Q&A with Mark Ivan Serunjogi on prioritizing inclusivity

?Who are you and how would you introduce yourself? 

My name is Mark Serunjogi. I am from Copenhagen, where I grew up. I was born in Scandinavia to Ugandan parents. So I identify as Black Danish, Afro Danish, Ugandan-Danish, or African-Danish.

I would present myself as queer-identifying. I do not mean it on the sexual spectrum level, but in terms of the ideology and philosophies, I adhere to, which are connected to questioning the status quo, norms, why we do what we do and how we can do things better in a more human way. 

When did you come to the realization you wanted to work on D&I? What is one of the most impactful experiences you’ve had early in your career?

The experience that had a lasting impression on me was working for a museum in Brooklyn, NY, focused on the African diaspora’s contemporary art. It was about Black artists catering to Black people. There, I experienced how it was to work in an institution as part of the majority for the first time, creating event spaces and opportunities for people to get in touch with art and doing work that is beneficial for other people. I saw how art could be a channel to voice your position in society and have something that reflects on yourself. It was a wonderful, eye-opening experience. I had never seen so many faces and different visible representations of Blackness, all coming through the museum from every gender expression to any skin tone nuance.

Following this US experience, I wanted to continue developing my digital marketing skills. That is when I started looking at opportunities in places like Berlin. Coming back to Europe, I knew I had to lower my expectations and be ready for microaggressions. I have had to learn how to deal with that. I was happy to find a small but growing community of internationals here. 

When moving, I was wondering how I could bring what I learned closer to home. I did not want to be a performance marketer by day and an inclusion activist by night or on the side. That’s how I started looking into ways to combine marketing and D&I and came across employer branding. 

What is Employer branding and what does it have to do with D&I? 

Employer branding usually focuses on talent acquisition, attracting people, and making them apply and want to work for the company. Secondarily, it is about retention and touches upon culture, employee experience, and well-being. A good employer brand gives an authentic idea of the culture of the company. It reflects a company that lives up to the expectations of people joining so that they will stay. There is no point in attracting people to join a company if they leave quickly after.

Ultimately, as a company, you want to make your employees into advocates for your company and proud spokespersons who can vouch for the culture, the practices, the management, the growth opportunities, and their own personal fulfilment. D&I done right allows you to become a top-of-mind company, especially when you need to recruit internationally (as it is hard to find all talents only inside Germany). 

How do you define and distinguish between diversity, inclusion, belonging and psychological safety?

I think at the core of everything is psychological safety. It is the foundation of D&I. If not all people, most people want to feel safe in their financial, social situations, for example. We all want to feel trusted, have autonomy, and be recognized as we are. At work, this translates as: is this environment safe enough for me to do my best work? Can we speak up? Can we disagree? Can we have off days? 

Only when you feel safe will you achieve a state of belonging: not only do I feel safe, I feel I am where I belong. I am me, seen and valued for who I am and what I bring to the table. And there's no reason for me to hold back or be anyone or anything else. What I am is good enough and I belong in the place that I'm in. 

To get there, you need to look at inclusion strategies. As a company, this means asking yourself: how do we ensure that people feel that they can speak up, make decisions without considering different factors like: can I wear this shirt to work even though it's my favorite one? I am a woman; how will they see me if I say X ? If I address something and I'm Black, how will my blackness affect how the other people are viewing me?

Finally, diversity is at a superficial level. It is about what is visible. Is it visible that there are different people in the organization? In leadership positions? As an employee and candidate, can I see myself in management, in company pictures, or on the career page? I think I am moving away from thinking about diversity toward channeling more inclusivity and strategizing about how to change cultures.

What does employer branding look like on a day-to-day basis? 

Employer branding is about collecting and displaying company stories. For that, you’ll need to talk to people, ask them questions and keep an open ear because the conversation comes out in many different ways: Do you feel included? What is your favorite thing about your job? What frustrates you? What are the good stories about your team? 

Employer branding is a lot about looking at the data that what we can see and measure, work and iterate on. And documented stories are also data.

What are the main obstacles you’ve encountered? 

