What’s a truly inclusive workplace?
Inclusion isn’t a fancy word but an action verb
When we wake up every morning, get past our morning routines, execute our personal commitments to the best of our abilities, and go into work, we are just looking forward to being in a place where we belong, where we feel included, where we are wanted. For some of us, that is only our vision. If we happen to fall into the gaps regardless of the gauge used — age, ethnicity, sexuality which often inconveniently and incorrectly stuffed into a binary, skills, neurology, physiology (and much more), then it becomes a distant vision. How many times in a day do we hear (and often respond to) a microaggression? [The day the count is zero, seems to deserve some distinctive celebration.]
Often we hear “Oh, I didn’t mean it. That wasn’t my intention,” but the pattern continues. It makes one wonder if the apology was merely a brush off, a way to get us off the back! Some of us don’t even get that slight of the hand. These microaggressions cause us to underperform — not that we are capable of only that level of performance! The story doesn’t stop there. When we get victimized by such micro-aggressions, our mindset gets impacted, and we too fall into the trap of victimizing others, thus starting a possibly endless vicious circle.
Often it relates to two errors — the error of over-approximation of self, and the mistake of under-approximation of others. Moreover, these two errors mostly go hand in hand. A majority of us do it, either intentionally or unintentionally. A small fraction of us has figured out how to correct the two errors — through openness, willingness to learn, accepting and celebrating mistakes as genuine opportunities to learn about each other — through awareness!
When we embrace each other’s individuality, diversity becomes an asset, a real growth prospect. Imagine the amount of learning we can acquire from each other! I have been in environments that had big cubicle walls, in those where there were none at all (open workspaces), and in settings where I was alone (working from home). However, the trends I observed were still the same. It’s time we stopped experimenting with the workplace arrangements and started opening our minds to a whole new world of learning, integration, and diversity. It’s not a problem with the positioning of furniture — it is a problem with our outlook!
Please do share your thoughts on what you think is a truly diverse and inclusive workplace.
