Diversity and inclusion: How to become inclusive and diverse

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.

Diversity 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:

• 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

initiatives. This important step encourages people to act as if they own the business and align with business needs. One of our goals is to empower all our employees to act as business owners, to speak up and share their ideas.

Align initiatives with culture and values

It helps if you can make use of your business’s natural advantages in approaching inclusivity. We’re bakers, and bread has a special place in people’s hearts everywhere. It’s a staple food in their homes. The first time I walked through the bakery, the smell of freshly baked bread reminded me of home and comfort. Bread puns punctuate our conversations: “goodness baked in” and “let it rise”, “don’t overbake it”.

We bake fresh bread and pies every day, creating products that bring moments of goodness to so many people. What we produce ties directly into our core purpose: to create Everyday Moments of Goodness. These moments – EMOGs we call them – are not just moments of kindness, they’re actions that reflect our values: Trusting, Safe, Collaborative and Courageous, and they link directly to inclusivity. For example, a woman coming for her second interview couldn’t find anyone to care for her daughter, so we invited her to bring her daughter along. It cost nothing, but it was wholly aligned with our core values. It made them both feel welcome and a place where they belonged.

Make it personal and meaningful

Inclusion is personal. It’s not about categories, and we always try to remember this. Our bicultural confidence project team, supported by the task force, organised a company webinar during Māori Language Week with a guest speaker helping our people to foster a stronger bicultural understanding.

The project team members who drove this initiative agreed to share their powerful stories at this webinar. This was well out of their comfort zone, and they met the challenge by talking about their “why” – about why they have pushed this initiative and what Māori Language Week represented to them. People recognised this as a courageous act: an EMOG.

Stepping outside your comfort zone and accepting your vulnerability, is vital. Each executive member posted a video in te reo sharing our values, and two executive members even performed a duet in te reo. These are small but meaningful gestures, because they show that everyone is willing to be vulnerable, learn and grow together.

Small, continuous and every day

We share our EMOG moments at meetings, at our monthly mixes and awards presentations. We always open with the question: “Does anyone have a value or inclusion share?”.

Our approach to inclusion is on the same scale. We believe that a series of small, meaningful initiatives, driven by our people, is more effective than a single large-scale programme or solution because thinking about inclusion then becomes an everyday occurrence.

Actually, there is a single solution: your people know what’s needed. Let them guide you!

Solay Ha, People & Performance Business Partner at George Weston Foods Baking, has worked in senior human resources roles in fast-moving consumer goods, viticulture, maritime, freight and engineering industries. She has worked for local and global organisations, supporting operational and commercial portfolios across Asia, Europe and the Pacific. She is currently a key member of George Weston Foods Baking Australia and the New Zealand Inclusion and Diversity Task Force. In her role in Human Resources, Solary is passionate about implementing the task force‘s vision to ensure #everyoneisvalued #everyonebelongs and #everyhasequalopportunity, recognising the important role HR has on a company’s culture and inclusion and diversity journey.