Why you need both diversity and inclusion, and how they differ

HR teams, especially in multinational companies, are increasingly being given a ‘diversity and inclusion’ target. In classic miscommunication based on pre-conceptions, many companies assign such targets and start working on a problem that they haven’t first defined. While diversity and inclusion are closely related, they are two different concepts that are often wrongly taken as being the same.

Consider an example. The company decides that differently-abled people need to be hired into the company to meet a D&I target. They proceed to hire one deaf person, one blind person, and one wheelchair user and declare success on meeting the D&I target. Two months later, all three quit, because they could not do their work. The blind person didn’t get talk-back software to verify the data entry he was doing. The deaf person lip-read his colleagues disparaging him in his presence because obviously he could not hear them. The wheelchair user was humiliated at being forced to crawl to her desk because there was no way to get her wheelchair up the flight of steps at the entrance, and the final straw was finding her chair damaged one day.

In many companies, this is followed by concluding that diversity is not a useful target, or in blaming the employees hired to meet the target for failing to ‘adjust’.

While diversity is usually easily understood and means that different, dissimilar, and non-uniform individuals are employed, inclusion is more subtle, and the lack of it causes the failures that confuse most companies who attempt D&I in a piecemeal fashion.

Inclusion comes from respect for humans as humans first, and their labels/descriptors afterward. Inclusive workplaces make all people feel valued and treated fairly irrespective of their tags, whether sexual orientation, religious, racial, gender, class, caste, ableism, language, place of origin, or any other such ‘tags’.

In daily life, in our family circles, we hear and see the operation of prejudices and stereotypes against communities, castes, gender, and so many more. We internalize these subconsciously. As a result, we are not an inherently inclusive society, and we carry these biases and stereotypes into the workplace. So, to make a truly inclusive workplace, either companies need to hire from the tiny set of people who are extremely low on bias, or they simply need to make their employees aware and train them to look beyond their biases.

Had the fictitious company in the example above just spent a little time on preparing their workforce to accept differences, and had they introduced the new employees to the rest with empathy, highlighting their capabilities rather than their weaknesses, along with investing in the tools and infrastructure necessary to equip the new and diverse hires, they would not have had their new policy collapse.

A diverse and inclusive workforce translates into higher productivity, an increase in creativity in terms of work approach, better problem-solving skills, and improved decision-making. It also helps in building a better reputation for the company. Yet, even companies that recognise this, hesitate, because they see it as too tough a job to get people to change their mindset.

However, Be.artsy has found that an awareness program on diversity and inclusion that brings out hidden biases yields the highest return on investment that any company can get. Responses from participants in Be.artsy’s D&I programs have usually included the term ‘eye-opener’. Participants who were ‘different’ before the program felt empowered and participants who were the ‘norm’ showed greater empathy and acceptance of the ‘different’ employees.