Inspiring Inclusion for #IWD2024 — Metta Blog Series (1/5)
The first in our 5 part #IWD24 blog series | Featuring Jia Afsar
The 8th March marks International Women’s Day, a globally recognised day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women all over the world. International Women’s Day has occurred for over 100 years, with the very first IWD gathering in 1911 supported by over 1 million people.
Here at Metta, equality of every kind is at the top of our company values and objectives — and in an industry which is predominantly male dominated, we are a women co-founded business with over 70% of our employees being women.
In order to celebrate International Women’s Day 2024, we sat down with five inspiring women in the industry to discuss what this year’s IWD theme of #InspireInclusion means to them. We also chatted about who inspires them, the barriers facing women in business today, and what they hope the future will look like in terms of gender diversity within the workplace.
—
For the first instalment of this 5 part series, we’re chatting to Jia Afsar. Wajiha(Jia) is an award winning, socially conscious leader within the urban and tech sector. She has more than a decade of professional industry experience, across a range of private and public sector clients. In all her endeavours, Jia applies a cross-discipline, transparent, systems thinking approach ensuring the needs and requirements of the end users, clients and wider team are well- considered. This ties into her holistic sustainability ethos and vision for a regenerative future.
Connect with Jia -
—
Q: Hi Jia! Tell us a little about yourself, and your background?
A: Hi Metta! I’m a hybrid, design and strategic advisor in service of people and planet. My background sits at the intersection of Architecture (the built environment), User Experience and Inclusive Business Development. I work in a cross-sector systems approach across education, research, design and advisory with the aim to create ‘better’ processes, places, spaces and products — one’s that span various economic, social, cultural and environmental dimensions to focus on truly sustainable and regenerative outcomes towards improved well-being.
I am of the view that today’s complex and interconnected challenges require cross-disciplinary efforts to co-create pathways for improvement and re-imagine ‘better’ scenarios. This is what I love to do — My platform studio breaks boundaries, explores ideas, imagines new realities and co-creates impactful solutions for complex human-centred problems.
-
Q: International Women’s Day marks a call to action for accelerating women’s equality, and this year’s theme is #inspireinclusion. How do you think we can aim to Inspire Inclusion in the workplace today?
A: IWD is a great opportunity to bring attention to accelerating equality and importantly equity in the workplace i.e. ensuring access to opportunities in a fair and transparent way, being conscious of the influence of bias, privilege and other influencing factors.
Meaningful Inclusion in the workplace is about good workplace culture. It needs to be deeply interwoven within all factors of the business starting from the board, governance to project delivery, pipelines, supply chains and their impact as part of wider society.
An inclusive approach can be inspired in several ways — I’ll focus on three:
First, there is still a need to build awareness around the basics of inclusion at board/founder level and its resultant positive impact on the ‘triple bottom line’ for genuine uptake. Using established evidence, this can initially be through mandatory training/knowledge portals or founder networks that share best practice. It must focus on early stage decision-making, as the way an organisation is setup and governs is key to its success and often sets the tone. It also offers the best opportunity to embed inclusion as part of sustainable workplace ethos. Eventually it could lead to further research into inclusive approaches to gain deeper insight into team/user’s behaviours, mindsets and bridge knowledge gaps while sharing insight across industries.
Second, transparent and open hiring methods from diverse hiring pools are integral to bringing in team members that can not only champion inclusive processes within the workplace but are already conscious of what these might be/look like. An inclusive minded team member is a fantastic enabler of development opportunities and approaches that maintain and improve workplace well-being and reduce attrition, normally a major cost to most organisations.
Third, an ongoing impact measurement check-in is important. One that avoids ‘tick-boxing’ but still manages to set targets around interlinked well-being factors. This could be undertaken to ensure best practice continues to be observed from not just within the workplace but also its influence within the wider industry. Check-ins provide a great opportunity for lessons learned and areas of improvement to be discussed early and continuously with clear co-created pathways. In today’s age, with ongoing multiple crisis, global pandemic following the period of the ‘Great Resignation’, it’s in the interest of all parties to ensure impact driven, value-based — inclusive workplace culture is not just an inspiration but a reality — not tomorrow, but now.
-
Q: Are there any women who have particularly inspired you? (Maybe they’ve helped you during your career, started a business, given you some advice, written a good book or article, etc?)
A: There are countless women who have inspired me and I am in the process of drafting a list to share on my website — so do check that out. None of these women have awards or are famous. They are people I’ve come across as my career developed who’s approaches, behaviours, thinking — I found inspiring. They did not offer any solutions or expect any reward but in often small and persistent ways showed me what ‘good’ looked like. Starting from my mother, my sister and many more — the most inspired I have ever felt is in the presence of those who look beyond ‘what’ they have done, to focus on ‘how’ they have done it.
-
Q: Based on your own experience, how can we encourage more women to pursue entrepreneurship or senior leadership roles in their career? What is the most important message you would want to give them?
A: Leadership positions including entrepreneurship takes significant resources, time commitment and courage to openly fail. While, there are many ways to encourage women to pursue such roles such as improving their visibility/networks, building confidence to take up space and challenge behaviours that enable barriers — the lack of representation in such posts is not only a result of willingness. The system, in itself, is a barrier. Women need to see other women succeed in these posts, they need all members of society to step in and create systems that share the burden — systems that work for everyone. To enable a workforce that is fair and balanced requires a deep understanding of the institutions and processes that currently influence the set up of modern society, jobs/roles, careers/pathways and to challenge them.
Therefore my message to everyone reading is to critically engage with current systems and champion for the re-design of approaches to facilitate more inclusive take-up of leadership roles.
-
Q: What do you think are three traits that brilliant and inspiring women leaders possess?
A: First — A curious nature driven by a desire for life-long learning, sharing and helping.
Second — An open and vulnerable approach that emphasises the benefits of lessons learned, reflective thinking and failure as a stepping stone.
Third — A connectors mindset; which links interconnected challenges, champions others forward and encourages honest, transparent and enabling conversations.
-
Q: What do you hope the future will look like in terms of diversity within the workplace?
A: I hope for a future where terms like inclusion/diversity, sustainability/regenerative move on from being industry ‘buzz words’ to deeply embedded in standard workplace culture. Where inclusive mindsets and approaches become integrated within standard ways of working — where delivery methods/project scoping/brief setting/reflection are geared towards conscious and considerate solutions. In the hope that lived experiences, collaboration and co-created pathways become the norm where businesses set intentions that leave a positive impact on processes, people and planet with a long-term lens to cross-industry share in a wider ecosystem.
-
Read the other blogs in this series here -
My Morinder | Worldfavor
Sarah Moneypenny | SustainAbility
Magda Cheang | Jobs for Planet
Andrea Sommer | Hive Founders
For more information about Metta and the work we do, head to our website. Check out our podcast Metta Talks to hear the latest about startups, innovation, and sustainability. The team is also on LinkedIn — reach out to us!
#IWD2024 #InspireInclusion
