In today's world creating a culture of inclusion is critical for business success. The benefits of inclusion are numerous, including increased innovation, better decision-making and higher employee engagement.
However, says Catherine Garrod, founder of Compelling Culture and author of Conscious Inclusion: How to do ‘EDI’ one decision at a time, it's not enough to simply focus on diversity. Organisations must embrace conscious inclusion to ensure that everyone is valued, heard and involved. This means making decisions intentionally, rather than relying on automatic thinking based on our own experiences – what she calls conscious inclusion.
As former head of inclusion at Sky, Garrod led the entertainment company to become the most inclusive employer in the UK, with 80% of teams increasing their diversity in two years. She believes that organisations must stop waiting for the right time for inclusion and just start taking small steps, for imperfect change is better than no change.
In this video Garrod discusses why we need a business case not to do inclusion rather than one to do inclusion and how to get started on the path towards conscious inclusion. She argues that it is critical to build a culture that fosters inclusivity before rushing to increase diversity in senior positions. By identifying gaps and building on existing strengths, businesses can develop stronger foundations for their inclusion journey.
You can also read Garrod’s article for The People Space on Beyond the gender pay gap: how to truly report on inclusion here.
About Catherine Garrod
Catherine Garrod is the founder of Compelling Culture and author of Conscious Inclusion: How to ‘do’ EDI one decision at time. She works with organisations to boost the experience for colleagues, customers and communities. Garrod believes when employees can be themselves and influence how things are done, their lives are better, and they're more creative and better problem solvers. And when consumers are authentically represented in media, products and services, organisations and the communities they serve to thrive.
Garrod led Sky to become the Most Inclusive Employer in the UK, with 80% of teams increasing their diversity. Now as a consultant, she combines the power of listening, employee engagement, diversity and inclusion, to make the complex simple. And collaborates to define practical actions people can implement today, tomorrow and the day after, to transform the organisations she works with. Clients using her inclusion diagnostic are achieving a 15% improvement within 18 months.
Listen to our podcast with Catherine to discover the common traps organisations fall into when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion, why mandatory unconscious bias training can activate bias rather than stamp it out and how to best measure the impact of inclusion strategies. Check out the Work’s Not Working… Let’s Fix It! podcast.
TRANSCRIPT
The business case for inclusion
When it comes to whether or not you need a business case for inclusion, here's what I think. So I think we're moving away from that now, which is really helpful, but I actually think we more need a business case to not do inclusion, which is an interesting flip because, if you think about inclusion, the fundamental definition of inclusion at its core ispeople being valued, heard and involved.
And there's not many organizations out there that would think that's not a good idea, right? So that's one thing, just in terms of people's experience, whether you are an employee or a consumer.
But the other thing is society is constantly changing and our understanding of society is constantly changing. So if you just take the global population, at the end of 2022 we tipped into just over eight billion people. It's a huge number. Ican't quite wrap my head around it. But the reason that that's significant is just over 200 years ago, we were just over one billion. So society is changing rapidly, and as our understanding of society catches up with that, actually inclusion is about remaining relevant in the future.
So if you've got an organization that's got a long legacy, or the industry has a long legacy or quite a traditional approach from maybe a 100 years plus, the way that you do things like research and marketing today needs to look very differentto how you did it a 100 years ago or you're going to get left behind.
What is conscious inclusion?
Conscious inclusion is really about equipping organizations and people to get their brain into the slower part of our brain. So if you weren't already aware, 90% of our decisions every day are automatic and our brains are theseincredible machines making decisions on our behalf all the time, which is wonderful for navigating a busy life. And it's as simple as yes or no, safe or dangerous, watch another episode, go to bed, etc. So really useful.
But it's much less useful when we're making decisions about other people because that 90% thinking is based on our own lived experiences and what we've tried before, who we know, what we trust, what's familiar, what feelscomfortable to us.
So if you are in a position where you are making decisions that will impact lots of people, you actually need to get your brain into that 5 or 10% thinking, which is the conscious bit. And that conscious bit goes and seeks research. It goes and gets feedback. It asks questions. It thinks who else can I go and get some perspectives from? And it just slows thinking down before you make any final decisions.
The number one action to ensure inclusion success
So I think the biggest thing that sets people up for success – organizations up for success - and avoids mistakes ishaving a plan that everyone can get behind.
That can take a little bit of work at the beginning to do some research, work out where you are, understand what's happening internally and understand what's happening externally. This is quite a lot of the work that I do with clients – a deep dive on policies, your website, your approach to marketing, the whole lot. Do the whole lot initially. Work out where you are, and then identify what the overall plan is and help people towards it.
I think that the biggest risk for organizations is not doing that or having a plan that's been put together by people who are hugely passionate about this stuff but again just don't have that experience necessarily of taking an organizationthrough change. Because what I will quite often find when I work with organizations is a huge shopping list of activity. And it's great stuff that's on that list. I very rarely disagree with the content that's on that list. But the weight of it is almost all on one person's shoulders or a group of people's shoulders, and they're not really sure what it's all addingup to.
So that's the biggest mistake I think that I see organizations making is not making that initial investment in the skill to define a plan that everyone can get behind.
The first three steps on your conscious inclusion journey
So the first three steps to start on the conscious inclusion journey, I could say go and read the book. Do a bit of private learning. See where you're at. See what resonates for you. I also encourage people to tick the things off that you arealready doing and highlight the things that you can do really easily. So if that's a style of learning for you, you want togo and do that in private and independently, that's a resource that's available now.
The thing that I tell all organizations to start with is start with inclusion, not diversity. You need to build the culture and the environment that helps people understand what you're trying to do and is safe for people to speak up and share different opinions and get involved in their own way if they want to, and is more collaborative and is constantly looking at this so that it's a safe place to then look at addressing over representation and building more inclusive and diverseteams.
A couple of years ago I saw people really rushing to diversity first when they wanted to increase diversity in senior positions, which absolutely I endorse. But if you haven't done the work on inclusive culture, it's just not a good experience for people. If your organization wasn't previously inclusive to people with mixed demographic backgroundsand then you've suddenly rushed to bring people in, their experience isn't going to be fun and actually for all the people working around them they're not going to be equipped to be thinking about the things they should be thinking about to make the environment more inclusive. Sodefinitely start with inclusive culture.
And go and start with, however you do it, what are the good things that you are already doing and what are the gaps? Because I've yet to meet an organization that's starting from zero. There's usually lots of wonderful things happening orpeople that want to be involved or getting on and doing things anyway. You can bring all of those things together and perhaps map them out on a big sheet of paper all of the things that you are already doing, and raise awareness of thosebecause you'll probably find there's things you didn't know that were happening
- and if you didn't know, then the next person doesn't know.
So it gives you this kind of nice base to start building your stronger foundations from as you then get stronger and stronger in your maturity journey.
About the author
