DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION SOLARY HA
How to become inclusive and diverse People and Performance Business Partner Solary Ha, and her team from George Weston Foods Baking, had the objective of making the workplace more inclusive. Here she shares what’s been learnt along the way.
D
iversity and inclusion are two parts of a whole: diversity without inclusion is unsustainable; inclusion without diversity is meaningless. So first, some baselines. When we surveyed staff of George Weston Foods Baking in New Zealand, we found that 22.4 per cent identify as Māori or Pacific Islander, and 58 per cent identify as culturally and linguistically diverse. Diversity isn’t the issue: we’re already very diverse. Now we need to be as inclusive as we are diverse. We always make sure everyone feels welcome, but it’s harder to make everyone feel confident, so our challenge is to find ways to make it easier for everyone to be able to participate in important and meaningful conversations. To do that, we need to be guided by our people, to move the company along the path to greater inclusion and diversity. While we still have a way to go, because it is an ever-evolving journey, we can summarise what we’ve learnt to date: 30
HUMAN RESOURCES
AUTUMN 2022
• acknowledge workplace and cultural realities • be guided by your people • align initiatives with culture and values • make it personal and meaningful • make inclusion continuous and every day.
We focused on recognising people with specific needs and making them always feel welcome, always listened to, so they can be their best at work and feel they also have a voice at the table.
Acknowledge the realities
Effective action starts from a realistic assessment of your position. Our first step was to acknowledge the reality of our workforce and the many cultures within it, then find ways of making those individual cultures and experiences relevant within our workplace culture. Our objective was to make our workplace more inclusive, to make everyone feel that they belonged. To achieve this, we focused on recognising people with specific needs and making them always feel welcome, always listened to, so they can be their best at work and feel they also have a voice at the table.
Be guided by your people
We think it’s essential our inclusion and diversity plan is informed by a range of voices and perspectives and that we are guided by our people. No one understands what inclusion means better than someone who has been excluded and has then been welcomed as a participant. We started with small, separate initiatives across our whole organisation driven by People & Performance. An eight-person inclusion and diversity task force was formed, with representatives from across the company, supported by, but independent of, People & Performance. To ensure broad participation, the task force asked people across the business to be inclusion champions, and, to date, 25 people have accepted this role in New Zealand. The task force is chaired by Mark Bosomworth, our New Zealand General Manager, who streamlines initiatives and champions their importance. As part of its inclusion and diversity strategy, the task force identified four pillars to guide its thinking: • • • •
shifting mindsets tools and resources policy, process and environment target specific needs.
The task force now takes responsibility for identifying and driving inclusion and diversity
