This week, organisations across the UK are celebrating inclusion and taking action to create inclusive workplaces. It’s a week dedicated to thinking about what we can all do to improve the workplace experience for marginalised colleagues.
Of course, people can interpret inclusion in different ways. To me, inclusion means everyone feeling a sense of ease and comfort at work. It’s about ensuring that our people at all levels feel like they belong to something bigger and that no-one feels isolated or side-lined in any way.
There are many reasons for embracing such a mind-set. At a basic level, it’s ‘being a good human 101’. I’m sure most of us will be able to recall situations in our personal lives when we felt like we didn’t quite fit in, and wouldn’t want anyone to feel that way at work. Worse yet, for someone to feel they didn’t fit in because of another individual’s poor behaviour that could have been prevented. We all hold responsibility for managing this in our workplace.
But there are also tangible business benefits to fostering inclusion. Embracing talent from all walks of life and creating the environment for everyone to thrive is key to achieving business excellence.
Driving impact
When businesses look to step up their inclusion efforts, there can often be a temptation to focus on the ‘what’ rather than the ‘why’. Companies will concentrate on the things they could do or the initiatives they could launch in an effort to become more inclusive without asking themselves what the outcome will be or if it will have an impact on their people.There’s no point in taking action without considering the impact – both long and short term. After all, actions are meaningless without a tangible, visible, positive impact on the people who they are seeking to support.
That’s why measurability is key to an effective inclusion strategy. Naturally, there must be elements that are authentic and focused on people. However, any business that doesn’t have a way to measure if its change initiatives are having an impact will never be able to know what works and what doesn’t.That’s why frequently reaching out to different people and communities across the business is so important. Based on their feedback and insights, focus your efforts on a few core items each year and deliver them well. Then check back to see if they are having the impact you want. It’s this human engagement that sits at the heart of all inclusion and diversity work – the experiences of your people and their personal and professional success, should always drive your business success.
How we’re approaching inclusion
Across BAE Systems Digital Intelligence, we’ve invested significant time and resources in building an inclusive workplace – something we believe is critical to our long-term success. The more we can embrace talent from all walks of life, the more we can thrive and deliver value to our customers.
Our approach has been based on setting ambitious but achievable objectives and considering a holistic cycle of the employee experience. This involves several elements, such as: ensuring inclusive processes from application to exit; engaging regularly with our people at a range of levels; embedding mental health and wellbeing in everything we do, and measuring outputs to ensure we’re sticking to our promises and making progress.
Core to our approach has been establishing partnerships with various specialist organisations that are dedicated to supporting diversity and inclusion, and that enable us to be more inclusive. One such example is Peppy, a digital health platform that provides support in underserved areas of healthcare including family and reproductive health and menopause.
We’re a partner of Neurodiversity in Business – an industry group for organisations to share best practice on neurodiverse recruitment, retention and empowerment – and signatories of the Made by Dyslexia Pledge, whose purpose is to help the world understand, value and support Dyslexia. We also have positive action partnerships with CodeFirstGirls, CodingBlackFemales and TechReturners to provide greater opportunity and support for women in tech, and we work with Mindweaver to attract, train and recruit minority candidates back into technology careers.
These partnerships have helped us to build a culture and working environment that is inclusive of everyone – no matter who they are, where they’ve come from, or where they are on their journey with us.
We’re proud of the progress we’ve made so far, but there’s always more that we can do. We must remember that this isn’t a journey with a definite start and end point; it’s an ongoing process of evaluation, and continuous improvement. Therefore, our commitment this National Inclusion Week is that we’ll continue taking steps to positively impact our workplace and the wider industry so that everyone feels valued and respected.