Making Sense of DEI Complexity [PODCAST]

Phil:
Foundations doesn’t mean it’s basic. It doesn’t mean it’s easy. To make an analogy, the foundations are not the most basic part of a house, but they are absolutely necessary to build the rest of the structure on. So foundations talks to the common elements of inclusion that can be relevant across multiple different groups. So they’re things like taking an inclusive mindset, being aware of for instance, types of bias.

Kerry:
Welcome to our thinking differently about DEI series. We know how important diversity, equity, and inclusion is in organisations, and that when done right, it can make a huge impact. But we also know that it can be incredibly challenging. And this series is about how we can take new ways of thinking to challenge how we’re doing things at the moment and ultimately make real change in organisations. I’m Kerry Boys, and I’m here today with Phil Cross.

Phil:
So the work we do with organisations that are trying to create more diverse, equitable, and inclusive cultures brings us face to face on a daily basis with some of the biggest challenging challenges facing businesses that are trying to make meaningful change. And some of these challenges are pretty universal. We see them across different industries, different types of organisations. And this has kind of got us thinking. When we’re dealing with these persistent and almost universal problems, we need to start to question how we’re traditionally going about solving them.

So in this series, we’re gonna explore those challenges, share some of the ways we’ve been working with our clients to think differently about making progress on DEI.

So that begs the question, why do we need to think differently? And Kerry alluded to it at the start there, but, really, it’s because we’re not seeing the type of progress that we’d really like to. So this is progress in things like representation. So looking at the stats here in Australia, we know that women make up half of the population, but only still 10 percent of senior roles in the ASX top 300 organisations.

And we see this across the board from different different groups, be it disability, LGBTQI plus, etcetera, etcetera. We’re also seeing a lack of progress in things like measurement of engagement, inclusion, and belonging scores in organisation. And this is also leading to a lot of burnout of DEI professionals. So many individuals are leaving their roles in organisations because of the emotional labour. It can be a draining and challenging topic because of insufficient resources, sometimes resistance, constantly having to deal with that pushback, role strain having to juggle multiple priorities.

So it’s really hard, and it doesn’t feel like we’re making progress. And that seems like a really good reason to start trying to unpack things and do things a bit differently.

Kerry:
And when we were thinking about this, we were like, okay. We get it. Like, change has to happen.

Things aren’t quite working in their current form. But why aren’t we making change? Why aren’t we doing things differently? And, really, for us, this comes down to the fact that trying new things in DEI feels risky. And that’s because it’s such a highly emotive and it’s sensitive as a subject.

Lots of the topics we’re discussing are really sensitive because they sort of go to the core of your identity. And that makes people really risk averse. So we’re scared of getting it wrong. Those stakes feel really high. And the risks are very real.

So there’s a risk of offending. There’s risks on people’s personal brand. There’s potential negative publicity for organisations, and there’s even legal implications. And all of that risk means that we default to traditional ways of thinking, and that’s even if we’re not getting the results we hope for. So it’s safer just to do the same thing we’ve done before rather than try new things.

So then we would know we need to try new things, but how do we do that given high risks that exist? So the way we’ve been thinking about this challenge is, actually, let’s take some learnings from some really proven, tried and tested fields as well as some advanced thinking and some more experimental fields and apply those to DEI. So the way that we’ve been working is to take areas such as agile, design thinking, positive psychology, organisational development, change, adult development theory, and apply these to how we think about DEI.Pill, I think you’ve got an add.

Phil:
Yeah. It’s this is one of the it leans on one of the core tenants we talk to all the time, which is the power of diversity of thought and the power of bringing in different and fresh ideas to you know, to solve problems differently and ultimately get better results.

And this is what all of the stats we see around diversity and inclusion and high performing organisations are founded on. So it’s kind of walking the talk here when we’re talking about, you know, these areas like design thinking and positive psychology that Kerry alluded to. Why wouldn’t we bring these in? But all too often in traditional approaches, they’re not touched on. So we just saw this as a huge, huge gap and a huge, huge opportunity.

