Diversity Is A Reality, Inclusion Is A Choice ™
For long-term success, embed inclusion in every aspect of your decision-making
Posted on 06-05-2019, Read Time: Min
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Diversity and inclusion is a popular topic for many businesses these days. Thanks to increasing social awareness about the importance of traditionally “feminine” traits like empathy and active listening in leadership and how diverse workforces can be beneficial for more diverse markets, organizations are finally beginning to realize the importance that diversity and inclusion can play in their success. Moreover, with increased awareness of issues like microaggressions, gender, and racial salary gaps, and the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment, organizations are realizing that diversity and inclusion aren’t just beneficial, it’s essential.
We know from academic research that diverse teams tend to be more productive, more innovative and more accurate in their predictions. People in those teams are often more committed to the company and more satisfied with their jobs. Famously, research by Scott Page and James Surowiecki found that diversity in teams is often more important than average IQ as a predictor of team effectiveness in many tasks like brainstorming, predictions, and problem-solving.
However, when a company is only working on diversity and inclusion because of the current political and social climate, they end up taking one of two approaches.
We call the first approach Diversity 101. Based on compliance, Diversity 101 is simply ensuring your organization isn’t breaking any laws around discrimination and equal rights. This is essential but is really only the bare minimum of what a firm should be doing.
The second approach is Diversity 2.0. A marketing-led approach, Diversity 2.0 is about having key milestones or cases to prove to consumers and prospective recruits that the company cares about diversity and inclusion and have made progress. They may highlight winning awards, or having a diverse workforce, or that they sponsored or hosted a talk about disability rights or marriage equality. However, these are more indicative of the image the company wants to portray than of the actual inclusiveness of the company day-to-day.
In fact, when the UK mandated that all companies with over 250 employees publicly report their gender pay gaps in 2017, we were finally able to show this phenomenon with data to back up our anecdotal evidence and case studies. We looked at the gender pay gaps of companies that are often touted as the best companies in terms of gender equality: The Times Top 50 Places to Work for Women, the Glassdoor Top 50 Organizations, and the last 10 years of Catalyst award winners. What we found is that these companies that are often celebrated for their gender equality actually tend to have WORSE gender pay gaps than the average British company. In fact, more than 90% of the companies we looked at had gender pay gaps that were worse than the national average.
When we looked again a year later we saw that this trend hasn't changed much. What’s more, we found that even for those companies that had closed their salary gap they often increased their bonus gap. This just highlights the fact that when taking a marketing-led approach to diversity and inclusion an organization may win awards or some good press but they won’t necessarily get any reasonable, sustainable change.
And there’s a clear reason for this lack of real progress: both the Diversity 101 and 2.0 approaches see diversity and inclusion as being about “the other”, and about helping these others fit in. As such, it’s almost considered like some extra charity work that a company does on the side. Indeed, diversity and inclusion in some companies we work with is housed in the Corporate Social Responsibility side of the company. The consequence of this is that none of these companies actually ends up being truly inclusive, and all their “diverse” workforce that they recruit ends up leaving in frustration at being duped.
Instead of this, organizations should take an approach we call Inclusion 3.0. This approach takes the perspective that a diverse workforce is critical to the success of a company, and that inclusion is essential to leveraging that diversity. The reason this is important is because while we know that diverse teams perform better than homogenous ones that only happens when these teams are also inclusive. That is, teams need to embrace and leverage their diversity in order to reap all the benefits that diversity can bring. It’s about making everyone feel like they belong, like their voice matters, and like they don’t have to conform to others in order for their opinions or ideas to be valued.
Inclusion 3.0 considers diversity and inclusion work to be a way of doing business, rather than something done on the side. As such, inclusion becomes a consideration in all actions taken by leaders, and policies work to make inclusion part of all day-to-day behaviors that employees practice. As a result, this approach creates a culture of inclusion weaved into the very fabric of the organization.
There are lots of things that an organization can do to create an inclusive workplace coming from this approach. For example, anonymizing resumes, having a robust parental leave policy and making work flexibility the default. However, it’s equally if not more important that leaders exemplify inclusive behaviors and embed inclusion in their day-to-day jobs.
For example, leaders might consider rotating a dedicated devil’s advocate in meetings to encourage a culture of healthy argument and ward off groupthink. Another behavior to be encouraged is to notice and minimize micro-aggressions. For example, we know that members of minority groups are more likely to be interrupted or have their ideas attributed to other people. If leaders especially can take note of when these behaviors occur and call them out, others will begin to mimic that behavior and microaggressions are likely to happen less often.
