INSIGHTS CHRIS O'REILLY
By Chris O'Reilly, CEO, AskYourTeam
It’s the greatest untapped source of increased productivity for Kiwi organisations, yet very few have managed to harness the benefits of diversity and inclusion successfully. Why aren’t we doing better?
T
he fact is we’ve been doing diversity and inclusion wrong. Despite the volume of articles, think pieces, strategies and white papers being churned out week after week, our results are poor, and our understanding of the topic is even poorer. We don’t even need to rely on our profession for lessons about diversity and inclusion. There are striking examples out there in the real world. Take the recent Cricket World Cup. The English team, famously humiliated in Wellington in 2015, enjoyed one of the greatest turnarounds in sporting history when they beat us in a final rightly called one of the most thrilling games of cricket history. The team that went from a group of underperforming individuals to the highest performing in the world put 30
HUMAN RESOURCES
SPRING 2019
it down to a single factor – diversity and inclusion. It went from being one of the most monocultural to a genuine mix of talent, with one Irishman, two South Africans, a Kiwi, a Barbadian and two English-born Muslim players. One of those Muslim players, Moeen Ali, put the team’s success down to its “diversity and ability to accept and celebrate differences”. At the postfinal press conference, Captain Eoin Morgan said the team’s differing views were a massive source of strength. They found unity in their differences and turned that into sporting gold. Of course, some businesses have managed to reap the benefits too. Qantas stands out as a company that went from posting a $2.8 billion loss to a record profit of $850 million in just four years. CEO Alan Joyce was emphatic that his company’s diverse environment and inclusive culture was responsible, claiming it had generated “better strategy, better risk management, better debates, better outcomes”. With these lessons all around us, why are we not seeing the same transformation in more Kiwi workplaces?
Let’s start with our record on demographic diversity, a familiar concept to all of us and one that generates a good amount of publicity and debate. Demographic diversity is about the makeup of our workplaces, reflecting the makeup of New Zealand as a whole. Pretty basic stuff. In March 2018, the annual Grant Thornton Women in Business report ranked New Zealand second to last (33 out of 35 countries) for female representation on the senior leadership teams of corporates around the world. This year, they didn’t even release a figure for it. This is a national shame, and it should be regarded as a national crisis. I believe that one of the primary reasons we haven’t achieved demographic diversity is because of our shallow understanding of the actual benefits of diversity to organisational performance. In short, we haven’t learned to understand the value of diversity of thinking. Diversity of thinking is the real new frontier for Kiwi organisations, and for us HR professionals, the most significant benefit we can offer is to build workplaces that value different thinking styles and find ways to leverage them for business success.
