HR IS WELL POSITIONED TO MAKE ORGANISATIONAL DIVERSITY A HABIT

by David Braue

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It is well understood that diversity in teams provides a necessary spectrum of experiences, which in turn fosters innovation across the organisation – but how can companies develop this diversity?

HR-driven recruitment practices can be a great place to start, as multinational manufacturer Kerry Group found when diversity played a core role in building a strong business case for hiring more than 200 new staff for its Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia shared-service operations.

As the organisation went to market it became clear that building diversity into its recruitment efforts would be crucial not only to finding enough staff, but to finding the right ones.

Also crucial was rapidly scaling up the recruitment effort. Over the course of a six-week recruitment drive, run in conjunction with recruitment firm Page Outsourcing, Kerry Group received over 20,000

CVs, screened more than 72,000 candidates and conducted more than 2000 interviews with the 320 people who were ultimately onboarded into the organisation.

“It was really a no-brainer for us to establish a bigger presence in Malaysia,” Clive Jardine, Kuala Lumpurbased HR director for Global Business Services with Kerry Group told a recent SSON webinar. “But we faced challenges around the need for really good skills and strong talent to support our business here.”

Asia’s broad cultural and linguistic diversity meant talent needed to be equally diverse. Support for 16 different languages was key, and employee diversity was critical to ensuring the new workforce could support the business and its customers.

Jardine said gender diversity was one key focus for the company, which, he said, was probably, predominantly female. However, building and extending a multicultural workforce was just as important to ensure the new business function had the right mix to support innovation for the long term.

“From a values perspective, we really do celebrate diversity,” Jardine explained. “And we’re really proud of the fact that we represent multiple ethnicities in our organisation that are representative of Malaysia; that was really a good aspect in terms of the recruitment process.”

Strong working relationships between the recruitment firm and internal HR organisation was crucial, with Page and Kerry Group teams using “honest, transparent and fluid” communication to work through the process in lockstep, said Page Outsourcing Hong Kong associate director Andrew Barnes – who noted that Kerry Group’s strong sense of values ensured diversity remained integral to the process.

Kerry Group “were able to supply us with a plethora of information that helped us gain a detailed understanding of them as an organisation, the way they work, their company culture, and the way they were going to be replicating that,” Barnes said, noting this had helped the two organisations refine the employee value proposition (EVP) Kerry used to attract the right mix of candidates.

In running the recruitment drive during the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing shift to remote access, for example, the EVP rapidly skewed towards “things that weren’t necessarily important to people before,” Barnes said.

Kerry’s workplace culture, personal development and work/life balance became points of differentiation as the Page team worked to sell Kerry’s culture to prospective employees – with diversity initiatives such as traditional dress and food days meaning they could “really allow people to be their authentic selves within the workplace.”

“The fact that Kerry lives and breathes this culture and ethos,” Barnes said, “helped us to identify suitable talent that aligned with the values they’re looking for.”

“We are super proud of the people that we’ve been able to attract to our organisation through this process,” Jardine said, calling the program a “remarkable success… we’ve got candidates selected on the basis of what will really work, and fit with our organisational values.”

Seizing The Opportunity For Change

Mass recruitment drives – often linked to significant new investments in technology or business capabilities – present a significant opportunity to remedy lingering inequality in the company culture.

Yet it’s important to avoid allowing pro-diversity practices to fade once the project is finished; rather, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) values should be embedded deep within the HR function – and that of strategic recruitment partners – to ensure hiring and staff retention practices seed the diversity crucial to fostering innovation.

Such policies speak directly to a company’s ability to deliver a hospitable, compelling employee experience, and many businesses admit their HR practices are still falling short in this respect.

A recent Gartner survey of more than 800 HR leaders found them facing increasing competition for talent. Thirty six percent of respondents said their sourcing strategies were “insufficient” to help them find the skills they need – and 44 percent admitted their organisations lacked “compelling career paths” to attract and retain the employees they need.

“HR leaders face a historic amount of disruption, and their timeline from planning to action keeps shrinking while the imperatives increase,” Gartner said, noting the simultaneous challenges HR leaders face in needing to juggle people and technology investments, cultivate a positive culture and employee experience, and transform HR to be “more automated and digital.”

Central to these changes is the creation of an equitable internal labour market, according to Gartner. It advises HR leaders to shape their strategies this year around boosting leadership development, organisational design and change management, employee experience, recruiting, and overhauling workforce planning that is often “disconnected from reality and… ineffective at combating the disruptive landscape.”

VALUE INNOVATION? THEN VALUE DIVERSITY

Doubling down on a company’s values and brand can provide a significant foundation for subsequent growth and innovation, says Delta Airlines senior vice president Tim Mapes. He told a recent CES 2023 session that “at the end of the day, a brand has got to be true to itself.”

“As a leader, if you see people behaving in a manner that is inconsistent with the very values that the company has stated, and that’s tolerated, then what credibility would go into the values?” he continued.

“When you make decisions, and behaviours are consistent with those values, your brand comes to be known in the hearts and minds of your employees and customers as representing those things.”

As the internal managers of human capital and culture, HR staff have considerable strength in setting the tone of that decision-making to ensure it supports the culture necessary to foster sustainable innovation.

RMIT University School of Management associate professor Dr Lena Wang told a recent AWSN International Women’s Day event that shaping culture also requires a degree of introspection to evaluate the effect unconscious bias may have on hiring practices – and to detect when unconscious bias skews hiring practices. She said recognition of unconscious bias could have flow-on effects in unexpected places.

“Every one of us has potential bias, and it’s about how to find strategies to counter that,” Wang explained. “It’s so powerful when leaders start to recognise this themselves, then do things to actively change that.”

Simply having senior executives pushing the barrow of equality is not enough to change an organisation on its own, she warned: “you may have this amazing, visionary CEO who truly gets it, but somehow when that communication falls down to your frontline managers, it goes missing – and they don’t get the point as to why we need more women on the team.”

Such attitudes can prevent many women from speaking up to express their concerns about potential blockers for innovation – an issue that proactivity by HR executives can counter. “It’s very important to create psychological safety for all employees to give feedback,” Wang said.

Even in companies that have good policies in areas such as flexible work arrangements, she said, “a lot of the time it is those day-to-day experiences that make women feel excluded… when you are creating workplaces that are not truly supportive of women employees.”

It’s a practice that should also be extended to strategic partnerships, says Kate Wendt, vice president of strategy, transformation and sustainability with Seattle-based outdoors retailer REI Co-Op. She identified three core steps the company takes when developing new partnerships.

These include doing due diligence on partners’ values and alignment, looking at what each party brings to the table, and how the company can learn by being more open.

“We tend to be highly discerning about partners,” she explained. “The biggest learning is how we can be more open and listening and learning.”