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WITI CAREERS
Inclusiveness in the Workplace
David Creelman - The issue of women in business has been with us for a long time, and we have made great progress. Is it still an item that belongs on the top of our agenda? Barbara Annis - It's on the top of the agenda in a different way than before. We spent too long on the identification phase asking what the issues were, what the challenges were, what the barriers were, is there a glass ceiling? What I don't see, and what is needed, is to go to the next phase, which is to ask how we can authentically remove some of these barriers. So it still remains in the hands of HR to place the issue at the top of the agenda with the CEO. DC - Don't you think that many of the barriers have been removed and we are seeing many more women in senior positions? BA - Some of the discriminatory and gender biases have been removed. What has not been removed are the cultural challenges and barriers that prevent people - and it is not just women, it is anybody who is different - from really thriving and bringing their best to the table. DC - Is it fair to put diversity and women issues together? I would guess that visible minorities face a much tougher challenge than white women in business. BA - I don't think it is fair for either side. The challenges for visible minorities are probably greater. Of course there are two genders in everything, but in talk about visible minorities the male voice seems to speak more. In white culture perhaps the female voice speaks more now, and gets more attention. At least some men feel a sense of reverse discrimination. I just spoke at an event in downtown Toronto called, "What do women want?" and found there is a fine line between speaking about legitimate issues and male bashing. There were only three to four men there and they were feeling very uncomfortable. When we talk about gender what we hear is "women", we don't hear "men and women". When we talk about diversity what we hear is "visible minorities", not the whole host of other diversities that are out there. Gender issues have been very female focused and while initially that was important we need to move to a much more inclusive approach. DC - I like your idea of using a framework that is sufficiently inclusive so that it addresses the needs of women and ethnic minorities and white males and whomever else, all within the same framework as opposed to having a targeted program for say, women only. BA - When you do a fix for a single targeted group it becomes a Band-Aid and you get some real undercurrent resistance to that. I have seen it all over the place over the last fifteen years. At our firm, we started with gender solely and then we moved to diversity including gender and now we have moved to a whole different context which we call inclusiveness. Inclusiveness asks, "How do you create a work place where people really thrive and are productive?" This is not at the cost of ignoring some of the specific challenges certain groups face but it is a different frame of reference, it is a far more social frame of reference. In every decision that you make, you need to look at your entire system and say "How will that affect people over here, over here, and over here?" DC - I would like to explore this concept of inclusiveness in more depth. What are the values and practices and programs you see in an inclusive work place? BA - One of the things you see is a much broader focus. Between 60% and 80% of people in organizations don't feel that they can bring their best to the table, so they "quit and stay", they " just do their job". That problem is more costly than having turnover and yet we focus far more on retention. When you look at the subject called inclusiveness, you have a big job at hand because first you have to ask employees the question, "Do you feel good about the workplace?" That challenges many things including some hierarchical structures that need to break down. A look at inclusiveness also addresses the question, "If people don't feel included how does that effect morale?" and as we know morale is directly co-related to productive activity. You ask these questions in a survey that addresses some of the behavioral issues and once you have identified them you can address them. You reach a point where it doesn't matter who is articulating the inclusiveness issues, it could be women, it could be visible minorities, it could be men. DC - Or it could be clerks or tellers or some other group... BA - What they are identifying is the collective water that they are all swimming in and that effects all of us at one level or another whether we are aware of it or not. You can really get people in action using the inclusiveness approach once they have identified what they can personally do about the issues. It is amazing to see how few people feel valued in many organizations. We did a program in the public service working with two thousand agents of change around how to create an inclusive public service. Our initial survey showed only about 42% of staff felt valued. DC - So we have this very distressing result that a majority of the people don't feel included, where does HR go from there? BA - There is the myth around HR and what HR is accountable for. We slap so many responsibilities onto HR that it can be very disempowering. When you do HR surveys - just based on the fact they are called "HR" surveys - guess where the responsibility goes? When you look at an inclusive approach everyone is responsible. It doesn't become about "you", it becomes about "you and me". It moves from "who can we blame" to "Wow, we are all in this water. What can we do collectively?" Now to answer your question specifically you need to look through the survey data for the specific challenges that most need to be addressed. In this case we co-created a task force, and we used outside people because when you are in the actual "water" you often can't see it. Then you need to hear from the people who don't feel valued and learn why that is. You might think they are just going to say they are underpaid, and while money is always