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D & I or the Opportunity to Work with Human Beings and not Clones

Chris Martin 11 Nov 2011
Posted by Chris Martin

What do you need to feel included in your team or department, and to give your best to your work every day?
 
It’s a key question for us all and for business productivity. What do YOU need to: feel included; to offer up your best ideas and, most creative thoughts; to put in that extra effort?

 I expect that one of the following may come to mind:

  • An open culture that’s receptive to new and different ideas
  • A fair reward system, both an informal ‘thank you’ and formal financial rewards
  • Trust and flexibility in how to approach work and work-life balance

The next questions focus on how we act towards others:

  • What do you do to make others feel included in your team?
  • How do you adapt your style to meet their needs?
  • What do you do to allow members of your team to excel?

In a competitive environment where the economy is emerging from recession, your business needs to exploit its competitive advantages more than ever. Often, advantages emerge from your employees delivering: new product ideas; high quality services; or, using ingenuity to solve customer problems.  Chaucer has experience here and can help you transform Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) concepts into facts and policies that deliver a business case. Realising both top and bottom line performance improvements.

I’ve noticed when I’ve had conversations about D&I with colleagues that their first questions are often “What does D&I mean for me and my team?” The discussion works best when we start with the needs of the enquirer and then examine employee needs. You are unique and require your diversity to be valued in an inclusive organisation before using that understanding to leverage the potential of Diversity & Inclusion to motivate others.

The next step is to identify what to do differently across an organisation to use inclusion to drive performance, creativity and business results.  We know from others’ hard-won experience that there are two groups which can become powerful change agents:

  • People who strongly believe in fairness
  • Senior male executives with daughters. *Source from Catalyst.org PDF page 11

These groups have been shown to understand and buy into D&I and the benefits that it brings to them and their business.  Chaucer can help facilitate the design and implementation of your Diversity & Inclusion strategy: tapping into your company’s change agents to realise those tangible business benefits.

Comments

14 December 2011 11:42 Terry Shane says

How do you go about deciding what D&I initiatives offer the greatest return directly or indirectly to the bottom line? In my experience, line managers are sceptical of the link, or, they think that attending a women’s gala networking dinner is enough. This is why, if the initiatives are to succeed, it is important for HR managers and other D&I advocates to make a strong case that their leadership teams can relate and buy-in to.

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