Overcoming exclusion in the workplace will leave organisations better off financially over the long term. But that's not why we should do it, writes Jess Berentson-Shaw.
Sometimes I get to go to some really awesome work meetings on the big challenges we are facing. In these meetings people are pinging with ideas, they are full of challenges, insights, and energy, exciting solutions, and there is a broad base of knowledge. I leave knowing far more than I came into the room with. These meetings are expansive and generative experiences. The ideas are deep and exciting (and the challenges are bigger).
The meetings that happen like this inevitably include people with a vast array of life and work experiences, identities, cultures, perspectives and knowledge. And they are all welcome and equal.
Sadly, I don't go to that many of these meetings. I do go to more meetings than I would like where I am one of lots of people who have pretty similar life experiences and perspectives. Sometimes, on unlucky days, I represent the diversity quotient (pretty funny given I am an educated, able bodied, Pākehā woman from Wellington)... those meetings boy oh boy….
The point is that problems, solutions, and yes meetings, are just so much better when the people working on them are not all the same or even mostly the same. When people with vastly different experiences, backgrounds, identities and knowledge get to drive and decide the work that gets done, in private, public, not-for-profit workplaces, it just feels right. Because it is right.
It's why I can't stand the “Do equity for the money” reports that regularly come out. You’ll know the ones. The reports that tell organisations how much more money they will make if they would just include more of x group across their organisation and industry.
The argument that organisations should include, let's say for example more women, in their workplaces because it will make them richer is not only setting the bar pretty low in terms of what people are motivated by, but it is ineffective.
Do we really think people who run workplaces are that shallow?
Is this how little we think of the people who run our workplaces? That the reason they would act on the active exclusion of specific groups of people from key parts of our society (basically injustice), is because they would get richer for it? Gross. There are loads of people running organisations big and small that would find the idea that they are only motivated on issues of fairness and equity because they can make money from it a bit off.
Along with my business partner Marianne Elliott, I run a growing organisation. I know that having enough money to achieve the goals we have for our people and our work is critical, but it is not the single or even biggest factor driving most people who run organisations. We might get told it is frequently (at school, in education, by politicians, in shareholder reports), but ask people what they really value, what matters most to them and it is not more and more money. They value things like being responsible to their staff, helping other people reach their goals, leaving a meaningful legacy, and yes making other people’s lives better. That is why most people care about more inclusive workplaces. The same reason we care about a more inclusive society.
What happens when it all gets a bit hard?
So you have sold the big financial win for including women in the boardroom (or wherever), but what happens if inclusion and equity works out more expensive and actually quite tricky work in the short-term? And spoiler alert, it often does. Is the smell of money really going to carry organisations through these challenges?
The places we work have been shaped to work for very particular types of people living very particular lives. As an example, better paid jobs are full time, we have limited sick or family leave, cultural expectations of 70 hour plus weeks for senior leaders, low tolerance for mental health issues, the list goes on. Workplaces are structured to exclude lots of people, or at least keep them in low paid, less senior roles. Single parents, women caring for parents, those with responsibilities for maintaining the cultural health of their communities, people with long-term illnesses, or mental health challenges.
Tearing down barriers to inclusion can take quite a bit of effort. It requires changes to both the physical and cultural structures of workplaces. It can mean creating more part time roles, providing more child care, more leave for caring, more on the job training, different physical structures, new ways of advertising roles, different qualification frameworks and all these things need many champions, people who deeply believe the mahi when it gets hard. It is 100% worth it for a healthy stable workplace and community and social wellbeing. And it's not a quick fix to do the things that make the biggest difference. You have to be committed to see it through.
Framing experts suggest that if you talk about return on investment as a reason to act on big meaty issues like including people in all areas of decision making, it actually prevents people thinking about the long-term wider benefits. It is a mindset that makes people more willing to put off changes that will make a big difference when it is not the easy or fast thing to do. In other words, rebuilding workplace cultures and practices requires more than an eye to the money.
People are excluded because we not rational
Finally, telling people to create workplaces that include as many people as possible because it is more cost effective is just not that effective. Consider all the things we currently do that make no long-term financial sense (building more roads to ease congestion, extracting natural resources to the point of ecosystem collapse, maintaining intergenerational poverty because we hate the idea of welfare). We don't continue to do these things because we are rational people who just haven't seen the best cost effectiveness arguments yet (you've seen them alright you just don't want to believe them). We do these things because we are not rational, because logic is the last thing we bring to our decisions, because shared mindsets, beliefs, cultural and mental models, mythologies, truthiness, cognitive bias, whatever you want to call it, play a far bigger role than rational arguments in how we decide what to do and what to undo.
Inclusion (and exclusion) in the workplace is much more about the stories we tell ourselves about who matters, whose work matters, what “good staff” and “good workers” looks like and who should be included in our workplaces. The rational argument just doesn't have a hope unless we get to the heart of these stories and rewrite them.
Without a doubt overcoming exclusion in the workplace will leave organisations better off financially over the long-term. But that is not why we should do it, we should include people because it is the right thing to do for other human beings. It will make the work a damn sight more meaningful too.
