s favourite topic. And I know how much you love this story. So I might hand over to you to tell the story of Sir David Brailsford. Phil: Absolutely. Yeah, I am a bit of a cycling nerd and I don’t get as much time to get out on the bike as I would, I would like at the moment. But this story just every time, every time we explain this, I think it really rings true. So, so, so David Brailsford was the high performance director for Team Sky. So that’s the British cycling team now. You don’t need to know anything about professional cycling other than for the longest time, the British cycling team were, didn’t really feature on the, on the world stage. They never won a grand tour. Their, their riders didn’t really, didn’t really perform at the same level as, as a lot of other riders. They had a mission within five years, they wanted to win a Tour de France and everyone thought that’s, that’s impossible. Never going to happen. So David Brailsford came in not with the attitude of let’s go buy a superstar rider and throw all the resources behind this one individual or, or do this drastic change. He brought with him something called the aggregation of marginal gains theory. Now that’s a bit of a mouthful and we just refer to it as kind of stacking one percenters. But really, instead of, again, focusing on the huge things, they took a lot of effort to find all of the tiny ways they could make improvements. So, the fabric of the cycling jerseys, how aerodynamic was it, the pillows, bringing their own pillows on the bus so they could get better night’s sleep, tweaking the nutrition, tweaking tire pressure for different road surfaces, and on and on, the massage gel they used. So, on and on the list goes. And. Individually, all of these things don’t really make a huge impact, but when you start stacking up a lot of 1% ers together, they amount to a huge, huge difference, and that was certainly true for the British Cycling team. So a lot of the things they did went against convention too, which I guess goes with the theory of this Thinking Differently About DEI series too. A lot of the other teams saw them cooling down after races, and that’s just not something you did in professional cycling. People thought they were crazy, but they didn’t win a Tour de France within five years. They won three. So, it really kind of added weight to this, to this theory. So, you know, if, if everybody makes a few small changes and over time, that amounts to, that amounts to a really, really big impact. And that’s kind of what we’re advocating for here. Kerry: Yeah, and of course that maps with what we know from the world of agile and design thinking, which is this small incremental approach. And the other benefit of that is it allows us to really tweak and adapt and learn. So when we go out or we do big, big changes, we don’t necessarily know what’s working. Whereas here, if we can do small things, we can see what’s working, then we can put greater focus on those areas that are working. And I think this is also really important in the world of DEI because we know it’s often the small things that make the big difference. So when we’re speaking to people in organisations, whether we’re running focus groups, or interviews, it’s fairly rarely an organisation has done something big that’s caused upset. It’s the small day to day, it’s the being left out of conversations, it’s the not feeling like your voice is heard, it’s the sort of seemingly small and actually unintentional, most of the time, moments that are really creating a sense of exclusion for certain individuals. And what’s important about our 1% ers is that they add up. So if every person in the organisation is making a couple of small changes in terms of how they interact, in terms of how they run meetings or make decisions, and if we take those 1% ers and we look at that across sort of systems and processes as well, because it can’t just be people changes, so policies, product, marketing, etc, then what we see is we get a really big benefit out the end. I think the other really important point about this is if we’re asking you as a leader to make a couple of small changes versus asking you to completely change your leadership style, it’s much more doable. People are going to be able to get more on board. They’re going to be able to make those changes will gradually increase what they might need to do over time. But it starts to be built in to how we’re operating rather than this Rather than something separate that we have to try and get our head around, we have to spend extra time to. It’s just part of your day to day and we’re giving you really easy tweaks that you can make to be able to do that. Phil: So maybe to bring this to life a little bit, we’ll share some examples of one percenters. So again, these are things we want to we want to seed across the business and give people the kind of the awareness and the tools to do. So obviously that’s part of the equation, but it could be something as simple as starting your one to ones and your team meetings with some relational people. I’m conversation before getting down to business before getting into the, you know, the work to be done for the day. The more we talk, the more we share, the more we learn about each other, the more inclusive an environment we create where people are likely to open up. They’re likely to share what they, what they need, how they’re feeling, and we’re able to make those