Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:01 Hi, this is Josh person. Welcome to Research-Based Perspectives on the ever-Changing World of work, leadership, learning, and HR with a heavy dose of insights on the exciting world of HR technology. Today I'm gonna talk about diversity and inclusion in the context of belonging. And it's a particularly poignant time because we just had the shooting of Jacob Blake, which is the second shooting this summer of a black man. And of course that sensitizes organizations and d and i leaders on all sorts of issues about race and diversity and inclusion and fairness and equity. And I also had a lot of time this week to interview about 20 different heads of D N I through our big reset group. I talked to the head of D N I at Workday, I talked to the head of D N I at several other big companies. And there's a pretty interesting trend going on, and that is a shifting away from diversity as a strategy and looking at inclusion and belonging as a strategy and diversity as an outcome.
Speaker 0 00:01:05 So instead of driving for a diverse workforce, we drive for an inclusive workforce or a workplace where people feel like they belong. And that in turn allows us to create greater diversity, which I think is a much smarter way to think about the problem. Now, one of the things that I've discovered in this research, and we're gonna be doing a big study on this, is that heads of D and I have a very, very difficult job. In fact, one of the meetings we were in this week, several people broke out in tears talking about what was going on in the United States because they felt so powerless. Because in, in some ways, head of DNI is almost a no win job because if the CEO and the leadership team and the management culture doesn't support diversity and inclusion, it's very hard for one person to drive it.
Speaker 0 00:01:57 But that said, it's an important role and many times these jobs exist to drive and inject change into the company and try to institutionalize it. Because ultimately diversity and inclusion is a philosophy that everybody has to adopt in order for it to be successful. But let's talk a little bit about this idea of belonging. If you look at the research on this, and there, by the way, there are a whole bunch of links in the podcast, uh, notes this time that I want you to read if you have time. Cause there's a lot of important things to think about here. If you look at a lot of the research on diversity and inclusion, you know, there's all the business issues of how diverse organizations outperform, how diverse boards outperform, how companies with diverse workforces are more sensitive to diverse customer sets, how products and services are better enhanced, how financial results improve, how innovation improves, et cetera.
Speaker 0 00:02:50 But you know, that's all sort of an outcome of a company that is diverse. But how do you get there from here? What, what is really the secret? Because you know, in most of the companies I talk to, the diversity metrics aren't that great. You know, at the senior levels it's relatively non-diverse. And in tech companies it's extremely non-diverse. And then, you know, issues come up. Like two weeks ago, Pinterest had a massive outbreak where the chief operating officer exposed that she had been completely ignored in many, many of the management meetings and treated unfairly and given unfair numbers of stock options and other things by the CEO and the CEOs, a young guy. And San Francisco claims to be a very inclusive person. And if you look at the research and where the thinking is going, we're moving towards this idea of inclusion. And inclusion or belonging is a feeling.
Speaker 0 00:03:47 You can't measure it, but you know when you have it. And as the head of D N I at work discussed with me and the head of DNI at Target and many others, if you get your head wrapped around belonging, then many other contributing factors will help you build a more diverse culture. By the way, there was a study done by glint on belonging, and I'll put the link into the notes that showed that belonging is the most highly correlated measure to business outcomes. And that companies with a high degree of belonging have six times higher business outcomes than those that don't. So, so yes, you know, diversity is important and there's many other ways to measure this, but this idea of belonging is high. So, so what is belonging? Well, you know, I've been looking at the academic research on this and there's a lot.
Speaker 0 00:04:39 And one of the most interesting one is done by somebody at San Diego State called Lynn by the name of Lynn Shore, and I'm gonna be publishing some things on this, but basically what their model shows is there's two axes, two belonging. One is uniqueness. Does your company value uniqueness or sameness? You know, if you're the military, you know, there might be a certain amount of sameness. Although actually the military's a bad example. The company that I used to work for, the consulting firm I used to work for, I won't mention the name, there was an enormous amount of sameness. And for some reasons, sometimes bias. People believe that sameness is good. By the way, one of the things that came out in the discussions we had with DNI leaders this week is that unconscious bias should just be called bias. Because when we call it unconscious, it's like we give people an excuse to be biased.
Speaker 0 00:05:40 Why don't we just say bias is bad? And if you want everybody to be the same, and your company, if you want to be the same age, the same gender, the same race from the same city, the same country, the same college, that is called sameness. Of course, it creates a sense of not belonging if you're not like tho that group. And let's face it, we're all different. So every one of us feels to some degree, we don't belong if everybody else is homogeneous. And so that's one dimension. Is uniqueness valued in your company or not? Now, explain a little more in then a minute. The second axis is belongingness. Low belongingness would be a situation where if you don't fit in, you know it, you feel excluded, you feel differentiated. High belongingness is a situation where not only can you be different, but you can be different and people will respect the fact that you're different and they'll listen to you and they'll involve you in meetings and decisions and strategies and communications, and you'll have an opportunity to move into leadership and you'll have an opportunity to develop new roles despite the fact that you're different.