Kerry:
And also something we find quite fun. So getting to play with some of these areas, and both Phil and I in our past have got a lot of experience in them. So it’s been really this whole process has actually, selfishly, been pretty enjoyable for us. And I think what you’ll see as we share our thinking today and then in the upcoming series is how we’ve taken a range of these areas, and we’ve blended them along with some of our own thinking to really try and help solve some of the key challenges that we just hear time and time again from our clients. And that was our starting point.

So, yes, there’s all these different ways of thinking, but we have to hook this into something real. And that real starting point for us is the challenges that we know organisations are facing, and that’s how we can make this as useful as possible.

So the 5 challenges that we’re gonna be addressing over the series is, first off, how do I make sense of DEI complexity? We know it’s an incredibly complex subject, and people can get very overwhelmed, and it can be really hard to manage resources there.

The second area is how do we truly embed DEI into the organisation?

So can quite often be a bolt on rather than built in. So how do we truly make it part of everyone’s day to day?

The third challenge is how we get on leadership and employees’ agendas. So we know how many competing priorities there are. We know everyone’s got their day to day.

How do we make sure that people understand why this matters and, of course, what they can therefore do?

The fourth area measuring DEI effectively. How do you build measurement frameworks that actually work? That’s about not looking at too much data, not looking at data overwhelm, but focusing on what we can do and what we can really action. And then the final challenge we have here is delivering effective L&D at scale.

So especially when we’ve got large organisations, how do we roll out content workshops in a way that enables individuals to actually be able to understand, take perspectives, and make change. So over our next 5 episodes, we’re gonna be working through those challenges, and each episode will focus on one on one challenge. So today’s episode is gonna focus on the first of those. How do we make sense of DEI complexity?

Phil:
And and just before we jump into that, I think it’s important to say that these are obviously challenges we’ve noticed with the organisations we work with, but we’ve also validated these in a number of different ways.

So we’ve had conversations with our clients. We’ve taken these to industry forums where DEI experts, HR, and L&D experts have kind of chipped in and helped us kind of refine our thinking around these 5 core challenge areas. So there’s a degree of consensus out there that these are really the big boulders that we wanna be focusing on, Kerry.

Kerry:
And that is also across a real range of organisations. So those organisations are from ASX listed through to much smaller, even not for profits.

So these challenges have been pretty universal across the broadest range of organisations. So, hopefully, there’ll be something really useful for you today.

Phil:
So the first challenge we’re gonna talk about today is how to make sense of DEI complexity. Now DEI can be challenging from this perspective for a number of reasons. There are multiple different groups we wanna consider when creating a diverse and inclusive organisation.

There is the overlap between those groups and the intersectionality, so people are not just one aspect of their identity. They are multiple and many. And this can create a bunch of downstream effects. The cognitive load for individuals in the organisation when so many so many different messages are being put out there and so many different lessons, learning things, and the stretch that can put on our resources from an organisational perspective. How do we prioritise, and how do we cater for a diverse set of needs?

So this is obviously quite a big challenge. And the way we’ve been making sense of this complexity is a few different ways. But first of all, is to think about the challenge from an inclusion first or an inclusion foundations first perspective. So what do we mean by that? First of all, it’s important to say that we’re not talking about an inclusion only perspective.

So there are very specific needs that groups have that we want to absolutely prioritise and absolutely address. But what we find is that when we focus on those foundations first, we have a more stable base on which to build and a more stable base from which to solve for the needs of specific groups. Foundations doesn’t mean it’s basic. It doesn’t mean it’s easy. To make an analogy, the foundations are not the most basic part of a house, but they are absolutely necessary, to build the rest of the structure on.

So foundations talks to the common elements of inclusion that can be relevant across multiple different groups. And we’ll talk to these in a few different contexts as we go through the rest of this session. So they’re things like taking an inclusive mindset being aware of for instance, types of bias that can apply across multiple different groups. They might mean basic inclusion practices that enable more voices from, again, a range of different underrepresented groups to be heard more readily in the organisation. So that’s kind of what we’re gonna talk about at a top level and now we’re gonna dive into a few different areas to unpack that and kinda really make it real in the context of the work we’ve been doing.

