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The Challenge
The principal challenges in tackling diversity and inclusion in society at large but in our workplaces particularly are, getting agreement on key definitions, on how to make inclusion more than just a “nice-to-have”, virtue signalling vanity project and most crucially, how to make it matter to those with the power for change, who’ve yet to fully appreciate what exercising that power might achieve.
Challenge #1: Culture
“Culture” has become a difficult and divisive term across our society, with everyone’s personal background driving their beliefs about, assumptions on and approaches to, any discussion on the subject of culture in general and workplace culture in particular.
To us at Include Me, “Culture”, recognises every element of a person’s past and present backgrounds that make up the individual they are now with the particular thoughts, values and personalities. In other word their culture that you cannot see by looking just at them.
Challenge #2: Who are the excluded?
The knock on effect of this is that when people consider culture, diversity and inclusion they do so predominantly from the perspective of ethnicity and race. Finding a universal resolution the “inclusion for all” conundrum, requires a methodological approach that works for all differences in any setting.
At Include Me, diversity includes every kind of difference, far beyond those characteristics protected by the law. We teach that understanding that each individual is unique and that every difference should be understood and celebrated. This is the theme that runs throughout the Whole Body Approach with CQ program.
Challenge #3: Effective Learning Frameworks
Finding the right learning tool to support genuine understanding of the skills and capabilities that enable better relations and effectiveness in connecting across any form of cultural difference, is a real challenge.
Cultural Intelligence or CQ, is a globally recognised way of assessing and improving effectiveness in culturally diverse situations. It is rooted in rigorous, academic peer reviewed research conducted across more than 100 countries over 20 years.
Challenge #4: Not a Tick-box Exercise
Many organisations are still looking for a quick fix, box-ticking exercise that they can call an inclusion journey. This so often involves an online training package and making it the responsibility of their staff members to learn and find a way of applying their learning.
Include Me provides a comprehensive program of coaching and support to follow each staff member’s training to ensure the embedding of CQ into a business’s normal everyday working practices and behaviours is properly affected
Challenge #5: Including Business Practices
The Challenges around transforming an organisation’s workplace inclusion practices and its culture cannot rest solely at the feet of its employees. The responsibility on the organisation to be transforming its ways of working is so often neglected, to the detriment of any attempt to sustainably embed better practices.
The development of an organisation’s inclusive infrastructure is a core element of Include Me’s Whole Body Approach with CQ program. We guide organisations, who have the courage, through the challenge of asking itself the right questions and to being open and humble enough to listen to and act on the answers they get.
Challenge #6: Measuring Inclusion
Measuring diversity and inclusion with any consistency has proved to be problematic for whole variety of well documented reasons so organisation have either done it poorly or have not done it all. This will consign all things EDI into an organisation’s “nice to have” instead of where it should be; a core essential to business success.
Include Me has curated a combination of concepts, data collation protocols and evaluation tools to effectively measure progress on diversity and inclusion and progress towards it. This will allow tracking and celebrating of your successes and to better plan your next steps.
Source: The Health & Safety Executive
Source: Market Inspector
The Journey
Equity, diversity and inclusion, for so long an ineffectual box-ticking sprint and a nice to have, is now recognised and accepted as being a marathon, not a sprint and a vital ingredient that has the power to make or break an organisation.
Include Me’s Whole Body Approach with Cultural Intelligence (CQ®) is no tick-box exercise. It is in every way an organisational change journey that if done correctly will transform your organisation’s diversity and inclusion practices permanently.
If it is not, from the very start of the journey, clearly understood by all, to be a marathon (for which you will forever be in training) and not a sprint, then your plan is destined to fail to achieve its goals and will once again only serve to disappoint the very people in you workforce community that it was created to inspire. It will take time and commitment
The Whole Body Approach proposition aims to deliver a quiet revolution for your organisation. It will be;
What can you expect to be the impact of your journey with Include Me? You will with our help have;
% of large UK companies that pay men more than women
Source: Druthers Search Diversity and Inclusion By Numbers. Kirsty Trafford-Owen
The employment rate for ethnic minorities in the UK
The employment rate for white workers in the UK
Source: The McGregor-Smith Review
Smarter Inclusion
Our smarter approach to culturally intelligent inclusion and our different slant on measuring its progress and impact, allows organisations to take a step back on lessons learned, celebrate achievements and reaffirm their on-going commitment to real change.
Include Me’s is unique in combining the power of the globally recognised learning framework that is Cultural Intelligence (CQ®) with a technological, data driven approach to evaluating the diversity and inclusion transformation in any organisation, its workforce and its business outcomes.
Include Me has joined forces with a internationally respected research, insight and evaluation partner with the pedigree of having worked with a number of well-known global brands, to enhance our clients’ ability to accurately measure the impact of their ED&I journey on their business outcomes, their reputations and on their workplace communities; namely their people and their customers. This is a set of insights unique to this Include Me, Whole Body Approach journey.
UK companies that focus on diversity to improve work culture
That focus on diversity to improve company performance
That focus on diversity to better represent customers
Source: Talent Now
We offer our end-to-end Whole Body Approach program, to ensure that your equity, diversity and inclusion plans will be more than simply a tick-box exercise.
Include Me will work with any organisation whose leaders have the courage openness and humility; prerequisites to any successful transformational-change journey; to curate and nurture sustainably more equitable workplace community cultures by building better practices in inclusion.
We aim to help you develop not only inclusive leaders but also leaders in inclusion throughout your organisation as well as cultivating more psychologically safe workplace environments in which all of your people can feel not only better connected but also that they genuinely belong.