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Hi, this is Damian with Cebo Health and for this short session we’re going to look at the twin issues of diversity and inclusion. So what is diversity? What is inclusion? Diversity is recognizing and appreciating what makes people different.
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Quite simple, quite straightforward, celebrating differences. Different how via any characteristic used to group people together. You’ll notice I don’t introduce the session by saying it’s calling it cultural diversity because it’s much wider than that.
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How can people be grouped together? Great many different things. There are the obvious ones, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, ethnicity are the most common. Other ones that take effect in the workplace, age, experience, training, parental status quite often, religious beliefs, marital status, sports, hobbies, personality, disability, political beliefs, sometimes even diet, certainly mental illness,
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mental health, physical health. They are all factors that can be used to group people together and they all have effects in the workplace. That’s diversity folks. Inclusion is a lovely phrase, diversity means I’m here, inclusion means I’m heard.
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Inclusion is about being respected for your differences, being valued, being heard, being respected while being able to be yourself, not feeling pressured to fit in to a particular way of acting to a person.
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particular way of thinking. Inclusion is about taking advantage of diversity to improve the organization. Of course, the catch for organizations is that diversity and inclusion have to be managed processes.
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Like any other organizational process, they won’t happen by themselves. They need a guiding hand. Why would you do this? Because the research is absolutely overwhelming on the benefits. You can see on the slide I’ve just thrown up there from the World Economic Forum that business case for diversity in the workplace is now overwhelming.
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You can read a number of reports on their website. Next slide here is about revenue from innovation. Companies with below-average diversity scores 26% average innovation revenue reported by companies compared with 45% average.
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innovation revenue for companies with above average diversity scores. Companies who are diverse and inclusive tend to be more agile, they’re more open, they’re better at creative solutions, they’re better at recognizing new markets.
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Possibly most importantly from a future point of view is differences in age regarding attitudes to diversity. The slide I’ve just thrown up here you can see for employed baby boomers when asked the question if I were to look for a new job tomorrow a diverse and inclusive workplace would be important part of my search.
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Even for baby boomers 37% is a large proportion you are going to miss out on a third of possible candidates if you’re not a diverse organization. 33% for employed generation extras but really startlingly 47% for employed millennials.
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You will cut yourself off from half of the workforce if you are really on diverse organization. So what are the advantages? It’s quite simply competitive advantage. We sell our products, we sell our services to increasingly diverse customers in increasingly global markets.
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We tend to recruit from increasingly diverse pools of talent, different backgrounds, different points of view, different perspectives on life. All of these drive competitiveness if we take advantage of them in the organization.
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Organizations that do so tend to be better at innovating, they tend to adapt more quickly to changing market conditions. They tend to operate far more effectively in global markets and they’re perceived more positively by their customers and of course they attract skilled staff more easily.
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So surely we should all be doing this and we can all be doing it. this. It’s not so simple. If you look at some of the research on diversity and inclusion, there are problems. A recent study with Harvard asked a class full of their students to rate the CV of a real-world CEO.
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Half the class were given the real-world CEO’s actual name, Heidi Rosen, and half were given a fictitious name, Howard Rosen, and asked to evaluate based on comprehensive CV of the person. For Heidi Rosen, they tended to perceive her as more power-hungry, self-promoting, and less likable than Howard, despite them being the same person with exactly the same track record.
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A study on ethnicity in the workplace found that people with English sounding names, the study was called, are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? CVs handed into organizations with a variety of different types of names on them.
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The English sounding people got significantly more callbacks. We have a problem with diversity. One of the most distressing studies, 67% of the British public feel uncomfortable talking to disabled people and 36% of them tend to think of disabled people as not as productive as others.
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This is a big problem. Diverse organizations are generally more productive, happier places to work, they are more agile, they adapt to change more quickly, but we’re not doing it. Why is this the case?
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You need to take a step back and look at the way we think, look at the way our society operates. So let’s start with stereotyping. You’ve probably heard the word before. The basic definition of stereotyping is assuming that all members of a group share certain qualities.
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In other words, we ignore individual or unique qualities and assume that the group is homogenous, that they are all the same. Every features. You’ve probably been stereotyped yourself at one point. We tend to jump straight to thinking of race for stereotyping that we stereotype people by race, but it’s far more comprehensive by that.
