Diversifying your way to success (it’s not what you think)

A diverse workplace full of people from all walks of life is crucial to business culture and it’s something the telecoms sector should strive for, rather than fostering the same old mindsets and relying on restricted pools of talent.

At a breakfast briefing at Digital Transformation World last week, three executives shared their insights and experiences on their companies’ journeys to becoming more diverse:

• Roland White, Microsoft’s Global Director of Diversity & Inclusion


• Joseph Johnson, VP, Consumer Product Development and Marketing, Windstream


• Sevasti Wong, Managing Director – Global Talent & Organization Consulting Lead for Accenture’s Communications, Media & Technology Practice

Inclusion is key

Inclusion is the conscious act of welcoming diversity, which helps people feel valued and vital to an organization’s success by engaging with them on their level. White explains that three years ago, the (then) new CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, chose to reward Microsoft leaders for positive actions around diversity inclusion.

The first step towards building an inclusive work environment is to first understand what inclusion actually is. White explains:

“People say that it’s about being invited to the party – and that’s a horrible quote. People also say it’s about being asked to dance, but that’s not inclusion either. It’s about being invited the party and being allowed to put your own music on the stereo, and everybody hearing different people’s music and dancing to that. That's really what inclusion is.”

He highlighted four key metrics for inclusion:

• Authenticity – people need to be able to bring their full authentic self to work


• Condemnation – they need to not be fearful of being stigmatized for who they are


• Emotional intelligence – it’s about emotion and feeling respect for your authentic self, and using empathy to understand how different people feel


• Potential – people can only fulfill their potential by being authentic

Unconscious bias

Unconscious bias is ingrained in us all and most of us aren’t even aware that it affects the decision and actions we take. This may have been a helpful mindset for our distant ancestors in their day-to-day survival mode, however it is less beneficial in 2019. It can, in fact, undermine an organization’s commercial efforts.

Johnson talked about an experience at work where he was reviewing images used within marketing collateral when suddenly, the unconscious bias present in their production suddenly jumped out at him:

“All the marketing images were of families and of people between 25 and 35 years old, and they were mostly all white. I had to stop right there and deal with this issue, because the image we were casting into our retail stores, our online stores, our web presence and social presence was not consistent with…our customers. We have seven segments of customers, and we needed to be more inclusive in the images we're putting forth.”

He explained, for example, that when seniors were coming into retail locations or going online, they were not seeing images that reflect them. Citing a 2018 survey by Gransnet, he explained:

• 78% of older customers (age 50 and over) felt they were underrepresented in company marketing


• 87% of them felt they were under represented by tech and gadget providers. “That's huge,” Johnson said. “We’re all technology companies.”


• 62% believed they were ignored – “They felt like the advertisers and marketing agencies are all 25 to 35 year-olds running around creating these awesome campaigns, leaving them behind and forgetting them.”


• And most importantly, “49% said that they would not shop with a company, because they were not being reflected their images.”

“We have to be aware of our demographic power, how we’re portraying them and how we're bringing them together,” Johnson added. “At the end of the day, if 50% of 50 plus feel that they're not going to shop with a company because they're not being included, that could also apply to race, to gender, to religious diversity and to the LGBT community.”

He emphasized that companies must have the processes to identify such bias, connect all the marketing dots to identify the problem, and then fix it and educate everyone involved.

“That was the big thing, going back to my marketing staff and challenging them with this,” Johnson said. “And now, all of our graphic designers look at product lines…and say, ‘Oh, wow, okay, we need to focus in on these demographics; we need to make this more inclusive’.”

Accessibility

One size does not fit all, and those with disabilities, or those who simply waver from the perceived norm, can end up struggling in ways that many executives fail to understand or deem important. Wong provided three examples of the lack of thought behind issues of accessibility:

• In 2009 a lawsuit was filed against the US government because each of the country’s currency bills, regardless of the monetary value, are all exactly the same size. People who are visually impaired or blind had no way to tell them apart. The suit resulted in the US government providing readers to help people tell the difference between the bills, a solution that cost $6.6 billion.


• A dire consequence comes with the story of the very first airbags, which killed a woman because they had not been designed or tested for someone her size. The weight and height of the crash-test mannequins were based on men so could not protect her adequately.


• The third example was more recent when in March NASA was forced to abort the first all-female spacewalk because there weren’t enough correctly sized spacesuits.

“I wonder sometimes about the different ways we can get that dialogue going, around just what the world is like and what the world could be like,” Wong said. “And every single person in this room has got the potential to take one small action to change that.”