Sustainable Inclusion in the desert of Diversity: IQ- Inclusion Quotient

In the recent classic, Hidden Figures set in the early sixties, the outstanding scientist Taraji Johnson is required to undergo the humiliation of rushing to a colored bathroom outside her office campus to relieve herself at work everyday. I was reminded that less than 20 years ago, my first job just out of college at Coca-Cola stationed me in a distribution center of 400 associates that had no toilet for women. This led to our young Finance head driving with the only qualified woman associate, on his bike, out of the facility, at least twice a day amid hushed whispers from an insensitive workforce. In real life, Taraji Johnson courageously ended up using the bathroom for white women and not going across campus to the colored bathroom.

In our own time, Madeleine Albright has worn pins to telling effect to make her point.

The fact that I can write is an act of inequality since someone else is unable to. The fact that I can express myself without fear is a function of inequality since someone is being repressed as I write. The fact that I can travel means that someone else cannot.

How then do we move from intentions for diversity to inclusive experiences in an increasingly exclusive world? The answer in my opinion lies in focusing on a key obstacle to diversity – the drive to INCLUDE.

The Diversity Quotient of an organization is directly correlated to its Inclusion Quotient.

Whether you are an HR professional or a line manager or a business leader, it is critical to meaningfully identify address not only the hard but also the soft forms of diversity. While the hard form of diversity appears in the now familiar demographic variables of race, gender, color, disability, sexual orientation, the soft form is a lot less visible and typically resides in factors that influence exclusion such as culture, identities, values, thoughts and biases. Ultimately, it is the actions we take or rather choose not to take that determine the diversity of the environment we experience.

Acknowledgment: This post owes a significant debt of gratitude for concepts and the identification of critical measures to Dr. Nurur Rehman. His pioneering whitepaper titled Quantifying Workplace Inclusion was published in 2015 and has an extensive survey of literature in this challenging field.

Drawing on his study, here are a few defining actions of inclusion based on my experience that positively impact the ten measures of inclusion that can significantly improve your Inclusion Quotient. Take a moment to reflect on how your organization and leaders foster global inclusion and more importantly what you can do to measure and influence this score for the business or division you support beyond increasingly narrow legal frameworks and geographies of suppression.

Defining actions of inclusion:

1. Homogeneity of hiring, pay scale and rate of promotion

• Is your hiring under-utilized or creating adverse impact to any group? Legally speaking, adverse impact exists when a personnel procedure has a substantial disproportionately negative impact on a legally protected group, such as ethnic minorities, women, and employees age 40 and over.
• All other factors being equal, is the rate of promotion and rate of pay increase for women, the same as men in your organization?

2. Equal opportunities for professional development

• Does your organization have channels to communicate directly with diverse applicants and does the award panel have sufficient diversity to support professional development such as company sponsored education, external training?
• When was the last time you asked someone in your team if they require support for professional development?

3. Leadership commitment to workplace diversity and inclusion

• Has your CEO met the leadership team of your employee resource groups?
• Is your leadership participating or empaneled on the board of a multicultural nonprofit group, especially one in which they are not a member of the targeted demographic?

4. Decision Making

• How many stakeholders and levels of approval are needed for routine vs critical decisions?
• What is the degree of autonomy you have to make decisions?

5. Access to critical information

• how long does it take for someone to gain access to critical information to perform their job such as a sharepoint or presentation or a business application?

6. Job Security

• Does the safety net of job security go beyond your company's ethics helpline?
• What forums (and how often) are available for associates to speak freely and address senior leadership without fear of retribution or identification?

7. Individual well-being

• What is your maternity leave policy? If you are in the United States do you offer paid maternity leave in locations other than California, Rhode Island and New Jersey?
• Is it possible for an associate to ask for support in accessibility such as parking or accommodations for physically friendly electronic devices.

8. Job satisfaction

• Do you conduct cultural assessment or engagement surveys and are the results shared with your associates?

9. Organizational commitment

• Can you think of examples that demonstrate your organizations commitment to match or exceed employees' contributions or efforts to foster inclusion or diversity such as educational advancement, charitable contributions to organizations of employee's choice

10. Workgroup integration

• How often do you end up attending or scheduling a meeting before waking hours or after dinner time?
• how often does your supervisor or senior leader call for a meeting at your own workstation?

The first time I encountered a dedicated parking spot for a physically challenged associate was at TIMKEN's work facility in Bangalore, India around 2007. Thanks to the foresight of our Facilities leader, who made sure that this was this was the first parking spot next to the entrance to our facility.

Thank you for reading and I welcome your comments and encourage you to share your own and your organization's best practices.

‘There is plenty of room in the world for mediocre men, but there is no room for mediocre women.’ - Madeleine Albright, first US female Secretary of State