A talent leader with over 20 years of corporate experience in Leadership, Talent and Organization Development across the Asian region (Singapore/India/Hong Kong/Shanghai, among others), Shailaja Sharma is currently Regional Head - Talent, Leadership, OD and Diversity: Asia and Digital at Aviva. With expertise in succession pipelining and talent assessment, management and development, and integrating the diversity agenda, Shailaja has worked extensively on creating the diversity and inclusion agenda and facilitating the delivery of key diversity metrics at Aviva.

In an exclusive conversation with People Matters, she shares her knowledge and advice for global leaders who are at the forefront of D&I initiatives and strive to strategize, execute and build a fabric of inclusivity in the organizational culture.

Here are the excerpts of the interview.

In your corporate experience of over 20 years, what was the moment that triggered your journey towards D&I?

While I have been a strategic Talent partner to organizations in the region, whether within a company or as a talent/ leadership consultant for the past 20 years, my formal journey into the landscape of organization D&I really began during the course of the CCC (Coaching and Consulting for Change) Masters program that I did with INSEAD in 2018. This coincided with the addition of the Diversity and Inclusion agenda to my leadership, talent, OD portfolio for a leading financial services organization. Accessing the latest in diversity thinking, and best practices with the opportunity to integrate it with the Talent and leadership portfolio within an organization enabled the best of both worlds.

How do you see the current diversity and inclusion landscape in APAC?

With the social momentum and awareness of movements like MeToo and the rise of the millennials that has happened in the landscape of work; I think the ‘Time is Now’ to really propel the D&I agenda forward in organizations.

Employees are increasingly asking their organizations about D&I efforts, while companies are becoming increasingly mindful about their public reputation.

Overall there is a sense of hope and future focus, many organizations, aided by an ecosystem of NGOs, special interest groups, minority representative organizations and the government have taken up the cause earnestly, in an increasingly aware and result seeking socio-economic and political climate.

Creating awareness around diversity and inclusion helps build an inclusive culture at the workplace. Do you think organizations are ready to factor in an inclusive mindset as a deal-breaker at the time of hiring?

While there has been significant progress, especially in the past few years towards building and creating an inclusive mindset, and some companies have adopted this as a value or a leadership behavior, few of us are at the stage where this is a deal breaker at the time of hiring.

A practical challenge is that an inclusive mindset is difficult to measure effectively, therefore most selection processes are geared towards assessing technical and behavioral domains. While inclusive mindset is not being explicitly assessed or sought after, generally speaking most hiring and recruitment tasks look for leadership behaviors that are derailers. A key watch out for us is the way a leader or manager treats his people, based on his/ her 360 feedback, whether in-company or while reference checking for candidates.

How can HR leaders work towards gaining leadership buy-in and ownership towards driving diversity and inclusion initiatives?

Research tells us culture is significantly impacted by leadership and in order to build an inclusive culture, we need to understand what’s the role the business leaders are playing. The role of the HR leaders then becomes really to equip leaders: coach, facilitate, guide leaders and when needed, hold them accountable. Sometimes D&I is seen as an HR activity, which limits its impact and effectiveness with the organization, as other agendas seen as more critical to business success take priority. Therefore, we as HR leaders need to work at an organizational level to make it an integral part of the way we do business. This may take the form of articulating a clear business case, citing market or industry studies, for example,

As the 2018 research from McKinsey shows, greater diversity in the workforce results in greater profitability and value creation. The same holds true at the executive level, as McKinsey found a statistically significant correlation between diverse leadership and better financial performance.

Another big, yet often missed area of opportunity is for HR leaders to strengthen the practice of consequences for non-inclusive behavior – including elements like usage of confidential reporting mechanism, incorporating data into decision making like rewards and promotions. The role of motivators is not to be underestimated; how many of our organizations give awards / recognize people for inclusive behavior?

What are the different areas of diversity that organizations need to work toward?

A quick question at the beginning of a D&I awareness building session is - if there are 6 people in a team, with the following characteristics – half are male and half are female, one is differently abled, 2 are Asian, 2 are mixed race and 2 are Caucasian, but all come from the same socio-economic background, studied at the same institution and came from the same previous company - How diverse is this team? Most people will say “very diverse”.

However, true diversity is 'Cognitive Diversity'.

Research shows us that better decisions and ultimately more successful businesses are created by organizations that have a set of people who are able to provide diverse perspectives.

Conversely, people who tend to think in a similar way and come to similar conclusions will make a less effective set of decisions. This ‘group think’ in fact is seen as one of the major contributory reasons for poor sets of decisions in financial institutions which ultimately led to the financial crisis. Simply put, there wasn’t enough “diversity of thinking in the room”.

While definitions of diversity can be wide ranging and cover multiple areas, most organizations work with the primary domains of age, ethnicity, gender, physical / metal abilities and sexual orientation. Generally speaking, I find that areas of physical/ mental abilities, sexual orientation and age diversity are relatively less focused upon. This may of course vary by company, industry or geography.

What is your advice for leaders to build scalable D&I initiatives? What are the key pillars of building a cultural fabric that fosters inclusivity?

There are 3 key pillars to build a scalable, sustainable and inclusive culture.