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Millennials are self-obsessed and entitled. Teenagers are moody. Introverts don’t make good managers. Irish people are great crack. It’s all stereotyping. It’s all assuming that because we know how the group in general acts, individual members will act the same way.
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I worked for a long time for a German company. time I’d go over to Germany, they’d drag me out to the pub. I’m an introvert. I don’t like pubs. They’d sit me down and they’d wait for me to be great crack.
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Okay, chances are you’ve had a similar experience. It may be something really simple, really straightforward. It may be you being left-handed or right-handed. Oh, if you’re left-handed, you’re creative.
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If you’re red-haired, you’re obviously Irish. We do it all the time. One of the most damaging ones, disabled people are so brave. It is most commonly around race, religion, sexual orientation and ability in some way, but we do it automatically.
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That is the problem. It’s not something we think about. Why? We’ll get to that very shortly. It’s largely to do with the way society works, but it’s also to do with the way our brain works. Before we jump forward though, I want to briefly mention an extreme form of stereotyping called Othering.
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This is extremely topical in the current political climate. Othering is portraying the stereotyped group as fundamentally different, dangerous quite often, unclean, dirty, disease-bearing, less complex, emotionally, intellectual, socially.
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This is harmful because, for two reasons. One, it’s the justification for discrimination, for individual structural societal discrimination. Two, because we use the media to enable stereotyping and othering, sometimes to a quite extreme basis.
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You will have seen it in recent political campaigns around the world. Stereotyped groups who are othered are an easy target. Okay? It stirs up hatred, it stirs up resentment, and it’s pervasive. It’s constant on social media, on news media, and it’s really, really unfortunate.
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So, how do we avoid it? We have three problems here. Okay? We’ve a thing called implicit bias. We’ve a following thing called confirmation bias, and we’ve an underlying issue called neuroplasticity. Let’s look at the last one first.
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Neuroplasticity is the tendency for our brains to rewire to support repeated thoughts or actions. Nothing exciting or strange about it. It’s how the human brain learns, and we do it very, very effectively.
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The first time you’re put behind the wheel of a car and told what everything does, it takes all your focus to remember what to do. Six months later, you repeat the set of tasks in your head over and over.
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It’s completely automatic. You can do other things. You don’t have to think about it. But it’s the same with any set of thoughts at all. If we repeat them often enough, they’d be become automatic. So that’s great if it’s positive thoughts, if it’s facts, not so much if it’s a constant flow of stereotyping or othering from our friends, from our social circles, from social media and from the news media.
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It becomes automatic. This leads to implicit bias where we’re biased against certain groups without realizing it. And this is the absolute core problem for organizations, is that it’s not explicit. We don’t do it on purpose.
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It happens without us consciously realizing it. you have seen the the effect in recruitment quite often that this is a known problem. We tend to recruit people like ourselves. We look for qualities that we would like to recognize in ourselves and you get an organization of like-minded people but also people with the same views, the same stereotypes, the same biases because it’s implicit because we don’t think about it and it comes out in many different ways.
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It can come out in micro-behaviors in the organization where very small giveaways that we were biased against a particular group or a particular type of person. It might be the slight frown when the woman in the room starts to talk.
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It might be the tendency to talk over the quiet person when they start to make a point. It might be the assumption that only someone who’s outgoing and extrovert will work in sales and it’s these small behaviors over and over and over in combination with neuroplasticity can make for some unpleasant places to work for people who are stereotyped, for people who are in groups.
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The final point is confirmation bias. If we have a set of values about different types of people in our heads, we tend to look for external confirmation that they’re true, that they’re right. This is called confirmation bias.
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I have a bias and I look for it to be confirmed in the workplace so we don’t see the value of people. You pick and choose your facts, pick and choose your scenarios and you use them to confirm your own implicit bias.
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It’s really harmful and worse, it’s really really difficult to overcome. So how do we do so? noting before we go into the details of how to actually get past it that discrimination in the workplace is illegal.
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It’s restricted by legislation. The Employment Equality Acts of 1998 to 2015 make it illegal to discriminate in the workplace on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, civil status, in other words married, divorced, family status, in other words whether you’re an orphan or of parents, disability both physical and mental health which a lot of people don’t realize, age or membership of the traveller community.