Kerry:
Yeah. And I think that’s important because I know this can sound a bit theoretical, but, hopefully, where it really comes to life is when we start to talk about how we apply that. So we’re gonna talk to three areas strategy and how we build DEI strategies from an inclusion first perspective, learning and development, and then ERGs or employee resource groups, which is a really interesting one when we’re talking about specific groups, but also inclusion first. So I’m gonna start with strategy. And what we often see in organisations is their diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies are led by the different groups that exist.

So there might be a whole load of work going on around gender and around race and around sexual orientation, for example. And they almost have pillars built around different identity groups. And while all of those are absolutely important, what becomes really hard for people in the organisation is to understand all of those different messages, and it becomes really hard to resource all of those different things. And, also, we see huge levels of crossover. So what we’re looking at here is thinking, actually, if rather than going individual group first, we think about what are those consistent elements that make sense for all groups.

So we aim to have one DEI strategy that’s relevant across all groups, and then that is built on with elements that work for specific groups. So what we would have there is a clear vision, a DEI vision, what we’re aiming for, where we wanna be from a diversity, equity, and inclusion perspective as an organisation, and a clear narrative and a clear set of actions that work for the vast majority of those groups and people that don’t necessarily fit within specific groups that we tend to prioritise. And what’s important about that overarching approach is that it really gives us an opportunity to link through to organisational strategy. So if at a top line level, what we’re trying to do is have a organisation that mirrors the communities that we operate in with a from a representation perspective and where everyone feels really included, for example, we can talk about how those two things are then gonna be able to drive business growth because we know that diversity of thought leads to better results. We know that people being included leads to happier people, which then also drives through to business results.

So it becomes a much clearer connection to business strategy. The other element that’s really important is it becomes much easier for individuals, Phil talked about cognitive load earlier, individuals to understand. So if we’ve got one core message, then it’s much easier for our really busy people to say, okay. I get that. That makes sense.

Then when we see other messages that might be group specific, they ladder in, and they build on that first narrative.

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 and it’s not just the understanding, obviously, is super, super important, but it’s how people then can talk about it with each other in the organisation and how it really becomes part of the language and and part of the kind of the daily ritual and how, for instance, leaders can cascade the message down throughout their team.

We know that a lot of this is kind of moving on to an area we’ll talk about in a future session. But so much of DEI being embedded comes from the leaders of individual teams really making it part of their part of their language, part of their ways of working, and part of their day to day. And if the message is confusing from the top, it’s gonna be hard for those leaders to translate it to the day to day. So really, really important that the the vision, that the story is clear. Yeah.

Kerry:
And I think that’s so important. And what we found with this approach, where we’ve got one core message and series of initiatives, is that we get a much stronger buy-in from leadership because that’s easier for them to understand. We know how busy our leaders are. And if we’re asking too much of them, then it’s gonna be really hard for them to flow that down through the organisation. Whereas if we’ve got one clear core message, then that’s a much yeah.

It’s an easier win. So I talked about the fact that what we often see in organisations, almost they’re sort of pillars or they’re key tenants of their strategy tend to be diversity group focused. Whereas we’re talking about the strategic pillars at an inclusions first level. So I think maybe you might wanna talk about some examples of that.

Phil:
Exactly. The strategic pillars, again, just just to kind of get clear on what we mean by a strategic pillar, it’s a it’s a way of helping guide our thinking and guide our ideation and prioritisation of all of the initiatives that we wanna roll out you know, as part of the as part of the overall strategy. So if those initiatives don’t ladder up to a strategic pillar, something that we think is really, really important, it gives us pause for thought in terms of is that the right thing to be doing. So measurement is a really, really common one. How are we measuring success in terms of DEI across all of these different pillars?

And we’ll talk about measurement specifically in a future one of these sessions. It might me how do we communicate and celebrate.. So again, if the messaging, if the language, if the story has been confusing and inconsistent in the past, how do we get very, very clear about that in the future? And another example could be education and empowerment. How do we craft a learning and development program that is really meaningful for everyone in the organisation? So, again, you’ll notice none of those speak specifically to an individual group but they are beneficial to all groups.

