Immersing Into an Incredibly Inclusive Work Culture and Establishing Radical Acceptance

The subtle art of not just including others to follow the crowd.

It has become a fashionable trend to portray an inclusive and diverse culture as the fresh letters ‘I&D’ have evolved to being an almost critical part of every workplace when a role is advertised.

So what exactly does that mean, and how do you know if you are including everyone in the most honest manner?

It has become very evident that being inclusive has resulted in many advantages to organizations since it involves bringing people on board who will add a huge value to the business, not based on how good they are at Microsoft Excel or at talking about their work experience in chronological order, but on their differences, no matter where they come from and who they are.

It’s also widely known that people with individual differences such as learning deficits and neurodiversity are highly beneficial and impactful in productivity and creativity, mainly because these differences bring so many different flowing creative ideas that spark unique projects.? These traits genuinely arise and beam when you match the person with the specific role that they’re interested in and when you allow the freedom of expression - to give guidance for the part, but not micromanage and tell them exactly how to do it, which mean that the person would have no room to expand or would be afraid to make mistakes so they would stick within four walls.

“ We’re not working with a background; we’re working with the people.”

When it comes to inclusion, and we’re working with others, we must manage the biases we face every day to comply with other people who are entirely different from us and manage relationships, which can be achieved through increasing awareness of the risks without letting them fog our capabilities and objectives. For instance, if you disagree with someone’s opinion or suggestion, take a moment to pause to make sure your internal judgments on autopilot haven’t clouded your thoughts over. Although our personal biases may play an essential part in our decision-making ability, reducing noise (any of our unconscious biases) should be our priority. Noise appears when people don’t collect enough information and don’t delay their response/reaction (Kahneman and Cowen, 2018). And at the end of the day, no suggestion is a stupid one, and there are no ‘stupid’ questions, so to simplify - let’s listen to everything everyone has to say because you don’t know how valid it will be. We also don’t know who could potentially be one of the people who lead the company upwards at a time of turmoil, so opening up to those who may be dissimilar to you is crucial.

Over the past few months, we've observed that our remote environment feels like one large family, and nobody gets left out or is excluded from pivotal information. Since I had the first conversation with the Operations? Director, Leah (my lead/manager), I knew I could trust her to discuss my ADHD and how it would impact my work. One unique thing that made a massive difference to any interaction I ever had in a role was that I was asked how I would prefer our communication to flow. This was a game changer because I instantly felt like she cared about how I wanted my day-to-day to look and be respected and valued from day 1. You rarely go into a workplace and are asked how YOU want the communication channel to go. Not to be simply delegated tasks - it’s a straightforward step to make us feel less like robots when we’re working from home and stare at a laptop for 9+ hours a day, so it’s a yes for companies who want to make their employees feel valued from the first go.

In terms of culture, there is a vast amount of nationalities at Emperia at this point; we’re working from all parts of the world and growing every month. Thus, we have a great understanding of what it is like to be unbiased, and we’re working on being even more aware of unconscious biases and reducing them to include amazingly talented people no matter what their background is - simply because we’re not working with a background, we’re working with the people.

We can start embodying inclusion & diversity, doing less talking about it, and making it part of the company culture. Planning and organizing programs to establish for employees is fantastic, but if they don’t feel like you include them in terms of transparency, active listening, and genuinely being cared for in the team daily, they’re not being included or feeling that connection. Our career is what we spend most of our lives doing, so if we don’t feel included, how does that impact our overall life? People thrive when they feel they genuinely matter - show them that they count and remind them how much everyone is part of the team.

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Patricia Delahunty

People Manager, CIPD

Working at the wonderful Emperia

Fascinated by wellbeing and culture