IMHO: Stepping up on diversity, culture and inclusion

OPINION: What have we learned about diversity, culture and inclusion (DCI) since the beginning of the pandemic?

As a diversity strategist, I’d say not all businesses have stepped up to the challenges to DCI presented by the pandemic.

Some businesses are using covid-19 to buy time by putting workplace discrimination investigations on hold. With lockdowns on short notice, this may be understandable to some extent. But the shutting down of the workplace poses risks to the integrity of discrimination complaints. 

Pushing back investigation timelines due to covid-19 stress can be justified. Everyone’s wellbeing matters. But we must work smartly to ensure processes aren’t abused to the point that the right to challenge discrimination at work is diminished.

Exclusion online

Online calls need careful management. If people are not contributing, it’s the manager’s role to encourage real time contributions from all. Arranging to check in with quieter members after a call is not always conducive to team building when staff should be empowered to engage.

Directors may be familiar with such behavior in the boardroom. A quiet majority can sometimes surface as holding the power despite not saying much in the boardroom – the power they wield actually coming from outside the boardroom and the vocal minority in the boardroom  effectively being silenced.

Shutting down those who want to contribute on an online call is also problematic. If the culture is that people contribute, every person should be allowed to do so.

Starting calls with agreed principles of behavior and affirming those principles set the tone. For many, this stuff is woke and groan worthy, but these practices can help staff engagement, promote inclusion and ensure your staff return to work feeling like they belong when lockdown lifts.

Acknowledging someone’s pronoun, increasing accessibility to people with disabilities and changing your language to accommodate people online is as much about civility as sending a card to someone who has experienced a bereavement or saying thank you.

Lockdown perspectives

It seems  that businesses are so preoccupied with being ready to transform one’s business online overnight in a lockdown situation that DCI has become a casualty.

Yet covid-19 lockdowns can also represent a reprieve for the discriminated. For some, lockdowns present a  break from social micro-aggression, namely that colleague who ignores you but acknowledges others. For others it’s a break from discrimination and comments resulting in discrimination.

For those who are the only non-European, single parent, only member of the LGBTQ community, larger, not sporty, not alpha, they may just revel in the opportunity a lockdown presents to get work done at home and not feel worse for being different.

Discrimination is a process. The law protects against the big stuff. But the big events are usually after a sustained series of smaller incidents that are very hard to prove. The legal world calls these small incidents disputed fact. Yet those who feel the pain of them call them micro-aggressions.

Experts on racism in the UK liken micro-aggression to a paper cut. Each little instance hurts. Whether it’s a joke you aren’t included on, or a look from a colleague, or a drink you aren’t invited to, or a comment about people of colour, these statements, when made to feel that are related to your presentation, hurt like little cuts. Eventually the cut gets bigger and bigger until you can take no more.

Lockdown could enable those cuts to heal.

Lockdown also gives perspective. Each little paper cut is an additional pixel that eventually merge to reveal an image, showing the person that what is happening to them requires intervention. This may result in the employee making a complaint when back in the office.

Bear in mind the reprieve from a lockdown can also makes employees less tolerant of discrimination when they return to work, pushing them to file a complaint over what an employer thinks is a “little thing”.

What do you know?

Surveys are a start but, really, what type of a leader really gets to know staff through an online form?

In these times we need to be having courageous conversations about the effects covid-19 is having on your team’s identity with a view to improving quality of worklife. The conversation needs to be an exchange on what it feels like to not fit in, not a one-day, one-way course with croissants, coffees and case studies.

As a large number of our migrant and skilled worker population face two years of not “going home”, to see family, to hear language, as they face another Christmas watching New Zealanders spending time with “the family”, it is evident that socially and culturally the gulf is widening in our workforce. These groups may not only struggle to afford the MIQ fees nor may be eligible to a guaranteed place. These are barriers created by the pandemic, effectively pushing out those who don’t fit in.

Acknowledging these issues is precisely where DCI can add value to business performance in covid-19 times and perhaps provide innovative solutions to our covid-19 strategy all round.

About the author

Melanie Sharma-Barrow is a British-born Indian now resident in Auckland with her husband and children. She studied law at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences and runs Ludo Consulting which consults to a wide range of sectors, including the arts and education, on culture and diversity issues.

The views expressed in this article do not reflect the position of the IoD unless explicitly stated.

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