Key takeaways | Why diversity is not enough: the importance of inclusion
The Top Employers 2021 Certificate Celebration held on 28 January 2021 brought together HR industry experts from around the world to celebrate the work done in HR and knowledge share the best people practices.
One of the breakout sessions called “Why diversity is not enough: the importance of inclusion”, focused on how to create a sense of belonging in the workplace.
The session was hosted by Jonas Van Wees, HR Auditor at Top Employers Institute, with guest speakers Mechell Chetty (Unilever SA), Anne-Sophie Chauveau-Galas (Alstom) and Raj Verma (Sanofi). The session highlights the importance of inclusion in the workplace and emphasised it as a competitive advantage for employers. Organisations that prioritise diversity and inclusion in their teams far outperform competitors. Furthermore, an inclusive workplace also drives higher levels of productivity and retention, and positively affects employee engagement.
Watch the full session by filling in the form or read the key takeaways here:
Takeaway # 1: Leaders need to create psychological safety
During the session, Mechell Chetty (Uniliver SA) aptly noted that inclusion is about providing employees with a sense of comfort. An organisation’s priority is to harnesses each employee’s uniqueness and potential by creating psychological safety. This is an environment where employees can truly express themselves, innovate, take risks, and be part of solutions that are born from employees unique characteristics.
To create a psychologically safe environment, leaders have to shift away from blaming ‘unconscious bias’ but instead work towards being consciously competent. Thus, the conversation must shift to how leaders can create competence, whether it is on matters of gender, disabilities, or race.
Takeaway #2: Diversity and inclusion is a vital part of employee experience
To create an inclusive culture is to create great employee experiences that people will relate to and remember. As an example of this, Raj Verma holds the title of Chief Diversity and Experience Officer at Sanofi – a clear indication of how important the two fields are related to each other. Employee experience starts at the pre-hire stage, up until the point of resignation or retirement. Inclusion involves creating a great employee experience at all these vital touchpoints in an employee’s lifecycle.
Verma explained diversity and inclusion with a simple process, where the input is a great employee experience, and the output is to maintain and grow diverse talent at every level. Inclusion and creating a sense of belonging is what brings the two points together.
Takeaway #3: Raise awareness of inclusion in the workplace
One of the most important aspects of inclusion is creating purposeful communication and awareness in the workplace. As an example of this, Anne-Sophie Chauveau-Galas shared some initiatives that Alstom created. To raise awareness of inclusiveness in the workplace, Alstom collects all the best practices from their teams around the world. An award is given to the best initiative, which creates positive momentum and spreads the best diversity and inclusion practices across the organisation. Another example is that Alstom created an ‘All-abilities toolkit’, which is a series of tips to help people with different workplace abilities.
Measuring the impact of mentoring during workplace disruption
Each year, more than 1 600 Top Employers across 119 countries/regions complete the extensive Top Employers Institute HR Best Practices Survey, which provides a wealth of information for our data analysts to collate for benchmarking trends in HR year on year.
One of the trends we are seeing is that Top Employers are increasingly taking a more formalised approach to mentoring.
Formal mentoring programmes allow organisations to create and nurture relationships by matching experienced managers with promising talents to meet specific individual development objectives.
Pairing employees with a mentor who is skilled in and capable of guiding employees creates a safe place for employees to learn, which in the current times of COVID-19 is ever more necessary.
But how do you create a safe environment for mentoring if the success of mentoring is based on the “human” connection between the mentor and the mentee? Mentoring must feel personal, relatable and connected. Pairing an employee with the right mentor is the most challenging aspect of mentoring, and the one.
So, if you are offering a mentoring programme, is it still appropriate or even possible during this pandemic? Although the virus has made it impossible for many organisations to continue face-to-face mentoring in the foreseeable future, it does not mean you cannot begin or maintain an online mentoring relationship. A mentoring programme can remain relevant and assist in keeping your employees connected, as well as be a means to show that the organisation cares for its people.
Mentoring and talent development
Mentoring should be included as part of the broader talent development and people strategy. It needs to be tailored to the specific needs and objectives of your organisation. But it should not forget to consider the individual employee and where there are in their personal and professional journey.
It could be that the current situation changes the focus of mentoring for your organisation. Without the Covid-19 situation, mentoring would likely focus in most on career development, but now other functions might come into place which might relate more to emotional and well-being support.
Therefore, it is a relevant for HR when evaluating and measuring their mentoring programme, to consider if the programme still fits in the context of the business needs. Relevant questions to ask yourself are “why does this initiative exist?” and “does this initiative still support our needs?”.
The importance of the right metrics
Many organisations think they are measuring and tracking what is needed to determine the success of their mentoring programmes. However, this often is not the case. Most organisations focus their measurements on traditional metrics, which are related to tracking of the program and can include:
- The number of employees participating in your programme, either as mentor or mentee.
- The participation rate in the different initiatives: how many mentoring takes place in person, in groups or virtual for example.
- When and how often do mentor’s and mentee’s meet?
- What is the satisfaction rate of both mentor and mentee?
Although those metrics are important, they do not fully assess the effectiveness of a mentor programme, because they lack metrics related to determining the quality of the outcomes, such as:
- What percentage of employees in the program is from diverse groups?
- What is the effect of mentoring on promotion rates?
- Do employees in the mentoring programme have access to more opportunities within the organisation?
- Does mentoring have an impact on employee engagement results (e.g. job satisfaction or employee wellbeing)?
Having a strong HR analytics can be used to increase the success of mentoring initiatives, especially, if you can benchmark them before, during and after disruptive situations like the pandemic. uotcomes.
Metrics can – and should – be gathered from a variety of sources (including employee pulse surveys, mood-barometers, stay interviews, and focus groups) and this will help provide a more accurate indication as to whether a programme has met success, or may require adjustments.
Mentoring via online meetings can still have an equivalent outcome to in-person mentoring, but your mentor and mentee may need some support in using technology to facilitate a meaningful conversation, which could include guidelines to create a new rhythm and find the best medium for meeting online.
We see examples with our Top Employers that create a successful digital employee experience and so continue mentoring by using online video tools, such as Skype or Microsoft Teams. Other Top Employers extended their mentoring to all employees by offering near-peer mentoring through social media platforms.
If you adjust your mentoring programmes or add additional initiatives to support your employees within the current pandemic situation, it remains relevant to measure the effects of those additional activities.
As we are still adapting in the world of work to the virtual environment, it is important to understand what works and what does not work within our organisation when it comes to mentoring.