accommodations. Kerry, did you have? Kerry: Yeah, I just think what’s interesting about this one, like, it sounds a bit theoretical. We talk about relational conversations, but basically all we mean is things that aren’t task based. And we heard from so many organisations that especially now in a virtual world, when you jump on a zoom call, it’s so easy just to go straight into the task I have to do and to forget about the human. And with lots of organisations where we’ve introduced this, which is really simple, two minute conversation about how your day is or how you’re feeling or something you’re excited about. There’s really small little differences. Really help connect the team, build trust, links back through to high performance team. So they can sometimes sound something like that as a 1 percent it can sound soft, but we see time and time again, the difference. Yes. In terms of inclusion, but all the way through to the team performance because of that connection and trust and relationship building. Phil: It is. It’s such a simple one and so powerful. We could keep digging into this one because it actually plays on a bunch of the cognitive biases we see and we know are very, very present in organisations. Things like affinity bias, the likelihood of us kind of connecting and engaging more with people who are like us. Well, we discover who’s like us by having conversations. It’s by sharing that. Oh, maybe I’m doing some renovations or I’ve got a kid who’s experiencing something or I’m interested in a certain sport. And it’s only through having those those conversations. Those small moments that you’re like, Oh, I’m a cyclist, too. I didn’t know that about you. And all of a sudden you’ve got a, you’ve got a relationship on a slightly different level with people. And fundamentally, it’s just a more fun, more human place to work when we can have those conversations and just enjoy the time we spend working with the people we work with. So I’ll stop there. We could, we could keep going on on that one. Another, another kind of. Again, very easy to implement and very easy to get around, thing is asking for accessibility requirements. So this is, this is potentially really, really huge. So before a meeting, before a workshop, before an event, or even just with your team in general, if you haven’t done it already, just saying, Hey, is there anything you need to make, this event or this work experience, more accessible and for you to perform at your best? So, that could be sharing the agenda, the format, the location, the rough ask of the participants, like what, what do you need to do when you come to this thing and allowing people to go, actually, you know what, I don’t think, you know, thinking on my feet isn’t my, my forte. If I have time to process the information, I’ll be able to come up with far better answers. Could I get the questions ahead of time? Or could I get the content ahead of time? And just being able to have that conversation or kicking off that conversation very intentionally and asking because people won’t often. come to you proactively with that ask, but, but saying, Hey, what do you need really opens up and makes those, those interactions far more accessible for, for more people. And of course, this extends to people with physical disabilities who maybe a certain venue doesn’t work for people who need. Content that’s accessible virus screen reader, for instance. So is your is your PowerPoint presentation formatted in such a way? The list goes on. But we find unless you ask people don’t proactively come forward with that stuff. So again, a small change on the final one I’ll share is just removing personally identifiable information in CVS. We know CVS are riddled with bias from names. Photographs where people went to school can all influence people’s decision to interview a candidate or not. And this is information that’s often not relevant to somebody’s performance or potential performance on a job. So removing that is is a really good way of making the hiring process a lot more fair. 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 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]. Kerry, any, any favorite 1% ers you’d like to share with the, share with the listeners? Kerry: Yeah, I guess I’ll add a couple. One was the team I was working with a couple of weeks ago who had a challenge that they had some really strong voices in that team. So team of 10, they had a sort of group of four that spoke all the time real extroverts, really confident. And of course, what that meant is they weren’t hearing. Or voices. So a really simple 1 percent habit that we introduced there was making sure in every meeting before a decision was made, we asked, who haven’t I heard from? And that’s just giving people that might have a quieter voice, the chance to be able to put their hand up and have an input. So having who haven’t I heard from as a really simple 1 percent habit made a big difference in terms of starting to be able to hear and get used to hearing other voices. That’s obviously sort of an individual one. The other one I thought I’d add from a process perspective, which is actually also related to hiring an organisation we worked with recently, where as part of their sort of hiring review checklist and interviews, we added a question around what’s the culture at. Into that process. So that document one of the questions was now what’s the culture at this person