These are just a few examples of actions organizations can take, but the important first step is that organizations need to realize that diversity and inclusion is about them, not some “other” group. It’s about making the best decisions, not about charity to some marginalized group.
We know from academic research that diverse teams tend to be more productive, more innovative and more accurate in their predictions. People in those teams are often more committed to the company and more satisfied with their jobs. Famously, research by Scott Page and James Surowiecki found that diversity in teams is often more important than average IQ as a predictor of team effectiveness in many tasks like brainstorming, predictions, and problem-solving.
However, when a company is only working on diversity and inclusion because of the current political and social climate, they end up taking one of two approaches.
We call the first approach Diversity 101. Based on compliance, Diversity 101 is simply ensuring your organization isn’t breaking any laws around discrimination and equal rights. This is essential but is really only the bare minimum of what a firm should be doing.
The second approach is Diversity 2.0. A marketing-led approach, Diversity 2.0 is about having key milestones or cases to prove to consumers and prospective recruits that the company cares about diversity and inclusion and have made progress. They may highlight winning awards, or having a diverse workforce, or that they sponsored or hosted a talk about disability rights or marriage equality. However, these are more indicative of the image the company wants to portray than of the actual inclusiveness of the company day-to-day.
In fact, when the UK mandated that all companies with over 250 employees publicly report their gender pay gaps in 2017, we were finally able to show this phenomenon with data to back up our anecdotal evidence and case studies. We looked at the gender pay gaps of companies that are often touted as the best companies in terms of gender equality: The Times Top 50 Places to Work for Women, the Glassdoor Top 50 Organizations, and the last 10 years of Catalyst award winners. What we found is that these companies that are often celebrated for their gender equality actually tend to have WORSE gender pay gaps than the average British company. In fact, more than 90% of the companies we looked at had gender pay gaps that were worse than the national average.
When we looked again a year later we saw that this trend hasn't changed much. What’s more, we found that even for those companies that had closed their salary gap they often increased their bonus gap. This just highlights the fact that when taking a marketing-led approach to diversity and inclusion an organization may win awards or some good press but they won’t necessarily get any reasonable, sustainable change.
And there’s a clear reason for this lack of real progress: both the Diversity 101 and 2.0 approaches see diversity and inclusion as being about “the other”, and about helping these others fit in. As such, it’s almost considered like some extra charity work that a company does on the side. Indeed, diversity and inclusion in some companies we work with is housed in the Corporate Social Responsibility side of the company. The consequence of this is that none of these companies actually ends up being truly inclusive, and all their “diverse” workforce that they recruit ends up leaving in frustration at being duped.
Instead of this, organizations should take an approach we call Inclusion 3.0. This approach takes the perspective that a diverse workforce is critical to the success of a company, and that inclusion is essential to leveraging that diversity. The reason this is important is because while we know that diverse teams perform better than homogenous ones that only happens when these teams are also inclusive. That is, teams need to embrace and leverage their diversity in order to reap all the benefits that diversity can bring. It’s about making everyone feel like they belong, like their voice matters, and like they don’t have to conform to others in order for their opinions or ideas to be valued.
Inclusion 3.0 considers diversity and inclusion work to be a way of doing business, rather than something done on the side. As such, inclusion becomes a consideration in all actions taken by leaders, and policies work to make inclusion part of all day-to-day behaviors that employees practice. As a result, this approach creates a culture of inclusion weaved into the very fabric of the organization.
There are lots of things that an organization can do to create an inclusive workplace coming from this approach. For example, anonymizing resumes, having a robust parental leave policy and making work flexibility the default. However, it’s equally if not more important that leaders exemplify inclusive behaviors and embed inclusion in their day-to-day jobs.
For example, leaders might consider rotating a dedicated devil’s advocate in meetings to encourage a culture of healthy argument and ward off groupthink. Another behavior to be encouraged is to notice and minimize micro-aggressions. For example, we know that members of minority groups are more likely to be interrupted or have their ideas attributed to other people. If leaders especially can take note of when these behaviors occur and call them out, others will begin to mimic that behavior and microaggressions are likely to happen less often.
These are just a few examples of actions organizations can take, but the important first step is that organizations need to realize that diversity and inclusion is about them, not some “other” group. It’s about making the best decisions, not about charity to some marginalized group.
Author Bio
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Raafi-Karim Alidina is the co-author of Building An Inclusive Organization: Leveraging the Power of a Diverse Workforce, and a consultant with Frost Included, working with clients to help create more inclusive workplace cultures. Connect Raafi-Karim Alidina |
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