Inclusion with a Purpose = Consistently Good Outcomes

“Inclusion sounds good but what is it, what does it look like, what does it get me”? This question, in one form or another, is one I hear often from business leaders. Being inclusive, like being fair, is instinctively the right thing to do. But what actually do you need to do and why? What is the business context?

Only last week a client meeting provided another practical example of looking at what I call Inclusion with a Purpose. The diversity strategy team inside a utility company is reworking their roadmap around diversity and inclusion. Where do they want to go and why? At the same time the organisation is reorganising and rebranding. At the heart of everything sits the ambition to deliver a customer experience which is second-to-none. This is a strong anchor-point for their thinking about operating inclusively. So now the question becomes “what do we need to do to deliver second-to-none experience for every customer in a region with very diverse communities?”

Why is this question so important to the business? Because regulators are increasingly linking future tariff increases to customer satisfaction. Profitability is hard-wired to the experience of every customer. The question creates the landscape for which a specific road map is needed. Now the organisation needs to apply a diversity lens to all the practices which link to customer experience. More questions will need to be asked and resolved.

· Do we have all the data we need on customer diversity in our operating area?

· What kinds of diversity are likely to impact customer experience and how?

· Are our systems allowing us to compare customer experience for different demographic groups?

· What can we learn from different customers about what they need and expect from us to give us second-to-none ratings?

· Does the makeup of our own staff and leaders reflect customer diversity with the empathy that brings?

· How can we access the different perspectives and ideas that could help us develop innovative ways to improve customer experience?

· Which of our core practices deliver consistent outcomes across differences like age or cultural norms and which do not? What needs changing?

· Have we helped our customer-facing staff develop the awareness and the attitudes required to provide consistently good service to every customer?

· How will we measure, report and respond to feedback on service from different groups?

Anchoring the effort in a core business outcome helps define what Inclusion with a Purpose means for any particular organisation. This helps leaders clarify what they need to do and makes it easier to communicate why specific diversity-related actions are being taken. In this case it will also drive greater engagement with diverse communities which links to recruitment and reputation as well as customer satisfaction.

What does Inclusion with a Purpose mean in your organisation?

Inclusion - Part of Being an Elite Organisation?

Is there a contradiction between being inclusive and being elite in terms of performance and business reputation?

Judging by the actions of many organisations with clear competitive ambitions, the answer is no. They are attaching more weight to inclusion as a means of delivering better business outcomes. Unilever, Barclays, BP and others in the Global Diversity Network (GDN) confirms this shift. They are analysing where and how to integrate inclusion into their operations to improve outcomes.

Much of this effort is driven by the need to connect effectively with stakeholders who are more diverse than in the past. This includes employees, customers, suppliers and joint venture partners bringing with them many individual, cultural and organisational differences. While these new connections may not come easily, remaining inside an existing “comfort zone” limits access to skills and potentially profitable business opportunities.

Inclusion is simply an approach to managing the differences (diversity) strategically and confidently. Companies are sharpening their competitive edge by changing mindset, practices and behaviours. Some brief examples are given below:

Inclusive Mindset - More Connections, More Opportunities

Where once competitive advantage came from inventing in-house and in secrecy, companies must now increasingly embrace ideas from the outside.

Drug discovery is a good example. An increasing proportion of discovery work is carried out by small, highly specialist labs. Competitive advantage for the major players is partly about becoming a preferred partner for these “inventors”. This requires the development of a different mindset where valuing and including people and ideas from the outside is business critical. Is your own organisation genuinely open to ideas, wherever they come from?

Inclusive Practices - It Doesn’t Happen by Accident

For some organisations, it is clear that making practices more inclusive is already generating a pay back.

One GDN organisation, facing huge competition for manufacturing talent in Mexico responded by changing its approach to recruitment. It set out to attract people with disabilities, a talent pool largely untapped at the time. Increased levels of employee engagement and retention have resulted from the change - a phenomenon we have also seen elsewhere.

Which of your practices might exclude people who are potentially important to the business?

Inclusive Behaviours - It’s the Real Thing

At the front lines of leadership and customer service, behaviour is everything. Organisations are investing to ensure that the behaviours of staff really do create an inclusive environment. In retail banking for example, leading organisations are training staff to deal confidently with the needs of customers with disabilities. Increased customer loyalty is a direct result of this effort.

Across industry sectors, we see increasing integration of inclusive behaviours into competency profiles, performance management tools, development offerings and selection criteria. Inclusion is increasingly seen as the way we need to do things here.

How Confident Are You About Inclusion?

You can start to answer this question by analysing:

o How your organisation is most impacted by diversity, internally and externally

o What kinds of diversity affect your business the most e.g. cultural differences

o Whether the attitudes, practices and behaviours prevalent in the business today are sufficiently inclusive to meet the challenges

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?

How Inclusive is Your Leadership?

Inclusion is a wooly word for many leaders. What does inclusive mean in terms of behaviours? People want to know how to put inclusion into practice in their everyday work.

I've been using different versions of a simple self-assessment tool to help answer these questions. It looks at behaviours in six areas:

1. Creating a supportive environment for each individual
2. Making sure people are treated fairly
3. Being a role model for behaviours that make people feel welcomed and respected
4. Developing diverse talent effectively
5. Avoiding the impact of biased judgements, assumptions and personal "comfort zones"
6. Using diversity to get better results

The tool describes a set of behaviours against which leaders can assess their own performance. Better still - copy the tool and have others provide feedback as well.

The work leads to pursuing one or two areas with highest potential for impact.

If you would like a copy of the tool please contact me