Inclusion

In practice: Ensuring you are not excluding people from aspects of work and the workplace, and taking steps to educate yourself with regard to life experiences and perspectives you are unfamiliar with.

Inclusion and diversity are often linked, but in fact a team can be diverse while its culture is not inclusive, or a team can be non-diverse but have a very inclusive culture. Diversity is about who gets to be on the team; inclusion is about everyone on the team playing a full part in its decision-making and work. A diverse team has a wide range of relevant backgrounds and experiences to draw on; an inclusive team culture makes sure those voices are heard.

Diversity is good for business¹, but the evidence shows that it’s particularly the combination of diversity and inclusive practices that improve team performance, commitment, individual job satisfaction and well-being.

Teams, or team leaders, may have little control over the diversity of membership in the team, but they can always review and improve their inclusivity. What is really important is that the range of different experiences and mindsets available in the team are actually encouraged and brought out by the team leader and colleagues. This improves decision-making, buy-in and enhances innovation.

‘Everyday’ discrimination or exclusion - casual and often unconscious ways in which people can undermine each other - can be more toxic to mental health and wellbeing than overt discrimination², and research indicates that team leaders have a particularly important role to play in showing visible support to members of minority groups to facilitate their full contribution to a team.

What team members can do to increase inclusion in meetings:

• Make sure the whole team contributes to important decisions.
• Develop a culture of fairness and respect by encouraging people to speak up. Seek out different views based on different experience.
• Share information across the whole team, not just to a favoured few.
• Be aware of, and address, people who speak too much or too little. Invite people into the conversation. Beware the power of the HIPPO (highest paid person’s opinion), men interrupting women, people appropriating others’ ideas.
• Establish team meeting groundrules so that everyone feels respected and valued for being who they are; that people trust that they can speak up and be fairly treated; and they share a sense of belonging in the team.
• Although the team leader plays an important role, every member can contribute to the actions above.

Outside team meetings, if you are a team leader you can:

• Make sure people have equal access to you – in practice, not just in principle.
• Encourage people to take development opportunities that require them to work alongside people who are different from themselves.
• Make sure the attractive and unattractive jobs /projects are not handed out unwittingly based on gender or race³.

You can find great tips of how to deal with bias in this short series of 5 minute videos: Four kinds of gender bias women face at work. The specifics are about gender bias, but the tips are relevant to any kind of bias. By a leading researcher in the field who directs the biasinterrupters.org organisation. Details of their website are in the Exercises section on the tab at the top of the page.

1. Why Diverse Teams are Smarter’, Rock,D and Grant,H Harvard Business Review, November 2016

2. Jones, K.P, et al., 2016, Not so subtle: A meta-analytic investigation of the correlates of subtle and overt discrimination, Journal of Management, vol 42, No 6, 1588 - 1613

3. “Women engineers report a “worker bee” expectation at higher rates than white men do, and women of color report it at higher rates than white women do. Meanwhile, glamour work that leads to networking and promotion opportunities, such as project leadership and presentations, goes disproportionately to white men.” Williams, Joan & Mihalyo, Sky, How the best bosses interrupt bias on their teams, Harvard Business Review November-December 2019