brings. So, so often when we’re interviewing, we think about culture fit. Therefore we get stuck in bias of looking at people that are like me. Whereas actually when we think about the culture ad, what different, what difference can they bring that’s going to benefit the organisation. It really reframes that and makes us much more positive and open towards diversity. So two simple one percenters there that again, we’ve seen make big differences. Phil: Love them. And that was a very short list. And again, there are literally hundreds of 1 percent as we could, we could talk about here and just a couple of kind of overarching things to, to, to mention here, as you could probably notice from those examples above, they weren’t necessarily doing anything particularly extra. They were just doing, they were part of people’s day to day and just doing that day to those day to day activities slightly differently. Just, just how do you start a meeting? How do you send out an invite for a, for an event? How do you how do you go about your, your candidate review for a, for a hiring process? It’s just a tweet to doing something you’re already doing. And. It could be easy as well. I just want to caution the expediency bias here. The, the desire to do everything and do everything all at once and do it very fast. The beauty of these is that we can implement them in a kind of drip feed way that keeps the eyes and always on top of mind thing. And people can see the difference in implementing these small changes. So having those, you know, having those human conversations at the start of meetings. If everyone in the organisation has a bit of a focus on doing that for a few weeks, it’s amazing the feedback and the shift we get, and then introducing something else and something else. Because if we do everything all at once, we’re back to, we’re back to kind of transformational land and we’re more likely to fail. And we know that from the science of habit formation. If you try and change 15 habits at the same time, you’re probably not going to change any. So yeah, these, these really start to add up over time. Kerry: And I think what’s interesting about how we just talked about those one percenters is they can almost sound a bit random, but of course, we’re not doing this randomly, and we’ve just given you some examples there. But what we do when we work with organisations, it’s about taking a really strategic approach to this. So how do you work out what the right one percenters are? How do we make sure we’re doing them across the whole system? And I’ll explain what I mean by that in a moment. And how do we make sure we’re rolling them out in the right way? So we have to take a strategic approach to one percenters. We’re not just randomly throwing out one percenters. So, we’re going to introduce you now to a model that we use a lot, and the best way to think about this model, I think, well, maybe have a look in the show notes first and you’ll see the full model. It’s from the world of integral theory and adult development, and it’s used in loads of different fields. So, politics, medicine, psychology, and we use it to think about how do we effectively make change, and how do we make sure we’re looking across all of the different elements that we need to make change in. So the four areas that it covers are our mindset, so how we think, our behaviors, so how we act, our culture, so what are the sort of collective norms and ways of working, and then systems and processes. So what are the things in place that enable the work and the way that we, the way that we act and to make real change, we have to cover off all of those quadrants. We have to cover all of those. So have a look in the show notes if you’re interested and want to see the model in more detail. But I’m just going to talk to you about an example. And how it touches on all of those quadrants when we’re thinking about the work that we need to do. So let’s say during the DEI strategic process, we’ve identified that decision making is a big challenge within that organisation. So we hear in the research that we’ve done through focus groups and interviews and any kind of survey that people don’t feel they understand why decisions made, they’re not being included in decisions. So what we need to do is work out how does this make more inclusive and effective decisions. So the first one, then, if we think about mindset, so we need to think about how can we help foster humility and curiosity by introducing perhaps simple questions for individuals and teams to consider when they’re making decisions. So it could be a simple one percenter of getting everyone when they make a decision to ask themselves, what could I be missing? So that’s reframing how we think about a question, we’re making the assumption that we don’t know everything and therefore we probably need to go out and get some more perspectives or at least test our thinking to make sure that we’re not being potentially influenced by, by bias or our own ways of thinking. So that’s the mindset part. So really simple one percenter, what could I be missing? Then behaviour. So what do we need people to do differently? How do we want them to act differently? So we could be introducing the norm here that in decision making or ideation sessions that leaders speak last. And we’ve done this with a few organisations now actually. So what happens when a leader speaks first is everyone just agrees with what a