Estimating the Potential Impact of Exclusion

During a series of recent workshops I have had the opportunity to ask leaders this question. "How often are the contributions individuals can make to your business being limited by the attitudes other people have about them?" The leaders respond in real time using voting handsets. The votes from 150+ leaders came out like this:

While this is not highly scientific it does represent the perception of a substantial number of senior leaders. This is what they think they see going on. With 71% believing that individual contributions are limited fairly often or frequently by excluding attitudes - removing this barrier is now significant part of their business case for creating more inclusive cultures.

Having the data from within the group, in real time, fosters great conversations about the future role of leaders.

Cultural Differences - Are you ^.^ or :-) ?

Stumbled across this study of cultural differences and the way people use different facial cues in reading emotions. It involved people from East Asia (who tended to focus most on the eyes) and Europe (a combination of eyes and mouth). Small sample size but seems to align with other studies.

I paste here one section of the article relating to emoticons.

"Emoticons are used to convey different emotions in cyberspace as they are the iconic representation of facial expressions," Jack said. "Interestingly, there are clear cultural differences in the formations of these icons." Western emoticons primarily use the mouth to convey emotional states, e.g. : ) for happy and : ( for sad, she noted, whereas Eastern emoticons use the eyes, e.g. ^.^ for happy and ;_; for sad.

New Source of Data on the Impact of Employee Engagement

The link between inclusive culture and employee engagement is rapidly becoming one of the strongest business case arguments for inclusion-building efforts. A recent report for the UK's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills compiled a lot of the published evidence for the impact of employee engagement on business performance. Well worth a look if you are developing your own business case arguments, information boards for a workshop etc.

Who Feels Fairly Treated in Your Organisation?

I’ve been working on inclusive leadership with a large UK organisation recently. For me, fair treatment is perhaps the most important component of inclusive culture. There is a really strong, well documented link between fair treatment and employee engagement. When maintaining engagement is so difficult in these challenging times, treating people fairly seems a low cost though not simple route to pursue.

The company concerned has a regular employee engagement survey. I was really struck by one method of illustrating the “spread” of employee perceptions around fair treatment (see below).

The horizontal axis shows the % of employees responding favourably in terms of seeing their treatment as fair. The vertical axis is the number of units / departments receiving each score (in this case between about 20% and 90%).

There is real power in investigating the differences in leadership practices between the highest and lowest scoring groups. What helps the most?

A version of this distribution can also be used as a fair treatment or inclusion measure for a whole organisation. Rather than simply increasing the average score for fair treatment you might also choose to have goals for improvement of the lowest scores etc..

Assuming enough demographic data is available it would be terrific to look at this kind of profile for different identity groups. Any organisation using Six Sigma should be able to use this kind of technique particularly well.

Fair treatment is fundamental to employee engagement and the resilience of organisations. Are you doing enough to understand who feels fairly treated and who doesn't?