Any kind of change is a hard and often emotional process. There is generally a certain amount of challenge and even discomfort involved.
Changing to be more inclusive and diverse is no different. Individuals and the organisations they work for need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, because to actually achieve change, they have to come face to face with some unwanted truths.
By failing to interrogate difference, and ignoring uncomfortable feelings, we could be denying the validity of that difference, and assuming that one set of experiences and values (those of the status quo) are the only ones that matter.
So, as organisations become increasingly diverse, we also have a duty to become more comfortable with talking about issues that have previously been swept under the carpet. Many mistakes, assumptions and subsequent issues arise from avoidance. For example, when women go on maternity leave, colleagues are often not sure about what they can or can’t ask, which can lead to misunderstandings between employees and their managers.
An open conversation that faces discomfort head on can help us address these issues pragmatically, as our experience at Baker McKenzie has shown. Just over 10 years ago, we became concerned around the lack of ethnic diversity among our trainee population. On analysing the data, we realised that only 3% of our trainees were from an ethnic minority, compared with 25% of those applying to the Firm. We unpicked each stage of our hiring process and uncovered a mixture of unconscious bias, a lack of diversity in our interview panel and an interview-only process that didn’t allow those with different skillsets to shine. This was uncomfortable for us as a law firm that, even at that time, prided ourselves on our diversity. We had to be quite brave in admitting that something was wrong.
In the years that followed, we became one of the first employers in the UK to adopt name-blind recruitment, we broadened our interview panel to include more women and members of ethnic minority groups in our hiring process, and we introduced mandatory unconscious bias training.
Within four years, that 3% had become 30%.
As the notion of inclusion and diversity becomes embedded within organisations, managers also need to consider those areas which are not completely overt or visible, but which still comprise an individual’s diverse identity. For managers, who may have been given little formal training, reconciling uncomfortable differences in the workplace is often hard enough – and harder still when those differences are invisible and highly uncomfortable in the personal sphere as well as the professional.
One such aspect of difference is mental health. A societal inability to talk about mental health, especially in the workplace, has resulted in the sort of stigma whereby you can openly talk about spraining your wrist, but not your depression. The Lord Mayor’s ‘This is Me in the City’ campaign encourages organisations to take proactive steps towards reducing the stigma associated with mental health issues through sharing personal experiences. Barclays colleagues have published stories on their internal website, and have also identified practical strategies like taking some personal time during the working day, for example a lunchtime walk. Sharing without stigma has led to a rise in employees identifying their own mental health issues, as they can be confident that they won’t be judged.
Other initiatives launched by the campaign include EY’s mental health first aid training, where colleagues are taught to spot and support colleagues facing challenges, alongside a buddy scheme where struggling employees are paired up with someone who has gone through something similar.
Initiatives like this aim to break open aspects of life that we have been too uncomfortable to confront. They also demonstrate that, as we continue to unpack the complexity of previously unassailable tenets of identity, for example binary gender division, and bring the unchartered diversity of human experience into the open, we need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Only then can real progress happen.