Kerry:
And I think what’s really important about strategic pillars is these are ideally based on data. So we’ve ideally seen within an organisation that we’ve got some real key challenges that exist. So, say, our strategic pillar is around inclusive leadership, and that might come from the data and insights that actually people don’t believe that their voices are being heard within the organisation or they don’t understand how decisions are being made. And we identify that a key way that we’re gonna be able to drive those challenges is by improving our leadership’s capability to understand what inclusion looks like, hearing voices, making inclusive decisions, for example. So we wanna make sure we understand the problems.

These allow us to solve for those challenges, and then we’d also build measures against them. So that in that example, let’s follow through with inclusive leadership. It might look like leadership ratings, which we know some organisations are uncomfortable with, but we think is really important in terms of driving accountability. It might look like scores around voice and decision making. It might look like 360’s in terms of how leaderships are performing.

It might look like leadership self rating scores. So we start to see how it’s much easier to measure things that can drive back to business and business strategy when we’re looking at strategic pillars versus individual group specific work.

Phil:
And one final thing or we could we could talk endlessly about strategy, and Kerry and I commonly do. But I I think one final thought on that that we’d maybe like to leave you with today is that by focusing on inclusion more broadly, by focusing on strategic pillars which are not directly related to individual groups, it it not only solves for things like resourcing and cognitive load, but it actually, it actually derisks other people feeling excluded. By that, I mean, if you’re you know, if you identify as part of a group that does not does not fall into the strategic pillars of an organisation that is focused on maybe maybe on reconciliation and LGBTQI plus, but you’re a person with a disability, that can often feel like, okay, Well, where’s the where’s the focus on my needs? Where’s the focus on my group’s needs?

By focusing on inclusion first, we’re hopefully including everybody, and again, providing that platform for individuals needs to be met post that. So an important consideration there, I think..

The next area we wanna look at is learning and development. So this foundational approach can be translated to how we think about our workshops, our webinars, and how we upscale and improve the capability and capacity Of our people within an organisation. So, for context we’ve had thousands of people go through our learning and development offerings. So, we’ve run workshops for people at all levels of organisations across many, many different types of organisations. So this is kind of what we’re gonna share with you now is based on the learnings from all of those sessions and the results we’ve seen from them as well.

So by taking a foundational approach, and by that, we mean focusing on core skills that people can connect back to their day to day and really make real as part of their their their their working life. So things like, how does bias show up?

How does it show up across multiple contexts? How do you identify it in yourself? How do you potentially identify it in others? Concepts like privilege. How do we recognise the privilege we have, and what do we do with that?

And then core skill sets. So how do we give and receive feedback effectively? How do we have conversations around topics which people can find difficult in the workplace, again, beneficial across multiple groups? How do we make decisions which are less biased, more impartial, more fair? How do we deploy things like coaching skills?

So we’re asking questions. We’re helping people share their ideas so we get that greater diversity of thought, and we’re also hearing more varied, more diverse, and more rich perspectives as well. So these are behaviours, again, that are universally applicable that people can make use of in their day to day. And because these are more generalizable, people get to practise them. People get to reflect on their success and their impact.

Often, what happens, especially in organisations which are less diverse, people might go to an education session. They might go to a training session. They might learn about something, but then they don’t have an experience of it in the workplace because the diversity isn’t there. So it kind of goes to waste almost, and we know that, you know, the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve for those learning and development nerds out there. Training that’s not put into practice often just gets forgotten very, very quickly.

So this gives people an opportunity to take action on what they learn. Again, this creates a foundation. It creates a shared learning, a shared understanding, so that when we do talk about the needs of specific groups, they’re more easily understood and they’re more easily kind of accepted and integrated by the organisation. So, again, we’ve seen we’ve seen a real, real, we’ve seen real strong feedback, and we’ve seen really strong results off the back of this inclusion first approach to learning and development. Kerry, anything to add on top of that?