Speaker 0 00:06:55 And so these two ax axis uniqueness or differences and belongingness actually create a very interesting two by two model. If your company has sameness and low belongingness, then there's a lot of exclusion. There's a lot of people that just won't come to work for you. I remember the quote from Mark Zuckerberg, it was a few years ago, where he said, young people are smarter than old people. Well, I wouldn't have gone to work there as an older person to tell you that, that's for sure. Even though what he said was absurd, that idea is exclusionary. It's, and it's funny that he, he sort of acts that way when his CEO writes sort of coo writes a whole book on, on, on women's rights. But anyway, that's another issue. If you have low belongingness and you do value uniqueness, that means you have a lot of different types of people in the company and they're different, but they're not all treated the same.
Speaker 0 00:07:53 So you might have all sorts of different shapes and sizes and colors and ages of people, but they're treated differently. That is not a high degree of belonging, but it's better than having everybody be the same. And, and you know, one of the things that comes up in the diversity discussions is that doesn't create diversity. You might force diversity into the system by forcing your recruiters to recruit from a diverse slate and always have a high percentage of women and minorities in recruiting processes. But when they finally join the company, their turnover rate's probably gonna be high because the belongingness is low. On the right side of the axis are companies that have high belongingness, and either they're all the same or not high belongingness and sameness is called assimilation. Okay? This is a company or an organization. I've worked for companies like this where everybody's very, very open-minded and talks a lot and you know, gets along and there's a lot of listening, but everybody's the same.
Speaker 0 00:08:58 So if you're the only Jew or you're the only man or woman, it feels a little bit weird. That's a better culture perhaps for some companies. But it's hard. And that creates what's called covering where you cover up parts of yourself. At Deloitte, we actually had a pretty big program on covering. I think covering is a solution. It's not a strategy, it's, it's a reflection of an organization that has a sameness and not necessarily a high amount of belongingness. And then of course, the best of all is uniqueness is valued, and belongingness is valued. And that is a company where I can be myself, I know I feel that I belong. And those are the people that get six times higher return. What creates belonging? How do you get there from here? Well, there's essentially three issues at stake. The first is the company climate.
Speaker 0 00:09:55 And that really comes down to culture. Do you have systems to promote fairness? Do you have systems to promote diversity? Is opportunity equal and fair? Is there transparency? Do you share information freely? By the way, you know, one of the ways to to reduce belonging is to hoard information where some people feel like they don't know what's going on because they weren't included in the meeting or the discussion or the email or whatever. The second is leadership. Leadership comes up in every meeting as the most pivotal issue in diversity, inclusion and belonging management behavior. Does management listen? Does management promote people of different backgrounds? Are decisions made in an open and inclusive manner? Is everybody included in decisions? How do we decide who to select for leadership? It isn't just diversity, it's really a sense of inclusion. My own personal experience in this is early in my career when I first became a manager, I became fairly biased toward people that I liked or respected or felt were the most credible in my, uh, decision making.
Speaker 0 00:11:03 And I had a few friends, I spent a lot of time with them. As I became older and had more experience in leadership, I realized that was all okay, but I was really missing out on a huge range of ideas and perspectives and became a much more inclusive manager and leader. I don't certainly claim to be perfect, but, but that's something that has a huge impact on employee perceptions of inclusion. And then the third is specific practices. You know, one of the things I believe is a good analogy for diversity, inclusion and belonging is to think about it like safety. In an oil company, you're not allowed to light a match in the refinery. You have to wear nomex coveralls. Uh, you have to wear your seatbelt. You don't skip stairs. When you go up and down the railings you have, you're supposed to hold onto the railings.
Speaker 0 00:11:54 They have all these rules to prevent accidents. And they're not just suggestions and they're not just kind of good ideas and they don't just sit around and make up placards and hope people pay. They are rules. And if you violate the rules, you're gonna be punished and there's gonna be consequences. So these practices have to be institutionalized. And one of the things that came up with the D N I people we were talking to this week was the fact that, and many several of the D N I leaders reinforce this, that while some of these practices feel bizarre at first, they create a new attitude and new changes in behavior. One of the heads of DNI for a construction company made a comment that one of his managers, young managers said something like, why am I getting so many girls applying for my job? And he kinda laughed, and this is a young young man.
Speaker 0 00:12:45 And he said, well, he said, that's just the way we do it. Here we, we recruit a diverse slate. And what he realized was that this guy's gonna learn a lot about women and how to treat women and the equality of women and the opportunities for women because there is a process that forces him to interview and evaluate female and male, black and white, different candidates, a diverse slate. If that process was not in place, getting that guy through a training program on how to talk to women may or may not have any impact at all. So think about these practices as injections of cultural change mandated through process. When I worked at IBM in the 1980s, we had very, very specific affirmative action programs. I actually think they worked very, very well. It was a very diverse culture and we all got along extremely well.
Speaker 0 00:13:38 I worked for a black man, I never thought twice about it. These days without those kinds of practices of teaching people a course on unconscious bias or microaggression, you know, it sort of sensitizes them to it, but it doesn't necessarily change their behavior. The second practice is flexibility. Right now in the pandemic, as you know, most of us have a lot of family issues, personal issues, wellbeing, health. We don't wanna get on a plane, we don't wanna go to the office. That's in a sense, an inclusion issue. I just talked to the head of talent at Sanofi this week and she said at Sanofi, which is a French company, there's a lot of rules and so forth. In France, we are letting every employee decide on their own whether they want to go to an office or not. And they can set their own schedule, they just have to tell us where they are.