Before, I was trying to play the respectability game. As a person of marginalized communities, I have been focusing on how to be listened to. We are often told that we will be listened to if we play the game as it's being explained and shown to us and if we fit into the box of the systems that have existed for decades, if not hundreds of years. I was very aware that to make them listen, we need to speak the language of data because that is being drummed in our ears.

Show me the data, show me the evidence. But most of the data we had was about gender. To build a case and get more data, we had to leverage the data on gender to say if this is popping up here in gender, could we imagine, could we theorize that there is a problem elsewhere? If so, how could we record that? 

I believed we could only do one thing at a time and that we almost had to infantilize White men in power to make them concentrate on one thing at a time, not to overwhelm them. You don't want to lose them. You don't want them to think that this work is too hard. So the approach for a long time was “let’s start with something easy,” and hopefully, they will do more, ask more, or be more interested. 

And this approach is partially true: you have to meet people where they are and speak the language they understand. But I also hit a wall of fatigue. I was tired of playing this game, especially with the Corona pandemic, the murders in the US and how it ignited this global awareness. I felt tired because we've been trying to talk about these things for years. And all of a sudden, people came to the realization, oh, this might be a problem.

Besides, I met and discussed with professionals working on gender equality. Listening to them saying they did not know what to do in addressing racism broke down my illusion. Talking about inclusivity and diverse representation only within the scope of gender is not enough to make people automatically connect with other forms of oppression, struggles and discrimination. Suddenly, all the tools these professionals had gone out the window.

I'm a cis man, and I am trying my hardest to understand how I, as a professional and a person, can show up for women, but somehow me being Black was hard to relate to for gender-focused White people in the D&I space. 

What you mean is that intersectionality should be the core foundation of any form of D&I work? 

If it's not part of the foundation, the work is not there. Audre Lorde said, you cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. I woke up and I realized I had been trying to do this work using the master's tools. I was focusing on making it comfortable for them, using their language on their terms. 

I figured out the whole thing does not work. Even the industry of Diversity and Inclusion is corrupt. It's been industrialized and become a space where buzzwords don't even mean anything in themselves. It has become a system in itself and we need to throw the whole system out. So how do we build something new? For me, focusing on inclusivity is a way of bridging that gap between the old paradigm and a new one.

And how should the new system look like?

It is about creating a working environment that works for all of us. It's not about people of color versus White, or able-bodied versus disabled people. How do we also address non-binary or gender fluidity? How can this environment work for everyone, regardless of your gender or gender expression, for example? 

Is working on inclusivity radical enough to be having different tools than the master's tool?

It depends on who you are. All of these terms are just terms; they’re just theory. If you want to radicalize it, you can radicalize it. I am trying to find a balance myself because I need an ear or an invitation to the table. The question is: how do you package radical inclusivity in a way that makes business sense? That is the balance to be found. 

And what is the answer that you found for yourself these days? What keeps you going with employer branding now that you have had this realization? 

I realized I am already a diversity and inclusion professional. I don't need the title and actually, there's more leverage in the title of employer branding than diversity inclusion specialist. Companies want to know where the talents are, how to attract them, and make them stay. For me, there is no employer branding if we don't talk about inclusivity. How do you become an employer of choice? What is a good workplace? These are very broad and essential questions. 

Diversity has become tokenistic. We do need representation for sure but diverse representation does not exclude discriminatory behavior. How do we limit discriminatory behavior so that we can make sure that we have diverse representation? Inclusivity is what we should be selling. Are we openly acknowledging that we have a problem? And then we need to be talking about the solutions we can implement. 

How do we make a comfortable environment for everyone? This also includes, of course, the straight White father who wants to have more time with children and family. How do we have an environment where he can be his best and leave without feeling guilty, exhausted, or feeling like he is acknowledged in supporting his coworkers too. How do we create joy for everyone? 

It means evolving in real-time actually and those thoughts are coming as I'm working.

What do you think 2020 has changed in that space?

I think that people are open to having a conversation that goes beyond gender. But then again, now it goes all into race. Some things are being lost there. I have to admit, I also need to learn more about what is possible in terms of inclusion for people of different abilities. COVID has highlighted working from home versus being at an office. Are we ready to create an environment where there's space for people to not come into the office anymore and have the flexibility to do their work?