• At the Leadership level, emphasis on building leaders who are Empathetic and ‘Kind’. While this may sound strange at first glance, emerging research from SAID business schools’ Lalit Johri and others, shows that kindness is the building block of inclusive behavior. This is because kindness leads to greater trust, engagement and commitment. ‘This is especially true in today’s organizational environments where people skills - listening, communicating, teamwork, engagement and building commitment are so vital’. Leaders need to actively feel within themselves the experience of being excluded and then translate that into empathy for their colleagues and teams. The more empathetic a leader is, the more inclusive he or she is likely to be.
• At a Systems level, we need to examine organization polices and processes with an inclusion lens, for example - if flexitime is applicable only to employees with children, then is it an inclusive policy? Check if our processes unintentionally exclude some minority groups, for example - if our job adverts are only visual, how do the visually impaired candidates get access to them? Have we set up hiring or promotion criteria biased towards some groups, for example - “role requires a dynamic, energetic young man who can fully commit to the workload and time schedule” - which simply means women, non-able bodied and old men need not apply, and this perpetuates nega- tive stereotypes .
• At an Employee level, how are we creating a sense of belonging and the freedom to be authentic at work? Do our Employee Resource Groups feel empowered to take action? A top down approach won’t work; we can’t simply enforce inclusion just because we believe it’s the right thing to do. And it will serve to drive compliance not genuine involvement in the agenda.

While there is a lot of focus on diversity, sometimes because numbers and metrics are more quantifiable and progress is easier to measure, the bed rock of a truly diverse workforce is an inclusive culture. This is of course harder to measure, takes longer to change and tends to be less liked because of it's more amorphous nature. This may lead to focus on shorter term gains, like hitting diversity targets without truly including the marginalized. Overtime there may not be significant changes in proportions and the organization climate may get less inclusive due to the failure of diversity initiatives.

What kind of metrics can be applied to measure the effectiveness of D&I initiatives?

There are broadly 5 kinds of metrics

• Representation Metrics (e.g. % of differently abled colleagues of total workforce)
• Recruitment Metrics (% of colleagues hired over the age of 55, % of hires with career gap)
• Training Metrics (% of managers who attended D&I awareness and training workshops)
• Workplace Climate Metrics (scores on engagement survey questions on D&I)
• Transition metrics (% of women who moved from junior to middle to senior management within the company)
• It is important to supplement quantitative metrics with qualitative data, collected from interviews, focus groups, immersion studies etc to understand comprehensively where the challenges are and possible solutions to them.

There are two great resources available to us now, in a way in which it wasn’t possible in the past - data analytics and digitization. Data analytics allows us to deep dive and truly understand in real time where the issues are. This is a shift away from the post-mortem world of annual surveys where the issues lay in the past and solutions could only be applied long after the problem had occurred.

A great example is a software which can analyze meeting invitees and attendance and flag potential exclusions that are occurring.

Digitization and automation can help minimize bias to an extent, although these come with their own set of challenges since the programming is still being done by a human hand. However, these are steps in the right direction since they can reduce human involvement in processes.

The bias against minorities often stems from years of a fixed social construct, mindset and accepted societal norms, and the fight to provide them equal access and opportunities is wide-spread across geographies, each at varying levels of acceptance, understanding and progress. How can organizations manage employees having an opinion contrary to the voices supporting diversity?

In my experience, there are two elemental ways to do this, which also become the root of changing our own belief system and well established norms.

• Create a climate of “psychological safety” (Amy Edmondson). Psychological safety is that belief that one will not be rejected or humiliated in a particular setting or role. In such an environment, people feel that if they make a genuine mistake, others will not punish them. It is a confidence that they will not be judged, ignored or invalidated if they give a suggestion, feedback or ask for help. This lies at the core of what we are trying to achieve through an inclusive climate - if we can make people feel that they belong, they are cared for and listened to, we would have gone a long way towards reducing systemic and pervasive bias.
• Propagate and champion an Employer brand that is inclusive - use words like authenticity, belonging, freedom to be who you are; and then follow it up with actions that are congruent – e.g. dress code policies, acceptable workplace behaviors and code of conduct aligned to inclusion. A silly, yet insightful example I often use to illustrate this is - why is it acceptable for women to wear sleeveless clothes and not men?

Conversation, understanding, advocacy, discussion, acceptance, policy changes, and finally implementation, the journey to translate diversity conversations into a living, breathing and thriving inclusive culture comes with its roadblocks. What according to you can accelerate this transition?

A couple of things.

Firstly, to bring “Joy back to the Conversation”. Celebrate what has already been achieved, to enjoy what we have and what we are already good at. Too often we forget to celebrate progress, choosing to focus on ‘what has not been done’.

Secondly, to engage and widen the conversation, with people who believe in the cause. We already know that gender balance is not corrected by only having women in the actioning sessions, the LGBTQ agenda can be led by a non-LGBTQ person. Create a system by which people who are passionate about a cause get to contribute to it.

Thirdly, create groups and communities based on common interests - for example a Pokemon or Karaoke club that has people of all age groups, genders, nationalities, hierarchies, functions etc. goes a long way to create an inclusive climate since people are bonded through a shared hobby.

Lastly, and most importantly to continue the struggle, no matter how little or how slow the progress, do not give up, persevere and carry on. It is the journey of a million miles, and by walking each step, we get closer to the destination.