Speaker 0 00:14:26 That's a sense of inclusion. That is a flexible work practice. Those are very popular topics right now and they're creating a better sense of belonging. Considering families is a big part of belonging. If you are a young mother and you have kids at home and everybody else you work with is a single professional and you have to leave the meeting early, but will people accommodate that? What if you can't come to the meeting at all because your kids are busy? You know, nobody would consciously make that an issue. But unconsciously somebody might joke about it and that would not necessarily make that person feel like they belong. And of course another practice is listening in feedback. We talked about listening many, many times. In many ways, listening is perhaps one of the most important business practices in high performing companies because employees reflect what's going on inside the company and also with customers.
Speaker 0 00:15:19 Now let's suppose you do that. You have a fair and inclusive climate, you have a fair and inclusive leadership population and leadership culture, and you implement many of these practices. And by the way, we're gonna be writing a research study later this year on all these practices so you can sort of read what they all are, what happens? Well, if you do those things, you will improve, improve the diversity of your workforce, you'll also, IM improve the level of belonging in your workforce. People will feel included in their jobs, in their meetings, in decisions that are made in, in their own careers. And all sorts of positive outcomes will result. Retention will go up, as Glen said, sixfold performance will go up. People will feel more willing to work with others on the team. They'll feel healthier, they'll be less stress, they'll be more creative.
Speaker 0 00:16:09 And in innovative, there will be better career growth cuz people will be more flexible about the roles they want to take. People will be more resilient. Nothing is creates more stress than a sense that I don't belong in the company and maybe somebody's gonna do something to me that I'm not prepared for. And then the company will have greater citizenship as a whole. So this idea of belonging is very profound. There's gonna be some announcements from, from some vendors on this. There are new indexes being created on belonging and, but the more you think about it, I think the better you'll find your diversity thinking is as a business leader or an HR person. And, and if you're a DNI leader, you can really wrap your whole program around this. The final thing I wanna mention on this topic of belonging is that one of the other reasons it's extremely important right now is that we're witnessing it in the political arena.
Speaker 0 00:16:57 If you listen to the Democratic and the Republican conventions, I think the biggest challenge that the Republicans have at the moment is a complete lack of interest in belonging. I think the Republican philosophy today is pretty much us versus them. The Democrats are evil, the Republicans are good. That is not a sense of belonging or understanding differences. You could argue about whether the Republicans are racist or not. Obviously there's lots of discussion about that, but we're witnessing what it feels like to be left out. And one of the heads of DNI that was very, very upset this week that I talked to, told me that the two things that they're most frustrating for him right now and he happens to live in Minneapolis, is anger about the injustice that's going on and his sense of powerlessness in exhaustion. That there's nothing you can do. And this is what happens when you don't feel included.
Speaker 0 00:17:51 You just feel powerless. And powerlessness creates an environment where people are fearful. People don't create and innovate. They may leave the company. We're feeling that in the, in the political sphere. And so that's coming into our organizations. And as many of you know in the current regime of where we live right now, organizations, businesses are the most trusted institutions in people's lives. A pew research study of a couple of months ago, wasn't that long ago, found that 93% of Americans do not believe the US federal government will do the right thing all the time, but a very much higher percentage do believe their company will do the right thing. So we have to live up to this sense of belonging and inclusion in our companies almost as a response to the sort of isolation that we feel in our external and political lives. If you're fortunate enough to have a great family and lots of friends and you've been able to weather the pandemic, well, you're probably feeling okay.
Speaker 0 00:18:56 But most of the studies that are coming out now show the very, very high degree of anxiety in the citizen population. And that means that belonging and inclusion at work is more powerful than ever. And of course, the upside of that, if you can pull this off and you have an inclusive company, is you're gonna attract better people. You're gonna create much higher levels of performance. People are much more flexible. They're willing to take a pay cut, take a new job, pitch in on a new project when they feel included. So it's a very important, very important fundamental topic. And in many ways, I think the issue of belonging is perhaps the existential issue in diversity that we face this year and probably into next year. I really wanted you to all think about it. Take a look at some of the links in the show notes.
Speaker 0 00:19:47 I think you find some really fascinating things to read. We are going to launch a pretty comprehensive research study on this probably in the next three to four weeks. Stay tuned for that. And we are working on a JBA program on this topic that'll be out before the end of the year, and it'll be new and fresh and very different. Please join us. Thank you for your time and I hope you have a great fall, what's left of the summer. Enjoy as much as you can. Bye for less than a cost of a nice dinner in a town near you. You can have an entire year's access to hundreds of courses, articles, research studies, case studies, and an entire community of more than 10,000 HR professionals all collaborating with each other to help you learn and solve the problems in your particular company. We call the Burson Academy, the world's home for hr, and you'll find it to be one of the most important parts of your career and your company's HR strategy for the years ahead. Thank
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