What Are You Doing For Diversity?

MIDWEEK REFLECTION

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Pretty much every day I consider how lucky I am to be in a position that enables me to engage with super inspirational leaders both inside and outside of Nokia.

These discussions are often focused around the achievements of these leaders , their aspirations and what they are doing to make a difference.?

Recently, however, these leaders are taking the opportunity to ask me “what are you doing for diversity?” “What is Nokia doing to drive impactful change”?

I love these questions , questions like these get me out of bed in the morning, ready to make a difference. Today, I would love to share with you just a small part of what we are doing for diversity!

This year Nokia implemented diverse interview panels to increase diversity in the company and maximize the impact of hiring decisions.

Nokia is committed to diversity and inclusion. Not just Nokia but Nokians. Every person I interact with has a commitment to diversity and inclusion and that commitment forms our culture .

We wanted to accentuate this in the way we hire. It is through the interview process that we?really?get to know a candidate - and determine whether they want to join us on our journey to create technology that helps us act together.?

Since spring 2023, we have implemented diverse interview panels as a new practice. Why? Ultimately, we want to diversify our pool of leaders and managers. Also, we want people to truly experience the diversity which is so core to Nokia. We want to go beyond the promises on our website and give our candidates a glimpse of what it’s really like to work in our global, diverse organization and give them exposure to people from different business groups.

At the same time diverse interview panels have encouraged us – the leadership search team and the hiring managers – to think more broadly and inclusively about who we are bringing onboard into the company.

The diverse interview panels have helped our hiring managers to see past their unconscious biases and focus on finding consciously inclusive leaders.

The results are promising. We compared the feedback results from the leader interviews done without diverse interview panels with that received from those who were interviewed by a panel. The scores given by the candidates who were interviewed by the panel are way more positive on all aspects.?

The biggest difference in experience is particularly visible when asked if they would be motivated to join Nokia in the future. Those interviewed by the diverse panel are almost twice as likely to apply also in the future.

Other benefits? Setting up the process has provided me, personally an opportunity to discuss diversity and inclusion topics with the leaders I support and bring additional robustness and structure into the interview and decision-making process.

To have the opportunity to impact DE&I through the hiring process is on its own a great step towards impactful change. But to also see that these interviews are positively impacting the experience of our candidates , well that is a HUGE bonus and something that certainly makes me be very proud to be a Nokian!

One of our candidates commented in the interview feedback survey ;

“There was diversity in the panel, the interviewers were all extremely professional asking only role relevant questions which were also gender neutral”

Receiving such feedback makes me smile. I can be proud that we are doing something very right at Nokia and even prouder of my colleagues , my leaders, my stakeholders, my candidates, my Nokia family that are the very enablers of change. Thank you Anneli Karlstedt (she/her) Burcu D?nmez (she/her) Bharti Mittal Ashish Thapliyal Shashank Gupta David Mills Lokesh Kariappa Paul Bowles Paul Heitlinger Nancy Yueh

So, my LinkedIn Network , over to you ! I would love to hear your thoughts , your experience , your journey! What are you doing for diversity ??

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