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You can be brought to court for discriminating on this basis. It as I say can be a very difficult issue to to manage because people do it implicitly. They do it without realizing it. To make things worse, passive acceptance of discrimination in the workplace is tantamount to tacit approval.
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You need a managed process around. diversity and inclusion. So, let’s give ourselves some workplace tools. If this is also automatic, we can try to change behaviour. It’s a long process. Quite often you’re changing attitudes, the most difficult thing to train in people.
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You need to be measuring quite simply, as with any other business process, if you want to improve it, if you want to understand where your organisation stands at the moment, you need to be measuring.
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If you measure diversity in groups, you will probably have the tools to do so. Your HR department may have the tools to do so. You will get figures on diversity. You will realize if you are a very young or a very old organization, a very Irish organization or a very male organization, it can be quite a shock to realize this.
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The tendency is to justify that measurement. Oh, but you’re everyone in IT is a guy. It’s an assumption. It’s confirming your implicit bias. Oh, but everyone in sales is loud and outgoing. Not always the case.
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And that defensiveness will actually damage your ability to be more diverse, to be more inclusive. Of course, you can measure diversity. You can implement measures to increase your diversity scores and tie different types of people of all kinds in your organization.
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It does nothing for inclusion and it can actually make things worse if you are hiring diversely purely to reach targets. This is not helpful. Value diversity. Measure business results. Measure productivity, but also allow people to be diverse.
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Allow the quiet people to be quiet. Allow different points of view from different cultures in meetings. Same as any other business process. It can be improved. You need frameworks in place ideally you need diversity champions someone who believes in diversity inclusion and in the effects on the business not just someone who has been asked to take on this task and is already busy.
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You can work it into performance reviews you can work it especially into hiring processes and you can gradually start to improve. If we think about neuroplasticity again of course once you start to have a diverse organization an inclusive organization it becomes the new normal.
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Your brain rewrites itself to accept that this is the way the organization is and a lot of your old stereotypes start to fade. So let’s give ourselves some tools if bias is implicit how do we notice it in the first place.
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Thankfully wiser minds than ours have put a lot of work into this. Web address I’m putting up now is called Project Implicit. Implicit.harvard.edu. It’s an online tool for measuring your social preferences for certain groups over others and it helps you to identify your unconscious biases.
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It’s a large fairly comprehensive questionnaire but I highly recommend putting in the time to actually do it because your biases are in your subconscious. They’re implicit. It can be a bit of a shock to the effect to which you are actually biased.
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A simple exercise you can also do is called the Trusted 10. So step one of this exercise if you want you can do this right now is in your organization write art just in your life for that matter write down the 10 people you trust the most.
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Okay if you want pause the video right now and actually do that and we continue on with the exercise. Back. Good. So what we do at the Trusted 10 exercise is you see how diverse they are. For each of those 10 people you write down their gender, their age, their sexual orientation, their nationality, their ethnicity, their political leanings as many as you can think of.
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You are charting how diverse the people you trust actually are and again that can be a shock. It’s a real indicator. It may not be what you think. It may not be an ethnic bias or cultural bias. It may be an age bias.
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It may be a subconscious bias around gender identity but this is the value of these type of tools. Project Implicit will tell you in no uncertain terms where your biases are. This is the first step in starting to manage them.
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From an organizational point of view there is a tool again by Harvard called bias interrupters. these are extremely useful in the organization. Biasinterruptors.org slash toolkits. There are a number of organizational tools for ensuring you don’t suffer from implicit bias, you don’t stereotype in hiring, in assignments, actually giving people work to do, in meetings, in performance reviews, especially in performance reviews.
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It’s very easy to let your biases affect your view of people’s performance in the organization. All these tools are free and they are really really useful to start the process of change. Bear in mind it’s not going to be quick, it’s a fundamental for many organizations piece of organizational change and it’s something that needs to be managed and it’s something that needs to take place over a long period of time.
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Most importantly, it’s something that needs to be measured. You need to be able to show that yes, this is actually working. Specifically on inclusion, you need to manage the process of inclusion. Some people think if they have a diverse workforce that they need to treat everyone the same, that not to do so is actually being biased against one type or another.
