Are We Still Missing Inclusion?

Photo courtesy of Burst.

Last year, it seemed Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) was on everyone’s mind. It was a new day in the sun for a practice that many had simply brushed off as a given. Now, it was now starting to take on new meaning.

For some, this sidekick word ‘inclusion’ was a relatively new concept. Many wondered how it was it was different from what they’d been doing for the last decade. It was a conversation that was long overdue.

When it came to really shifting the narrative around D&I, inclusion just couldn’t be left out of the picture. It asked companies to do more to be intentional about how they maintained their teams and promoted thought leadership across the organization. It had many companies stopping short in their tracks.

The general assumption was that “promoting diversity should just mean being inclusive.” However, there was a larger point being missed: inclusion was something that often required significantly more foresight and effort. Diversity was suddenly not a means to an end, and inclusion wasn’t a benefit that inherently came along for the ride.

What Inclusion Means

Today, more companies are making hiring decisions with diversity in mind. While you may feel you have a company that is diversely staffed, that’s just one part of the equation. If those same people aren’t being included in meetings or dialogue where impactful decisions are being made, then you’re operating under the illusion of diversity. This is where inclusion comes in.

Invited and represented is not the same thing as acknowledged and awarded. It’s like buying all the ingredients for a casserole and then thinking you can just throw everything together in the oven and it’ll come out tasting great.

Plenty of companies tend to believe that everyone who works there is always working toward the same goal, with the same interpretation of how information funnels out. However, people who have not historically made critical decisions for the company might come from radically different cultural backgrounds with different value systems. Cultural diversity can promote diversity of thought and perspective, and it’s critical to have ideas heard across all tiers of an organization.

Why Inclusion at Work Matters

Business leaders are told that if they want to be successful, they need to build an environment that fosters creativity and original thinking. All too often companies will check the box on the diversity forms, but they fail to bring these voices to the forefront. Innovation can happen when new ideas are shared and companies can begin to see holes in their messaging, procedures and processes that they may not have been aware of before.

When you build a company that encourages people to not only be seen, but also regularly heard, you build a culture that is inclusive of all of its members and better able to handle changes down the line.

The reality is that leaders often tend to hire those who look like them, think like them, and are therefore more willing to agree with them. It’s an unfortunate tenet of human psychology that has played out over time and it does comes at a cost.

There’s a growing bank of research to prove that D&I is critical to a company’s bottom-line. As society pushes for improvements in D&I in the workplace—hiring people of different race and ethnicity, from other cultures and walks of life, and with altogether varying life experiences—growth starts to happen. More perspectives means less room for error and greater opportunities for fresh ideas to spread.

The science behind this concept is that the more we stay in our comfort zones, the less we’re able to develop and improve our lives. What’s true about taking our own personal risks to be better humans, is also true for how we run our businesses. Friction and challenge in the face of traditional ideas and structures helps both people and organizations make exciting breakthroughs.

Sallie Krawcheck, Founder of Ellevest, captured this idea so perfectly in an interview we did with her for one of our clients last year.

When looking to invest, she would often ask, “is the leadership team any good?” The only thing that seemed to strengthen a company’s forecast for success seemed to be diversity. It wasn’t just about having those people on the team, though. It was also about having them in the room—maybe even fighting with one another.

We like when people agree with us, but there’s a huge downside to staying comfortable at work. We weren’t meant to always agree with one another and challenges are part of everyday life—both in our relationships and throughout our careers. We have to afford them both an equal amount of care and attention.

Talk about a work-life balance. So, how do you ensure you’re being inclusive at work?

Photo courtesy of Burst.

Start With Your Culture

When everyone is thinking the same, it stalls growth. Including new voices in the mix means you’re making adjustments to check yourself and stay relevant.

But how can you solve novel problems if you have a work environment that doesn’t encourage people to speak up? Studies show that when employees exist in a company culture that isn’t hospitable to sharing opinions, they don’t want to share them—even if it means making a mistake.

In the past, critics had suggested company culture really didn’t make all that much difference as to whether someone decided to chime in. They thought it had more to do with personality type. Now, there’s evidence that environmental norms can override this influence and push people to keep quiet when they might normally speak out.

In another study involving nurses and doctors, nurses were tested to see if they would object when a mistake was made by a doctor in an extreme life-or-death surgery simulation. Believe it or not, only about 50 percent actually called attention to the mistake when it was made. Those who were higher up on the hierarchical ladder did so more frequently.