leader says. Nature of hierarchy and power. It’s not that leaders doing anything wrong, but it does mean that we don’t get different perspectives. So if we introduce a norm that moving forwards, The leader will always speak last, and we can do that either overtly by actively saying it or we can just speak to our leaders and get them to hold their perspectives. But what we suddenly get and what we see is a huge range of ideas that can actually be really powerful, really strong and that we wouldn’t have heard if the leader had had their opinion first. So mindset behavior. The next one is about culture, so that’s sort of all of us collectively and and how we’re how we’re thinking and our ways of working. So, culture, encouraging and recognising different perspectives. So, how might we do that and are we making sure that we’re getting that really diverse range of perspectives? So, how do we promote that? How do we reinforce that? How do we recognise it? So, if we’ve established that moving forwards, different perspectives are going to be recognised and then we start to do that within culture, that’s a really strong way of starting to help with inclusive decision making. Phil: Oh, sorry, Kerry. I was just going to add on to that, that culture piece as well. It’s, again, starts to create those norms that if we’ve agreed collectively that different perspectives, no matter how kind of left field they are, that we’re, we’re welcoming that being put on the table. You can then give people the, the reference point to if somebody, say, shuts down a perspective that, that somebody shared to be like, hey, that’s, that’s not the way we work around here, obviously, in the, in the. And in a kind of skillful way and, and just reinforce that reinforce that kind of collective value and that collective belief. So it’s, it’s a really good anchor point for everyone to for everyone to kind of use for their thinking and doing. Kerry: So expectation setting, and then we can hold accountable against that. Absolutely. And then the final quadrant is systems and processes. So what do we give people to enable them to be able to make decisions as well? So we look at things like decision making frameworks here. And how do we help our leaders or our teams make strategic decisions with more rigor and inclusion and efficiency? And what guidance do we have? So decision making frameworks effectively give you a sort of way of thinking in a process that you can follow. So starting to put processes around those, those decisions that we make. And again, that doesn’t have to be something big and transformative. It can be something very simple that we start to embed in what is already an existing behavior, which is we’re all making decisions. So hopefully that shows you how we can start to think about these changes, not just as sort of tactical one per sentence, but how we make sure they go across the whole system. And that’s what’s going to enable us to make real change. Phil: And you can see how those self reinforce as well, where we miss out. And this is, you know, a point we often we often talk to when we’re working with this model. When we miss out one of those quadrants, we often miss a big piece of the puzzle. And that can often be the thing which stalls our change initiatives. If we’re not. Embedding the changing culture, then it’s harder to it’s harder for people to really kind of get it as part of their mindset. If we’re not pointing people to specific behaviors, people don’t often know what to do, and if we’re maybe not providing systems and processes, which support the thing then, you know, we’re, we’re leaving people in the dark as to how they might go about something that’s that there’s a bit more substantial. So it’s really, really important to kind of think in that systemic way. So yeah, big reason we focus on it. Finally, we wanted to wrap up with some key questions we get from clients. We love this because it kind of grounds it in maybe some of the question marks that you have listening to this listening to this conversation so far. The first one of these are, how do learning workshops or leadership programs fit into this? How do we, how do we go about taking a 1 percent approach with that? Kerry: Yeah, and I think this is kind of at the heart of the 1 percent approach. So if we want people to do 1% ers, then we have to explain to them why that’s important. And then help them understand how to go about doing that. So huge value, of course, in any kind of learning or conversations around, around DEI. And what we see is that from the data is that when learning programs are connected to people’s day to day and give them things that they can implement immediately, that’s when they’re most effective. So in terms of how we roll out our learning programs, absolutely the content is that is the learning and the why and highly motivating because we have to connect to people’s core if they’re going to make change, but then we give them those habits. We give those 1 percenters is that make the most difference. And we get them to choose which are going to make the biggest impact for them and for their teams, of course, which is most important. And then we get them to go away. We practice. We see them as experiments. We come back. We might do group coaching sessions to understand how they’ve gone, or we then follow up with another session in four weeks after, for example. So it’s really about how do you help them to