Kerry:
Yeah. I might just give an example of sort of the alternative. So I had a conversation with a client towards the back end of last year about allyship training, which is something that we offer. And they said to us, we’ve been really struggling to find the type of allyship training that we want. And I was like, okay.

Tell me more about that. And what they’d found was that they could get allyship training for First Nations, or they could get allyship training for LGBTQI plus, or they could get allyship training for women. But as they identified, there’s so much crossover in all of those different areas. And what they were looking for is exactly our approach here, which is that foundational allyship training. What are the core principles of allyship that apply across all groups?

And, yes, as part of that training, we do use those groups’ examples from each of those different diversity groups. But what it allows us to do is give a set of principles or, like, a foundations or principles based approach with clear actions. But then people can apply that across multiple groups rather than feeling almost stuck because they understand it within one context. So I thought that might just be helpful in terms of a specific example of how this L&D might play out.

Phil:
Yeah. And if we’re linking that back to the realities of organisational life and, for instance, resource constraints, time constraints you know, running multiple multiple learning and development sessions is, you know, people’s calendars. There’s only so much time. Learning and development budgets, there’s only so much budget. If we were to run an allyship course for each individual specific group I say most organisations would not would not take that approach because of that resource constraint. So it allows us to still have that and and have that in a way that works for the most possible people.

Kerry:
So the final area we wanna talk about as an example is ERGs, and this is also employee resource groups. So when we have groups of people within organisations, normally identity based, so it might be a women’s ERG, that are designed to support that group in some way. So whether that’s taking action, whether it’s a community for that group. So this is a really interesting one to think about in terms of inclusion foundations.

Right? Because we’re saying here a foundational approach, but then we’re also saying group specific. And the reality is that these two things absolutely work together. So what we believe is that the foundational approach actually helps make ERGs much more effective. So if we think about it from the strategic side, if we’ve got that foundational approach, we have that strategy that works across all groups, and that becomes the basis for ERGs to do their work on specific groups.

So they understand what the organisational aim is. They understand what the organisation was trying to achieve in this area, and then they can plug into that. So when we worked with rolling out programs for ERGs, they’ve said that one of the most useful things is having a true understanding of where the organisation’s organisation is trying to go so that they then know where they’re trying to go. And rather than having all our ERGs working completely in isolation, they can point in the same direction. The other way that we think about this from an ERG perspective is actually bringing them together.

So things like collective problem solving. So we’ve been working with the group recently, and we were talking about International Women’s Day. And, traditionally, you just go and you speak to your women’s ERG about International Women’s Day. But, actually, because we were collectively problem solving, we brought all of those ERGs together and said, what should we do for International Women’s Day? We were able to take the learnings that lots of the other groups had had when they were focused on key events.

But, also, we were able to build a really intersectional approach because we got to think about International Women’s Day in terms of women with disabilities, for example. So bringing them together as a problem solving brings that inclusion foundations approach to life. And then the other area that we found really useful is in terms of how they take action. So, again, if we’re thinking just from an individual group perspective and they’re doing policy reviews, for example, we’ve had organisations that we’ve worked with come to us and say, actually, these ERGs are making our lives so much harder. As a HR person, I’ve suddenly got six different sets of perspectives on endless policies, and I don’t know how to manage that.

Okay. If we work collectively and collaboratively, then we say, as a whole ERG group broader ERG group, we’re gonna focus on this policy first. We’re all gonna give our feedback. We’re gonna have a discussion, and then we’ll send that to HR. So we’ve got a much more collaborative approach that’s considering all groups.

And then the other area that’s really useful, we’ve seen great successes around communication. So back to that challenge we mentioned at the start, if we’ve got six ERGs communicating six different things about six different groups, it becomes very messy. We know communication’s already a challenge in organisations. Actually, working with those ERGs, we were like, what are the key things we wanna communicate? So one was recruitment.

Awesome. Let’s communicate recruitment for our ERGs across all groups. Or if it’s events, let’s communicate across all groups. So we actually, in that organisation, ended up with one ERG newsletter, one ERG Slack channel that had the broader communication on, and then people could be funnelled into specific activity for specific ERGs. So, again, this is back to sense making and also managing resources.

