Diversity Minus The Inclusion: A lost cause
What It’s All About
Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI)
You’ve no doubt heard about it or potentially read about it in the company’s on-boarding documents.
The real question we have for you is, are you seeing it in practice in your organisation?
Diversity is like leading the horse to water, inclusion is about getting it to drink.
Diversity Council Australia explains D&I in terms of social and professional identity, and how one is valued based on respect, connectedness, contribution, and progress.
They suggest that to optimise a diverse culture, inclusion is a must.
In our experience, inclusion sets the tone of organisational culture.
We believe it’s impossible to claim a strong culture exists if it doesn’t at a fundamental level take into account the ideas of all its members.
Do you identify with your organisation’s culture?
Is this how you feel valued and included?
A Sense Of Belonging
We believe a common misconception around EDI outcomes is that it’s a quota or best represented by a set of numbers.
Something you can visually get a sense of such as race, age, ability, and gender.
While these are contributing factors, we consider them to be the outliers, not the concentration of relevant data points.
Our research and intuition tell us a different story:
Equality, diversity and inclusion is something that you experience. It is something that is felt.
Statistics on a sheet don’t paint the full picture.
They aren’t qualitative and they fail to report the surest measure of inclusion.
A sense of belonging.
A feeling of community.
Why It Matters
As stated in one of our earliest articles (link social integration article here) social belonging is not only a fundamental need hardwired into the human DNA, it’s the biggest determinant of life span.
We argue strongly that social acknowledgement, particularly from direct bosses and leaders, is the most significant factor determining the employee retention life span also.
In the US alone, businesses spend close to $8 billion dollars annually on EDI training programs that misses the mark.
Why?
Because they neglect the innate human need to feel included.
Being invited to the game is great, but sitting on the sidelines only keeps the bench warm.
The goal is to keep the hearts and minds warm.
As with so many initiatives, if inclusion isn’t cascaded from the top down, it simply won’t be effective long-term.
Inclusive leadership is where the buck starts and stops.
Adopting diversity for diversity’s sake is where you are bound to struggle with inclusion.
Additionally, inclusion should not be predicated on the idea that we all look the same, or think the same.
Genuine inclusion should be representative of the idea that we belong because we are not the same.
We belong because we welcome diversity of thinking, gender, ethnicity, and age, to name a few.
A sense of belonging is created by how people feel, not how they look or sound. It is not about shoving a square peg in a round hole, it is about adapting the shape of the ‘hole’.
In the 2019 Pulse survey, advanced EDI organisations experience the following:
Diversity is the ingredients list and inclusion is the recipe.
To cook anything that is going to resemble a tasty meal, it’s best to follow both.
What You Can Do About It?
Before you start, the first question to answer is, are you ticking the box or are you interested in shaping a new box?
Pulse identified the following five best-practices that advanced organisations have implemented as part of their EDI strategy.
Best Practices
1. Hire, develop + retain diverse talent
2. Build inclusive culture
3. Develop inclusive leaders
4. Create unbiased people and talent management processes
5. Create a sustainable EDI operating model
At KINSPACE, our interactive EDI learning design addresses the entire learning life-cycle to help deliver your EDI strategy.
Our partnership with globally renowned practitioners and learning designers fuels our capacity to co-design client-specific solutions.
* Food-for-thought for organisations looking to build a more equitable, diverse and inclusive organisation...
The conversation starts with discovering:
The purpose?
Who benefits?
How are you measuring it?
How often?
Who are you asking?
When are you asking?
How are you asking?
Why are you asking?
The decisions you make around equitable and inclusive cultures today will determine the outcomes you see today and beyond.
As Lincoln tells us, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
And your future always starts now.
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