Sometimes we want to be inclusive, but our culture is not set up to succeed from the get-go. Inclusivity requires openness and the free-flow of ideas.

That’s why it can be hard to get things done in an organization that’s extremely siloed or bureaucratic. When it’s difficult to approach those in higher positions of power who make decisions that directly affect staff, more barriers are created to the fluid exchange of information. Leaders who thrive off fear or a need for control can make inclusion feel harder to obtain.

Imagine sitting in a working session to provide input for much-needed organizational change. All of your colleagues agree on the right way to go, but the leadership team walks away and does the complete opposite without taking any employee input into consideration. Likely, those employees will feel left out and undervalued.

If this is how things generally go at your company, it’s time to learn to respectfully disagree and have hard conversations. Tension may be uncomfortable at first, but it’s what gets the wheels turning. As long as you’re moving towards understanding, you are making progress.

We live in a world where there’s a lot of fear around being wrong or coming off as insensitive or culture-deaf. Sometimes, the only way we learn is to make mistakes. Remember the old adage, “there’s no such thing as a stupid question?” It really is okay not to know everything all the time.

As Peggy Yu, CEO of Stack Education, sums it up so eloquently in an op-ed for Forbes, “We need to foster an environment that allows these kinds of conversation to happen.”

Photo courtesy of Burst.

Encourage Engagement and Feedback

When it comes to work, inclusion doesn’t necessarily mean involving everyone in meetings, all the time. It doesn’t mean you’re always on the email chain either. This might actually have the opposite effect. You don’t want to waste peoples’ time just to seem inclusive.

The ability to act inclusively is a strategic advantage both personally, and professionally. Not only will it make your team stronger, but it will make you better at your job. Engaging people in work when they don’t exactly share your point of view will challenge you to think differently. It may even kick you out of a box you’ve placed yourself in for years. Years.

The trick is to have a heightened level of awareness for when it may be useful. There are plenty of examples to keep in mind where the dynamic can be shifted to ensure a certain level of inclusivity is being met.

When creativity is involved: Creative meetings where ideas are flying around without a filter are a great example. It’s easy to want to be comfortable in these situations, but you also need to invite the critics into the room. Those moments where you’re on the brink of innovation are arguably the most important to have a diverse team present at—and that team also needs to be given the floor to speak.

When decisions feel top-down: When decisions are only made at the top, and employees are not asked for feedback in the process, it can cause a slow breaking down of company culture. Staff may begin to feel their opinions don’t matter and this can lead them to feel less encouraged to work toward the goals that leadership teams have set forth. Organizations would be wise to examine whether these problems are inherent in the way they manage their business before trying to facilitate inclusion at work. When the culture conversation gets bottle-necked at the top, it’s hard to make real, lasting change possible.

When on-boarding new hires: Taking the time to get to know employees and checking in with their style of working from the very beginning can be extremely helpful to set the right example from the start. It also prepares the team to better understand how work together and where they can make changes to create a more welcoming environment for everyone. This can be as simple as asking employees what their preferred pronouns are, or asking what an employee thinks about a company’s diversity policy.

When working together toward goals: On a day-to-day basis, leadership should be creating space for staff to feel accepted and appreciated at work. Colleagues also have a large hand in making their peers feel seen. Allowing a colleague the opportunity to speak uninterrupted during a meeting can seem like a small gesture, but it can ultimately influence the way someone interacts in future meetings. It might even be as simple as asking whether or not, as a team, you are being inclusive of the perspectives of your audience and whether anyone has anything else they would like to add to the situation.

When holding a leadership position: It could also mean asking an employee how you can be more inclusive as a manager. Asking for the opinions of others to weigh in should seem like common sense, but you’d be surprised how many leaders don’t request feedback on their jobs. Inclusion requires everyone—upper management, mid-management and junior employees—to have more frequent and open dialogue as fellow individuals. This creates a safe space where staff can share feedback without the threat of fear or retaliation.

In Conclusion

Inclusion can take many different forms in the workplace and that can be confusing for companies that have made a habit out of working in certain ways. In short, inclusion just means welcoming everyone into the fold and coming together despite our differences, to be humble, vulnerable, and to learn from one another.

The goal should be to keep an open mind and always be learning. The only way we can do that is for our workplaces to be two-way exchanges where everyone is given an opportunity to weigh in on decisions being made.

This kind of sea change may take some time, but if we continually pause to take an opportunity to ask ourselves if we have included everyone’s opinion we’ll undoubtedly be moving in the right direction.