Another element: people talk about inclusion as if it's a completely separate process. When we do pulse checks within teams or individual engagement like employee engagement, many engagement tools are there to help with inclusivity. We don’t necessarily need to run around and reinvent the wheel. It’s about asking ourselves what we can do with the tools we have. Asking the primary question: are you asking the questions that you need? Do you have the right questions in there? 

Have you seen anything remarkable in the industry that qualifies as a good practices recommendation?

I am a huge fan of what Zalando is doing. Of course, this is coming from an external viewer. I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, on the inside. Even the latest thing that I saw was a partnership initiative with an academic network to create internships for people of color. This is for me putting money where your mouth is. They seem to have these conversations, at least in their marketing campaigns, about diversity and inclusivity. Maybe it sounds cheesy, but they’re making a conscious choice. 

They have a lot of different employee resource groups that meet and talk. So they are creating space internally. On paper there, a lot of things look good. Of course, the following question is how well are they working? What are the problems? Etc. But you cannot blame them for not making an effort, for not trying. That's the thing: can you commit to trying? Maybe you’ll make a mistake. Perhaps you’ll be wrong. People are so focused on getting it right and are afraid of scrutiny or becoming the next PR nightmare. But if you're not willing to take risks, you're not going big.

Talking about risks and getting your hands dirty, do you have any tips for people just starting with D&I work?

My question would then be who those “people” are. Are we talking about companies as an entity? Are we talking about people in leadership, or are we talking about individual contributors?

Because the answer depends on how much power you have in the company. As a contributor, the very first thing is to find allies and a community. It is crucial in going beyond the practical aspects of the work; it also supports your personal and mental welfare. You could be asking who else is interested in this, and talking with your manager about this. You cannot do this alone, even when your role is entirely dedicated to D&I questions. If this comes on top of your work, you have to figure out who will hop on those questions on a volunteer basis to drive change. 

How could you divide the work? Maybe you can find someone good at data and someone else who is better at presentation. Perhaps you find a third person who might have connections and can get you in the right meetings to show this presentation. 

What’s so specific about Berlin tech space and D&I? 

Berlin has a certain allure as a city that is cool. It is attractive for young people who are starting their careers or want to have an experience abroad. On the other hand, tech companies are growing in Berlin and looking for the same talents. That’s why you need an employer branding function: as a company, it’s about selling yourself better. How can I become an employer of choice? How do I not only attract but also make it comfortable enough for them to stay? There are enough companies in Berlin and those talents can simply quit and start somewhere else.

Where do you think D&I in the Berlin tech space will be in 5 years? 

I hope that we can get to a point where inclusion strategy goes from a-nice-to-have to a need-to-have. Going forward, organizations that don't have it in place with published data or reports will be behind or seen as non-progressive. We will slowly see a division between top players and the rest. 

We're not going to get rid of capitalism; we're still going to be for-profit. But I think that people will be more cautious about what the effects are of what they do, who they support, where they buy and where they work. I see this from the questions that talents and recruits have.

You mentioned fatigue earlier. It is a risk to keep in mind when investing yourself in these questions. How do you preserve yourself? 

Germany is a predominantly White country and has a specific history. So I need to think about how I will have to deal with my blackness in Berlin. It is about remembering the context. That means you might have to remind your colleagues, “Oh, actually I am Black. So please be mindful of that when you address this topic, or this is why this topic is sensitive to me because I'm a part of this marginalized group or when you use that phrase or word that's insensitive, I understand you didn't know, but now you do.”

When we talk about D&I, everybody is thrown out of their comfort zone whether you're a part of marginalized groups or the majority group, but the conversation has to take place. Arriving shielded from any slight discomfort is a difficult promise to make for any company. So everyone needs to be ready to have a tough conversation. 

The way I preserve myself: I keep telling myself it is not personal. It is business, which is the hard part because business is also personal. 

Any book/podcast, resources you can recommend?

 I like one podcast in particular: NPR’s Code Switch. It is so good at breaking down societal issues, specifically, in terms of race. It is NPR, so it has a very American lens, but many things can be translated to the European context. When it comes to race, it is not just about Blackness or whiteness. It is taking on different identities, the intersectionalities of these identities and how these societal factors influence the workplace.