know what habits are, but then also embed them, keep them top of mind over time. And then once they’ve got it, that’s the beauty with these habits. And the one percent is, is it’s not something you have to put loads of work into forever. Once it becomes that habit. We add another habit on and it’s a continual process of learning and embedding this into into people’s day to day And that’s kind of the beauty the beauty of it. The next question we have then we get this a lot actually which is So 1% ers, what does that mean in relation to sort of celebrating specific days or events? So things like International Women’s Day or NAIDOC Week, how do they fit into a 1 percent model? Phil: They can absolutely fit into that and I think there’s a place for celebration and recognition and acknowledgement of these kind of key cultural events and days in any DEI strategy. I think the place this this sometimes falls down, it’s when it’s the only thing an organisation does, and they see these these kind of cultural landmarks as the key drivers of change in an organisation. And we don’t see that we don’t see that working particularly well in terms of actually making meaningful change. And if you want to hear more about that, I’d suggest looping back to the first episode in this series and we’ll talk, we talk more there about our foundational kind of approach to DEI. I won’t labor that point here, but I’m seeing these as maybe another 1 percent so instead of relying on them to be these monumental drivers of change. They are another piece of the education and awareness and celebration puzzle. They are another 1 percent of that that’s happening inside of your organisation. That’s obviously aligned to its values. It’s aligned to the change it wants to see in the world. So it’s, it’s more of a lens shift on, on how you view these days as an organisation rather than rather than saying do or do not do them. And then of course the, the, the difficult conversation about which of these days that you recognise and celebrate as an organisation always comes in and maybe that’s for a whole other episode, because that’s something we know a lot of, a lot of businesses struggling with. Because there are so many days that they could acknowledge and and only so many and only so much time and so much resource available. The final question we’re going to, we’re going to cover here is how do we measure impact, a big one we get from clients? Kerry: Yeah. And I think for us, this is the same regardless, really, in terms of the type of approach that you take to DEI. So when we think about some of those one percenters in terms of habits with leaders, for example, so say through our inclusive leadership training, we have two kinds of measures we want to take. One is leadership measure, so how they feel they’re progressing. So to what extent do they value DEI? To what extent are they implementing their habits? What level of success have they had? What outcomes have they seen from doing that? But then also really importantly, the outside in perspective. So what have their team felt? What have their team noticed? Are their scores changing in their engagement surveys? So we would always recommend trying to get engagement data on a team level. And then we can start to track how that’s changing over time and how these little different one percenters are, are stacking up. Okay, so I guess in summary then, what we’re talking about here when we think differently about embedding DEI is moving away from this big transformational approach, which so often ends up actually being sort of DEI as a bolt on to how do we truly embed it into people’s day to day and into the systems and processes that already exist. Within the organisation, so moving from sort of a bit more ad hoc, maybe bigger focus to a more always on. So there’s incremental embedding, learning, constant, constant learning loops and constantly improving and getting better. Phil: So in the next episode, we will be discussing the challenge of getting leadership, getting on leadership and employees agendas. So how do we get the time and attention of time crunched individuals? And how do we think differently about how we communicate within organisations to help make a bigger impact and ultimately drive more, drive more positive change and create a more inclusive and better world? happy environment for everyone to work in. Kerry: So if you got value from this episode, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on the rest of the Thinking Differently DEI series. Obviously, look in the show notes if you’d like to go and hear about the first episodes, which was how do you make sense of DEI complexity. And of course, if you’d like to discuss anything related to DEI and culture change, please get in touch. We’re geeks on this stuff. I’m very happy to talk about it. You can either come to us via LinkedIn, our website, or email us at [email protected]. Thank you for joining us. Phil: Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Inclusion at Work podcast. If you’d like to help others benefit from the conversation you just heard, the most impactful thing you can do is share it with a friend. You can also give us a rating or a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And of course if you’d like to talk to us about accelerating your organisation’s DEI efforts or if you’d like to provide feedback on anything you heard today, you can reach us at [email protected]