INCLUSIVITY Action Plan

May 29, 2024

When an organisation isn’t as inclusive as it could be or its management would like it to be, it isn’t necessarily because of a lack of concern or effort. Quite often, it’s because the organisation just doesn’t really know how to go about the process of improving inclusivity.

Sure, everyone is familiar with inclusive behaviours such as being welcoming, avoiding gossip, steering clear of offensive language, etc. And, while those certainly do promote inclusivity, they’re really guidelines for creating a healthy work environment and avoiding toxicity. After all, they apply just as equally to a diverse workforce as they do to a homogenous one.

As a leader, do you ask yourself how you can help everyone in your workplace shine? Building an inclusive organisation is a great way to allow your staff to shine and to develop a unique expertise in their area of work. At ACT Curious, we refer to this as helping workers create their own story of mastery in an area of knowledge or skills.

An inclusive workforce is about more than helping workers feel welcome. It’s not even about equality. It’s about ensuring equity — that is, recognising that each person has different circumstances and that they need correspondingly different opportunities and resources in order to reach the same outcome.

Example: Someone with carpel tunnel syndrome might experience pain when typing and using a mouse for a prolonged period of time. So, in order for them to produce text documents as efficiently as someone who has no problem typing and using a mouse for long periods of time, they might need software that enables them to type and navigate their computer via voice. Providing such software to some workers doesn’t give all workers equal access to resources.
But it does give them equitable access to resources.

Inclusivity is a great way to help workers feel welcome, but that’s not all it does. It’s also good for business. For example, a study of three major Australian workplaces found that inclusive workplaces are more productive and that employee innovation is 83% higher in inclusive workplaces. And fostering diversity and inclusivity is an important part of ensuring your organisation is moving toward shared values and that you’re being the leader you want to be.

To help with the process of building an inclusive work culture, it’s useful to have a roadmap for how to get there. Our 7 step Inclusivity Action Plan lays out concrete steps that will yield positive results and give you just such a roadmap.

STEP 1.

Identify Areas of Concern, Set Goals, and Define Success

Compile as much data as you can about diversity in your workplace. This isn’t just
about gender and skin colour; it’s also about age, disabilities, etc. As you do so,
encourage employees from all demographics to provide feedback about
how inclusive they feel the workplace is and how invested management seems to be in it.

This will help you set targets and also identify areas of concern. Does
management largely consist of people from one demographic? Is there a broad age
range among employees? Are people with the same qualifications who are doing the
same jobs being paid differently?

Asking these and similar questions, or discerning the answers to them from your
data, will help you set goals. Once you’ve set goals, you can define what success will look
like, and then you can get started improving your metrics.

STEP 2.

Create a Taskforce To Measure Diversity and Inclusion

Once you have your diversity and inclusion metrics, create a taskforce from diverse staff members whose role is to:

Measure and monitor diversity and inclusion and report regularly to management on your organisation’s progress
Develop inclusivity policy for your organisation
Come up with ideas for improving diversity and inclusion

Not only will this help you develop inclusion best practises, it’ll also show that you take the mission seriously and want others actively involved.

STEP 3.

Adjust Hiring and Recruiting Strategies

As humans, we have a tendency to stick with what and who we know. For example, only 32% of marriages registered in Australia are between people from different countries. This is often a subconscious tendency, and it’s an impediment to inclusiveness.

Example: When a recruitment panel is made up of white men and they all have a subconscious tendency to stick with what and who they know, they’ll be less likely to select a female or non white candidate to fill a vacancy even if such a person is a better fit for the role.

Here are some things you can do that will help improve diversity your workforce:
• When there is an open position, you can reach out to minority owned businesses to expand your applicant pool or seek a wider range of referrals
• Ensure recruitment panels are as diverse as possible
• Create positions specifically for minority groups for example, some organisations have a graduate recruitment program with a dedicated stream for Indigenous Australians to ensure Indigenous Aussies have an equitable chance of gaining employment within their organisation
• Create roles with responsibility for inclusivity related actions to people who have a lived experience with a relevant challenge (e.g. if you were to create a role for a Mental health Champion, the person filling the role must either have a mental health challenge or have had one in the past)
• Intentionally fill leadership positions with diverse staff

That last point is particularly valuable and diversity in leadership does some important things. First, it provides thinking from different backgrounds and perspectives that can prove invaluable to business strategies and outreach. It’s also morale boosting for people in entry and mid level positions to see people who look like them in upper management. Finally, it gives those employees reason to believe that there’s a place and a future for them with the company.

Remember, the goal is not to hire just to meet numbers; it’s to attract a broader pool of qualified, talented individuals.

STEP 4.

Find Ways for Employees To Connect

25% of Australian employees are unhappy at work, with 70% wanting to leave their jobs or change careers. While many factors contribute to workplace unhappiness, one of the biggest is a toxic or stifling culture that often is a hallmark of a lack of inclusiveness.

Such cultures foster silos and breed anti-social and competitive behaviour. The counter to this is
prosocial behaviours like:
• Altruism (sharing, helping, volunteering, donating, etc.)
• Positive interactions (being kind, practicing positive conflict resolution, having cooperative conversations, acting in accordance with values all in the group share, etc.)
• Cooperating (contributing to a group, doing one’s part, working towards shared goals, etc.)

As you no doubt know though, encouraging a prosocial culture is easier said than done. It’s far from impossible though!

