Part 1: An agile approach to Diversity & Inclusion — Understand & Define
I recently shared how I’m using agile methodologies to collaborate with companies on creating real, long lasting change when it comes to Diversity & Inclusion in their team or organisation. In this series I will use the concept of a ‘Design Sprint’ to illustrate the different types of exercises & agile approaches you can take to put Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) at the centre of your organisation and create a sustainable and effective culture change.
Phase 1: Understand
I’ve generally found that for the costs and benefits of diversity & inclusion to really hit home with individuals or organisations people have to experience it. This means change can often be incredibly slow, particularly in the sectors and organisations that are furthest behind in terms of diversity because the opportunities for staff to experience the direct benefits of working in a diverse team are limited. And all too often organisations or individuals don’t take action to create a more inclusive workplace until they have first-hand experience of some of the costs that stem from people being marginalised or excluded.
Many companies first start to take action to become more diverse & inclusive when they have a member of staff reach breaking point and quit, or when they fail to hire a talented person because of their lack of diversity or inclusive policies. In order to combat this teams need to create more safe spaces and opportunities for individuals to speak up about the barriers they face in the workplace — otherwise it will simply go unnoticed until it’s too late.
Through using Design Sprint techniques you can manufacture moments where people are invited to speak up and create shared experiences within your organisation. You could run a series of ‘Lightning Talks’ where you ask different people to speak to the wider team on a D&I related topic. I’ve seen some people share very personal stories at Lightning talks — such as their experience of being Transgender in the workplace and what it’s like to be misgendered, or a woman explaining the history of afro hair and sharing how it feels when people touch her hair, or a person talking about the highs and lows of caring for a disabled child. But I’ve also seen companies use Lightning Talks as a way of encouraging people to share other, less personal, stories & insight — perhaps by getting a user researcher to talk about the demographics of the company’s user base and what this means, or by getting the HR team to share stats and insight into hiring, promotions & pay rises at the organisation broken down by demographic.
Not everyone will be comfortable with presenting in this sort of space, so another Design Sprint technique used during the “Understand” phase is Empathy Mapping. Empathy Mapping is usually used by product teams to explore different types of users who may wish to access their product or service. But it can also be used to build empathy with different employee personas. Some of the personas I recently asked a University to explore included “A female black professor with all white male colleagues”, or a “Young father who suffers from depression and feels guilty for not spending time with his young daughter” and discuss the Pains/Gains these personas may have in the workplace.
Of course, this type of exercise may cause teams to make wild assumptions. But the idea is to use these personas as a conversation starter, to get people challenging each others assumptions and exploring the different barriers that people may face in the workplace. Through this exercise I’ve seen many teams develop a much deeper understanding of the costs to individuals and organisations when people face barriers or discrimination because of their difference.
If your team is already very diverse and would prefer not use fictional personas, you can always do workshops such as this that encourage individuals to speak in pairs about their own differences and share what it is about their background, values, beliefs and past experiences that affects their experience of work. This sort of exercise often helps to create a safe space where people feel able to share ‘hidden’ differences that may not often be addressed in the workplace, such as sexuality, disability, class or religion. And it also encourages teams to take pride in their own differences, and value other people’s differences.
Through doing some of these ‘Understand’ exercises individuals often have ‘epiphanies’ that help them to learn about themselves, about their colleagues and about the importance of diversity & inclusion. All of which is important to address first because D&I initiatives often require company-wide culture change and rely on the support of the whole company in order to be successful.
Phase 2: Define
Once your team has developed a better understanding of Diversity & Inclusion the next phase is to define the problems/opportunities. This is often the hardest part for a company and I see so many teams waste time focussing on the wrong problem. Many teams exert a lot of energy on defining what percentage of staff should be from specific race/ethnicity, or how many disabled people they need to hire in order to be seen as ‘truly diverse’. But diversity & inclusion should not be a tick box exercise. Your team needs to understand the actual underlying problems with not being representative of difference, rather than simply focussing on representation on it’s own.
One way I’ve encouraged teams to define the problem is to get them to map strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats in relation to D&I next to different themes such as:
- Hiring & onboarding
- Creating a sense of belonging
- Decision-making
- Progression & development
From here you can then choose which are the most important things to tackle and spend time creating a really clear definition of those problems or opportunities. Reframing a problem as a “how might we” statement often encourages teams to describe the problem much more succinctly. At this stage you should also be looking at how you might measure the impact of addressing that problem or opportunity. For instance if the problem is “How might we make decision-making more accessible & representative of different voices in the company” you might choose to measure/monitor who’s involved in making decisions or how often people are invited to contribute to decision-making, but you might also want to explore other important measures such as how to show that being more representative helps your organisation to create better or faster decisions.
The understand & define phases are often the most important part of tackling D&I in the workplace but many companies fail to spend enough time on them. Too many teams simply look at what other organisations are doing and try to replicate that, or jump to tackling the most visible problem first. Whilst it’s true that many companies share the same problems such as a lack of representation at senior levels, or wide gender pay gaps, all companies are different. Your industry, geographical location, size/scale, existing staff make-up and turnover will affect what D&I problems are most common or pressing within your company. We should all invest the time into understanding and defining which problems we are going to tackle first.
Next week I’ll be sharing resources & exercises for the next two phases (Sketch & Decide) of the design sprint for inclusion. In the mean time if you are interested in working with me you can email me on tessa@collaborativefuture.co.uk. And if you benefited from this post and want to support my work please buy me a coffee in return for my time.