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If you have someone with a specific skill, with a particularly unique point of view, as a result of a certain trait, then don’t be afraid to make use of it. Google’s head of UI design for Android is blind and extremely effective at his job, rather than shying away from mentioning this particular disability.
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What makes you different? What makes you valuable? What can you bring to the table? In this case, it’s extremely intuitive UI design for Android. People who are quiet, people who are outgoing, people from different cultures, including them.
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Quite simply, that’s what inclusiveness is. This person may have a different viewpoint. This person may have a different attitude. This person is new to the company in particular. It’s often quite useful to focus on new people.
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They haven’t had term to learn the organizational biases and be afraid to actually speak their own minds. Finally, folks, change yourself, okay? If you want to recognize bias in the organization, if you want to include diversity, if you want to be able to work on inclusion, you have to be able to understand the processes in your own mind.
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We’ve looked at neuroplasticity. We’ve looked at the trusted 10. We’ve looked at Project Implicit, all tools for helping you to recognize them. It may not be a pleasant experience. Your biases may surprise you because they are so automatic.
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you can do for your own part is try to change your point of view. Okay, the best way to change attitude is to put yourself in the shoes of someone who’s very different to you. There are no shortage of ways to do this.
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Okay, you can read books. Any book by an anthropologist is going to be really valuable in this way. Anthropologists study people. They study societies but they do it by embedding right at the base of the culture and getting to know the individual people.
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I highly recommend, for example, a book called Talking to the Enemy by Scott Attran. He’s an anthropologist who went out to talked to terrorists, talked to people who may become suicide bombers to understand them at a basic level.
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It’s by no means pleasant reading but it’s a very useful change in perspective rather than stereotyping, rather than judging it’s trying to understand. I recommend an autobiography by a man called Mark Mathebane called Kaffir Boy, a story of a young boy growing up in apartheid South Africa in the slums.
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If you want to go back a bit further, a book by Dee Brown called Bury My Heart and Wounded Knee, it’s the story of the conquest of the American West from the point of view of the Indians. Very, very unpleasant reading but very valuable for changing your point of view.
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If you’re more of a visual person, pop on YouTube and type in radiate. Radiate is radiators for Norway by the people of Africa. It’s turning the whole. Africa is a nation that needs charity on its head.
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They produce some videos to make you take a step back and think of how we view Africa. This was something I did purely because I soaked it up as a child. The only aspect of Africa you saw was on the news was famine, was people needing help.
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This turned out to me one of my fairly strong unconscious biases. Radiate, go and watch the videos. I won’t spoil them for you. There’s a link at the end of the video. They’re really, really good for making you think in terms of other people’s points of view.
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Finally, folks, by far the most simple thing you can do is talk to different people. It’s the most direct way to break down stereotypes. Whenever you realize someone is different from you, especially if you have a tendency to stereotype them, sit down and talk to them.
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Get to know them. Ask about their experiences. Ask about their differences, what they have noticed about the people around them. make mistakes. You will make assumptions. That’s the way our brain works.
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That’s absolutely fine. Apologize when you do so. Try to see things from their point of view. I guarantee it will make you see the world in a different way. It will make the process of diversity and inclusion in your organization much easier.
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Final point folks. Practice empathy. Practice compassion. Judgment is very very easy. It helps with the stereotyping process, with the othering process. Take a moment to think, you know, what is this person going through?
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What may be going on in their life at the moment that results in their actions? Empathy and compassion are very good for the stress response, quite apart from anything else. Stress is focused on yourself.
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Empathy and compassion is deliberately thinking of the welfare of another person. has been shown in numerous studies to reduce the stress response. That’s when you want your organization to be. Folks, we’re reaching the end of our time on diversity and inclusion.
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Remember the problem, that it’s implicit. We don’t do this stuff deliberately, but it’s wired into us. Make use of the tools we have described. Project Implicit, the Trusted 10, and the Bias Interrupters program, all by Harvard.
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They will go a long way towards making your organization more agile, more adaptable, more profitable, and a more pleasant place to work, if you manage them. Thank you very much.
In the workplace, diversity is understanding and recognising that each individual is unique, while inclusion is respecting that unique difference in a way that makes it part of the workplace culture.