Phil:
We’ll link to this in the short show notes, but we’ve also got an episode and a blog post on effective ERGs. We do a lot of work in this area, and a lot of the a lot of the points Kerry has just articulated, but some of the how we bring that to life is detailed in a bit more depth in those in those posts and episodes. So we’ll make sure we link to that as well.

Kerry:
So this is our approach, I guess, and we’ve brought that to life through a few areas. And, overall, we’re hearing amazing feedback from clients in terms of the inclusion foundation approach because it really simplifies things, and it provides that framework to work within and the sense making for both HR professionals, DEI leads, leaders, and then the order organisation more broadly.

And what we thought we might just touch on now is some of the key questions that we get in relation to that and specifically in terms of, well, how do we make it happen for our organisation? So the first question that I’ll pass over to you, Phil, if that’s okay, is I’ve already got that strategy in place. So my strategy at the moment, it focuses on different groups. I’ve got a diversity group first approach. So I’ve got that pillared approach.

So I’ve got, yeah, we’ve got a focus on gender. We’ve got a focus on disability. We’ve got a focus on LGBTQI plus. How do I move to an inclusion foundations approach when that’s already in place?

Phil:
And this is obviously, you know, an asterisk over the answer.

This is gonna depend on the organisation and what’s been communicated and what’s been rolled out, etcetera. But I think at a high level, I would answer this with thinking about the road map and think about what comes first. So once again, we’re not saying that there isn’t absolutely necessary work for individual groups to be done in organisations. You know, people with disabilities have very specific needs that would potentially sit outside of an inclusion first approach. Absolutely.

But maybe if we’re thinking about reevaluating our strategy, it’s what comes first and what’s the story there. So we’re absolutely gonna still have a focus on the needs of individual groups, but what we’ve identified through our conversations, through the surveys we’ve done is that there is potential overwhelm, lack of understanding, lack of resources, all of the things we’ve talked about already. So our first cap off the rank is to take some of these inclusion foundational inclusion steps, and that looks like x, y, and z. Once those are in place, we’ve got shared language, we’ve got shared understanding, then we’re in a much better place to start focusing more specifically on the needs of individual groups and potentially communicating that more broadly. So that’s one way I would think about approaching this.

It doesn’t mean throwing out the strategy you’ve already got. It means rejigging it and maybe reprioritising some of your initiatives and activities. I I don’t know. Anything to build on there, Kerry?

Kerry:
Yeah.

I guess my point or my sort of starting point is always, where possible, to start with the data. So what do we know about how well our strategy is performing? Do we see these challenges? Do we have that overwhelm? Do we have confusion?

What are our people telling us about the work that we’re doing already? And then that always helps provide a starting point. And depending on what that data tells you, depending on what you have in place already, what tends to happen with organisations is that we and I guess this depends on organisational maturity, so where you are in your DEI journey. But quite often with organisations, we will go in, and we will do a new strategy process. So we will go back, and we will speak to those groups.

We may speak to other individuals internally and understand what’s working, what the challenges are, and then work with a core team to develop that strategy. As Phil said, it doesn’t mean throwing everything out that exists, but it does mean working out some of those missing pieces. So often, organisations wouldn’t have the overarching vision of what we’re trying to achieve in DEI. And they’re quite often missing those strategic pillars and the measurements associated with those. And then once we’ve got that, then it’s easier to start to reprioritise the existing initiatives and understand the gaps.

Sometimes we don’t need to go back and speak to the organisation. Sometimes the DEI leads in whatever form that might be. It might be under the CEO remit, or it might be in the HR remit, wherever that sits. We might be able to just run, like, workshops and say, okay. This is what we’ve got now.

This is where we’re trying to get to. These are the principles that we wanna apply. What are those gaps, and how do we start to fill those in?

Phil:
The next commonly asked question we get is, what does this mean for underrepresented groups in the organisation? Kerry, I’ll throw that question to you in the first instance.

But yeah, how would we go about talking to that?