there, it was lower in the ranking. What was high in the ranking was having a work place where they feel empowered. Too often we think that to show that someone's valued you have to give them a promotion, more money and a corner office. Actually people just want to be able to contribute and feel their contribution is valued. When we started the dialogue we found that people would be told, "This is just the way it is done around here" - which is another way of saying could you please just suppress your difference or your creativity. After the dialogue we had interactive broadcast workshops for two days where we reached 2,000 people across Canada in French and English. We heard from all of these people and we heard some commonalties across Canada. Then we went into what actions people could take to improve inclusiveness so it didn't become the VP of HR's problem it became, "I can do something about this." DC - Let's talk more about this concept of inclusiveness. BA - I love the word "inclusiveness" rather than the word "diversity" because diversity often becomes a numbers game: "Oh yeah, we have so many visible minorities, we have so many women" which is insulting because no one wants that sense of tokenism. DC - I remember working on employment equity and one staff member who was clearly a visible minority refused to identify themself as such because they just wanted to be like everyone else, they did feel included and they didn't want to change that. BA - The trouble that we've found with self identification in HR surveys is that targeted groups often don't want to self identify. If I am an aboriginal male and I have made it in the team and I am one of the guys I won't want to identify myself as if I were an outsider. Women don't want to be viewed as tokenism because when women get to a senior position there is the perception that they got the job because of gender. DC - I imagine that as soon as everybody understands how to think in terms of inclusiveness it has all kinds of effects across the organization. Again it is not a program or project, it is in the day-to-day actions of the individuals who now do things slightly differently because they have this new mindset. BA - It is almost like you are turning it upside down. So often you see senior executives go off on a retreat, they come up with this wonderful vision, mission, strategy, etc and they come off the mountain and announce this great thing to everyone. Now if you are looking at inclusiveness, where are you going to get your vision from? You are going to have to get it from your 5,000 people or 50,00 people or however many you ask. It's no longer just coming down from on high. DC - That reminds me of appreciative inquiry which often gets input from very large numbers of people. BA - Our goal of moving from a monologue to a dialogue is aligned with appreciative inquiry. With inclusiveness you have a context where appreciative inquiry doesn't just become something that you go off and do and feel good about for a while and then go back to the old water. For example, in an inclusive atmosphere if I debrief my staff, I will still do the usual, "These are the action items" but I'll also inquire about how they feel about it. DC - I was going to ask about how work life demands fit with promoting women in the work place but now I see it as being simply another aspect of inclusiveness. BA - You are absolutely right. Work/life balance doesn't really exist so we are going to have to let go of that since there are some times when you are not in balance and you just have to meet that deadline but if you have an inclusive environment you can raise your hand and say "I am burning out folks, I have to take three or four days here." It is admission and is actually welcomed. If you have a framework of inclusiveness then work/life harmony doesn't become this "women's issue", it becomes "our issue". It becomes how can we make it work for all of us. DC - I have one last question, what is the role of government in inclusiveness, or women's issues, or the issues of visible minorities? BA - When we just focus on gender, or on diversity and there are pitfalls that can be very costly. I just spoke to a CEO from a big software company who had decided to hire a board full of diversity. He hired 15 people from all over, diverse culturally and also in terms of experience. Within a year he lost $20 million. What was missing was that he wasn't able to facilitate a coherent alignment between these people and couldn't maximize their intellectual diversity. It was one of the most dysfunctional boards that I worked with because there was no structure or appreciative inquiry, no way to really listen in a powerful way and include people's diverse perspectives. Without that it all becomes about turf wars, opinions, assessment, and blame. Two things challenge us with government. In the beginning there were some pay inequities and there certainly was discrimination and people tended, especially successful companies to hire likeness. IBM used to have in the late 80s ads showing people standing around a computer with the text saying, "Great minds think alike". Now you have an ad with people standing around a smaller and sleeker computer, and the copy says, "Great minds think unalike." That is the shift that has happened around the world and I think that government could let go of some of the employment inequity regulation and go to a different model one based on recognition that would look at the progress a company has made against the benchmarks and congratulate companies who have made things happen from an inclusive perspective. Don't you think that would motivate companies way more?
This interview was originally published by HR.com and is reprinted here with permission.
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Sometimes diversity is about women fighting for their rights, visible minorities fighting for their rights, gays fighting for their rights... Is there some way we can make progress without all this fighting? Barbara Annis, a leading edge thinker on gender and diversity from Canada, has some new ideas. David Creelman spoke to Barbara Annis.