One of the joys of my role at the NCFD is meeting so many of the 1500 organisations we worked with over nearly two decades. It is a fabulous privilege to be introduced to representatives who are doing a great job and to hear how, through the thought leadership and guidance we offer, these organisations are improving their approach to Fairness, Respect, Equality, Diversity, Inclusion, Engagement (FREDIE).
It is a two-way process; we gain so many valuable insights listening to the wonderful stories from those who are further along the EDI journey about how workplaces are being transformed. It is truly heartening.
I have seen so many changes over the last 20 years. Two decades ago E&D practitioners as they were called back then almost stumbled into EDI Officer roles. There were few EDI Manager or EDI Director jobs. People often became the designated EDI officer because they happened to be from a minority background.
Though the early diversity professionals may well have had their own lived experiences , many of them may not have had a depth of experience of others with other characteristics.
Some lacked any real professional experience in the field and fumbled in the dark a little bit until they found their way. Then people with an interest and passion started to join the field. Then the social scientists, academics and PhD’s joined, and brought persuasive data and research with them.
Then we had the world class research by the likes of the McKinsie Institute to show the benefits of well managed diversity and it was then many company bosses , whom may well have been supportive previously now had real supportive evidence to take back to their Boards to support the Inclusion drive.
The neuroscientists and the behavioural scientists changed the game. Now we know so much more about human behaviour.
Next came the engineers, the mathematicians and other scientists and they brought in diversity of thought.
The Equality Act of 2010 , now thirteen years old, was an important step but legislation on its own cannot create culture change. It merely provides a carrot and a stick. So, the pace of change up to about 2018/19 was fairly slow with the world having to deal with the aftershocks of the financial crash in 2008.
After 2019 and particularly after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the pace of change and indeed, demand for change has been so fast that it has left many employers in a tiz.
Senior bosses came out and began conversations with their black employees after Floyd. Expectations increased because now CEO’s were directly talking to their people. Some organisations made significant changes and significant improvement but I think it is fair to say that the expectations of some people have not met.
As said before things have been changing not least with abundance of steering groups set up by employees in companies to get the workforce thinking about the issues. Twenty years ago these were small scale and often didn’t really have a clear remit and lacked seniority but with our help they also began to evolve and improve.
They attracted passionate people who brought their passions to the table however for some, the cause that brought them to the table made many feel that their cause was so important and relevant to them, that they wanted to focus their attention on that one cause. So single agenda-item groups were formed. In some organisations, before long there developed some level of competition sometimes leading to friction between the different equality groups.
When this happens you get siloed thinking and cognitive barriers in our collective thinking, and this moves us away from taking holistic approaches which are intersectional. When our passions take over, we have to be careful that we to be careful of that impact on others. Our approach needs to be inclusive at all times.
We need to be open to the fact that we might be wrong or at least that our truth might be different from someone else’s truth. We must understand that another person may not believe what I believe but I need to afford them respect for their belief.
That is why we have to make inclusion safe again. We need to ensure we have a handle on our passions and that the language we use is inclusive of all and doesn’t alienate others.
It seems today that a genuine mistake can ruin a person’s career and life. We also need to take extreme care when we accuse people of discriminatory behaviour.
I have been on the end of a massive amount of racism in the first 28 years of my life but I was and still am today so careful to ever use the word r-word because I know it’s power. Even today when I suspect covert racism or racial bias is at play I will seek to eliminate all other reasons for the behaviour of another towards me before I can even entertain the thought that this person is behaving that way because they are racist. It is sad that today that these words are thrown around willy-nilly.
Accusations must not be made without evidence and attacking people for mistakenly using the wrong terminology or saying the wrong thing has driven some people into silence.
Many people are frightened to talk about equality issues for fear of saying the wrong thing.
The National Centre for Diversity has been concerned about these matters for some time now and that is why we are helping organisations by adding three new concepts to their thinking.
- Margin for error
- Margin for forgiveness
- Margin for reasonable disagreement
If you would like to discuss how you can embed these into your approach , please contact us at admin@iiduk.org or by phone. Our work is a joy let us bring the joy back and make Inclusion safe again.