One way for diverse employees to connect, collaborate, and feel like a valued team member is to establish employee groups based on mutual interests, backgrounds, and experiences. These groups support the company’s goals while also fostering increased inclusiveness and trust.

You might also consider establishing facilities for particular groups. For instance, you might create a mum’s room for breastfeeding employees to connect with others while they breastfeed or express breast milk. Or you might create a prayer room for the spiritual members of your workforce.

Another key way to institute a lasting culture shift towards prosocial behaviours is to promote connecting over, and working towards, individual and shared goals. When staff can align their individual goals with team and organisational goals and realise they all share important objectives that align with their personal values, team members can truly connect in meaningful ways that foster workplace happiness and productivity.

STEP 5.

Foster A Safe, Consistent, Predictable Environment That Promotes Listening and Learning

It’s not always easy to understand another person’s lived experience if it differs substantially from our own. Our minds are always evaluating, judging and comparing, and that can be counterproductive when we’re working with diverse people. So, it’s important that leadership within your organisation is open to listing to feedback and acting on it even if individuals don’t initially see the benefits of acting on the feedback.

This can be difficult. Being open to feedback involves being vulnerable and that can be challenging for some and downright terrifying for others. A good approach to overcoming the instinct to avoid being vulnerable that you can use and also convey to your leaders is to actively pay attention to difficult thoughts and feelings that we develop in response to this kind of action. When we notice challenging thoughts and feelings, we have the option of acknowledging them and then continuing to move forward in the direction we value — in this case, in an effort to accomplish shared workplace goals.

STEP 6.

Teach Your Workers to Appreciate Differences, Value Diversity and Be Inclusive

When a workforce is comprised of self-centred people who are forever seeking opportunities to advance themselves even at the expense of others, the organisation crumbles from within. But things don’t have to be that bad for workplaces to suffer due to a lack of inclusivity. And few workplaces don’t have room for improvement in that area.

And it makes sense. From an evolutionary perspective, if humans didn’t look after their own interests, they starved, got sick or got eaten. And from a historical perspective, people have unfortunately often learned that if they don’t look after themselves, they’ll regret it. This is specially true of minorities that have been persecuted in the past.

The result is that many people don’t feel safe and secure enough to be inclusive and they often don’t know how to value and celebrate diversity. This results in anti-social behaviour or, sometimes, groupthink. Thankfully, building an innovative, growing workplace isn’t a pipe dream. It’s possible to teach people how to value and celebrate diversity and be inclusive.
The previous five steps in this action plan are a great start to this process. You can go further though in several very important ways.

1. Model the behaviours you want to see. Take every opportunity to actively and deliberately show that you appreciate, value and celebrate differences. Use inclusive language. Hire diverse leaders and managers.
2. Actively model and promote prosocial behaviours — teach your staff to go from me to we.
3. Invest in prosocial training.

Prosocial behaviour refers to a range of voluntary positive behaviours that are intended to help others. Prosocial behaviours include:

• Altruism (sharing, helping, volunteering, donating, etc.)
• Positive interactions (being kind, practicing positive conflict resolution, having cooperative
conversations, acting in accordance with individual and shared group values, etc.)
• Cooperating (contributing to a group, doing one’s part, working towards shared goals, etc.) Examples of ways to encourage and promote prosocial behaviours:
• Create interdepartmental taskforces that get multiple teams working together to achieve common goals.
• Ask your managers and leaders to host divisional team-building activities, so workers have the opportunitity learn more about their colleagues and their goals. Avoid ice-breakers and cliched activities that make us cringe. Instead consider cooperative board games, orienteering (or set up a treasure hunt), or an escape room challenge.
• Have monthly award ceremonies where you reward people who’ve exhibited prosocial behaviours. But don’t just give a ‘certificate of achievement’. Talk about how the prosocial behaviour lead to better outcomes for the team and your organisation and then give a meaningful award. Some workplaces can give monetary bonuses. But not all can afford that or are allowed to do that. And that’s not always the most appreciated reward. So, think outside the box and ask your workers what they’d appreciate it. Maybe they could have the afternoon off to have a team picnic. Perhaps you could shout them a nice lunch or a delivery of desserts from a local patisserie. If one or more of the team members has strict dietary requirements that make sharing a meal challenging, they might enjoy a trip to the movies or even an in-office movie afternoon if cinema tickets are outside the budget

STEP 7.

Always Act Curious, Reflect, Review, Adjust and Retry

You aren’t going to have overnight success with your diversity and inclusion goals, and
there will be setbacks along the way. That’s okay!

As long as you start (or continue) reflecting on your current situation, keeping your goals in mind, implementing and evaluating your programs, working with your taskforce, reflecting on your changes and progress and listening to feedback from others, you’ll make progress toward your goals.

Regularly reflecting on how things are going and then making adjustments or trying something different will pay off. Even when you do reach your measures for success, it’s important to stay attuned so you can address any backsliding or find ways to further improve.

And if you’re ever struggling to achieve your workplace inclusivity and diversity goals, don’t hesitate to reach out to our friendly team. Our experts help organisations overcome these challenges on a daily basis. In particular, our Supervision service is one of specialised EAP services, which is perfectly suited to helping leaders and managers manage the change toward a more diverse and inclusive organisation.

AUTHOR Michelle Robertson (Trudgen), Clinical Director, ACT Curious.

CONTACT US 📞 0438 922 979 (Australia Wide) email: [email protected]

DISCLAIMER The content of this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.