The tapestry of a diverse workforce

On the phone the Sales Head sounded distraught. ‘Listen, we need to take a call on Vandana. Today she made a big scene with one of our old customers when she had gone to negotiate a new contract. A small issue of discount went into a big fight. Fortunately, the Team leader acted cool and controlled the damage. ’ The HR Manager assured him that he will look into the issue.

Vandana Nair came through their trusted Search firm about a year back with two years of post MBA experience and a good profile. She was initially well received, and worked well on her assignments. But problems surfaced since last two months – repeated incidents of uncontrolled emotional outbursts, frenzied behaviour, especially if there were discussions about a particular political party and its leader, who she worshipped.

The company is committed to a mission of diversity and inclusion (D&I), and is quite tolerant about little lapses in orderly behaviour on behalf of their employees. After all, with long hours and demanding customers nerves can get frayed sometimes. But now he needs to talk to her gently and counsel her on observing some ground rules, especially in dealing with outsiders.

The HR Manager talked to some of her colleagues, who complained about her behaviour. When he spoke to Vandana, she expressed her disgust with ‘so much negativity in the team’ .She apologized for her behaviour, and broke down. She showed signs of extreme stress, and he suggested a session with the therapist. Surprisingly she agreed. Dr. Joshi, the part time employee counsellor later informed him that Vandana was showing signs of depression and would need to see a psychiatrist. The news creased the brow of the HR Manager. Vandana Nair’s days in this office were clearly numbered in an organization where diversity only meant recruited more women employees.

According to a 2017 Global Human Capital Trends Survey by Deloitte rover two-thirds (69 percent) of executives rate diversity and inclusion an important issue (up from 59 percent in 2014). Companies embrace diversity for myriad purposes: it fosters innovation, which guarantees business success; a diverse workforce forms a rich tapestry of perspectives, experiences, culture, gender and age; 15% of diverse firms are more likely to outperform in a gender-diverse company and 35% are more likely to outperform in an ethnically diverse company; it yields better returns financially; the companies investing in diversity are higher than their national industrial medians. This is the good news on diversity.

The bad news is that despite recent efforts, diversity remains a much-discussed topic — and not because companies think it is right, but rather because they want to tick all the boxes. Google’s data-driven diversity program cost $265 million to implement but still failed to significantly change the composition of its workforce.

So what works on diversity? The answer lies in two domains. One, in the scope of diversity. Most organizations, leading diversity initiatives, largely equate and report diversity with the percentage of women in their work force. In reality, workforce diversity is far more than just gender. It’s about embracing those who are different in any way. In many ways, the human mind is still a mystery. What is clear, however, is that dismissing or under-utilizing a full one-fifth of the workforce because of potential employee mental health issues is like throwing away a vast, untapped source of human potential.

The second area to explore is the extent of ‘inclusion’. While diversity has been compared to being ‘invited to a party’, inclusion has been described as ‘the invitation to have cake at that party’. Inclusion has often been described as the only scalable way to build diversity within an organization. Without thoughtful and deliberate discussion and action to cultivate an inclusive environment, all the energy and resources spent on acquiring a diverse workforce are for naught. The employees, so painstakingly recruited, will be soon gone.

The lever for a truly diverse workforce would appear to lie in the mental models of the people: both executive leaders as well the community inside the organization. Are there portents of such a change of heart? A reputed Deloitte study described millennial perspectives on diversity and inclusion, in contrast to the perspectives of earlier generations (termed “non-millennial”). The results were interesting, with millennial and non-millennial having different definitions of both diversity and inclusion, and divergent perspectives on how these types of programs should be implemented. One striking difference stood out : non-millennial want to achieve results by hitting numbers and achieving measurable goals, while millennial want to achieve results by gaining more ideas, insights, and perspectives, by facilitating a sense of belonging and creating a ‘culture of connection ‘. That makes them more focused on qualitative outcomes, and cultural changes, rather than trying to hit some arbitrary numerical goal. They tend to see the importance of “diversity” as extending beyond the lines drawn by things like sex, ethnicity, and religion. They recognize that different age groups and people from different socioeconomic backgrounds have different experiences and different perspectives to share. In the minds of the millennial perhaps the weaving will begin for the tapestry of a vibrant workforce of the future.