Kerry:
Yeah. And I think the number one sort of misconception that we risk with talking about inclusion first, and you’ve probably heard us talk about this a fair bit so far, is that this is not saying that specific diversity groups are unimportant. Like, I think we can’t stress that hard enough. What this is saying is it’s about trying to build a platform so that the work that we do for specific diversity groups is as effective and works as hard as possible.

So in terms of what this means for underrepresented groups, it’s about building a platform to do more work. And, again, that might take time in terms of where focus is. So what might happen is early on in the process, we might be focused on inclusion foundations. And then once we get that set up and established over time, it might be that we move to specific diversity group focus as we’re building that understanding. We’ve got the shared understanding internally.

We’ve got the basics around ‘what does bias mean’. That applies across every single group, not just specific groups, and then we start to build. I guess a really good example of this is hiring. So, again, we’ve seen lots of organisations. They go and they review their hiring process, but they’re just looking at, okay, well, how do I improve the experience for women in my hiring process? Actually, what we should be looking at is how do I improve the hiring process for everyone? And if we can get that right, we can work out how the hiring process prioritises diversity, prioritises inclusion at a total level. That will apply that will make a big difference for lots of groups. But once we’ve got that in place, then we can say, okay, what additional things do we need to do for people with disabilities, for women, for example? Getting the sort of the chunk of it right first means that that’s gonna be much easier, much more effective, and much more efficient use of resources later on.

Phil:
And just a couple of bolt ons to that. I’d say when we’re thinking about our underrepresented groups, this approach should be done with, not for, the members of those underrepresented groups. So we’re involving the ERG leads.

We’re involving representation from different groups throughout this process in terms of consultation, in terms of execution. And circling back to what we talked about previously with the employee resource groups, making sure those are as those are as shored up and as set up for success as absolutely possible. So those ERGs still remain in place. And if they’re not quite hitting the mark in terms of how effective they are I will defer you to the other episode about effective ERGs, but making sure those groups are served as well as possible by the organisation. So underrepresented groups should absolutely be part of this process.

They should absolutely have you know, forums, etcetera and all of that kind of acts in concert, I think, to a more effective approach and a more effective strategy overall.

Kerry:
And it’s been interesting because I think when we’ve talked to DEI leads around this, I think that is a concern. It’s like what are my ERGs? Or what are people of an underrepresented group is going to feel about this? But we haven’t ever had any pushback from underrepresented groups because when we’ve articulated in this way, absolutely understood that this is about a better outcome overall, and it’s also about making sure that we get everyone on board.

We know this work can’t fall to underrepresented groups only, which often happens. So what this whole of organisation approach, the biggest strategic approach does is say, actually, this is for everyone. This benefits everyone, but this is also everyone’s responsibility. And we know that we have to have people in power positions. We have to have white men on board.

And so often, they’re excluded from DEI work or they feel excluded from DEI work. So what this allows us to do is have people that that are in power positions, people that do have the potential to help drive change rather than just assuming that our ERGs and underrepresented groups will will do the work for the majority.

Phil:
So I think just to and Kerry, feel free to jump in if there’s any other any other points, but maybe just to summarise some of the things we’ve talked about. So taking an Inclusion Foundation’s approach helps reduce confusion, helps reduce overwhelm, helps create clarity. However, it doesn’t mean inclusion only.

What it does mean is a strong foundation with longer term greater success, greater buy in for nearly everybody well well, for everybody in the organisation.

So, yeah, hopefully, that’s some food for thought for you. If you’re a DEI professional, if you’re if you’re kind of helming DEI initiatives in your organisation feel free to take any and all of the ideas that we’ve shared in these in this episode and in in the in the series to come. And yeah, swipe them with pride and put them into play. See how they see how they how they work.

And if if you have success or we have questions, we’d love to hear from you.

Kerry:
Yeah. And we’ve really enjoyed thinking about this and really open to be challenged. If you’ve got any thoughts, any questions, we’re we’re happy to geek out on this. So get in touch, and we’re very happy to have a chat.

Thank you.

Phil:
Thanks.

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 provide feedback on anything you heard today, you can reach us at [email protected].