Master inclusivity and reap invaluable rewards for your organisation

Inclusivity means having voices from various cultures, genders and races equitably represented at all levels of your organisational structure.

This means BBBEE or affirmative action strategies need to go beyond window-dressing to ensure diverse voices are not only hired —  across departments and all levels of your organisational culture — but heard and acted on when agreeing on organisational structure and direction.

Deep diversity

It is critical to understand the difference between optical diversity (demographic box-ticking diversity) and 3D diversity (true diversity of ideas, mindset and backgrounds).

Even if your team has gender, cultural and racial diversity on paper that satisfies the corporate and governmental bureaucrats, that is no guarantee you have achieved the benefits of true inclusivity.

If you have achieved optical diversity that looks wonderful in your company photoshoots and press releases, but all those diverse faces have gone to the same private school and studied the same degree programmes as each other, you are missing out on potential innovation, creativity and future-resilience. 

Look outside

To build a deep 3D diverse team you may need to look outside your comfort zone to find people who not only look different, but who think differently too.

This means hiring across industries and geographies to find people who have different lived experiences to your existing team.

A good example is Roivant Sciences and its “Justice League of pharma veterans”, composed of a special team of non-pharmacists recruited from finance, consulting, tech, academic and political campaign backgrounds. 

The pharmaceuticals company inserted this team into drug development roles with a mandate to come up with fresh ideas for making the notoriously expensive and time-consuming drug development process more efficient — with significant success.

Deep diversity also includes people of different age groups in mixed-generational teams. Every age group has something valuable to learn from another.

Don’t trust the machines

When it comes to building diverse teams, it pays to retain the human touch in the recruitment process. A team is made up of individuals who need to communicate and work together and that requires a certain degree of serendipity and intuition when hiring. 

You may not be able to replicate this with artificial intelligence-enabled recruitment programmes and processes that “flatten” interactions into binary parameters. These place people into yes/no boxes based on inferences and statistical probabilities that tell you little about the individual in question.

Relying on algorithms to make hiring, promotion and firing decisions can lead to a perpetuation of bias such as gender or racial discrimination — and homogeneity, if the algorithm contains intended or accidental bias. This is the opposite of 3D diversity that innovative teams thrive on.

If you want to build a deep, 3D diverse team, you need to connect with humans on a personal level, and embrace individuality as a benefit — rather than see difference as a problem to be flattened into a homogeneous organisational culture.

• Bronwyn Williams is a futurist, strategist, economist and trend analyst at Flux Trends. Williams will be speaking at the upcoming Standard Bank SME Summit in partnership with Business Day on July 27 at 10.15am, to watch her presentation click here to register. 

This article was paid for by Flux Trends and was originally published on their website.