The Future of Work: A Place of Belonging
I was recently a speaker at the TedxNuremberg event that took place on July 24, 2021. Below is the video and script.
When you hear equity, diversity and inclusion - what do these words mean to you? Maybe they’re buzzwords that you’ve heard in the office. Maybe they’re part of an HR training that you’ve taken recently or maybe you've never heard of them at all and that's ok, too.
In fact, I didn’t know what the word diversity meant until I was almost 18 years old.
Today, these words and their concepts are deeply meaningful to me - I'm going to share with you how they've shaped me and my career. More importantly, I want to give you a deeper understanding about how they might be showing up in your workplace.
Imagine any town in America. There's a main street where trees line the block. Everyone knows everyone's name and there was always a debate on where to get the best slice of pizza! This was the type of place I grew up.
When I was starting to apply for colleges and universities, I noticed that I was being recruited to join diversity programs. I asked myself, diversity - what’s that? I truly had never heard the word in the context of people - just when it came to concepts in biology class and ecosystems.
It was in those moments that I realized that I didn't just grow up in any town, I grew up in a town that was a microcosm of diversity. Black, White, Latinx, immigrant American - we all went to school together. No one ever felt like an outsider.
There was something else very special happening in my town - those bright yellow school buses that you see on TV - those buses, in my town, were part of a system that was intentionally moving kids around the district so that there was an equal amount of diversity within each school.
When I finally decided on my university - it was then that I was confronted with what it meant to have a lack of diversity. Imagine walking into a room with 600 students and just a few others looked like you. 1 in 6 - that was my reality, there were only 6 people in that classroom who were not white.
I felt like I was beamed to another planet! I had never experienced anything like that before. Yet, this was the first of many “firsts” in college: First time someone told me that they could “Never date a Black girl.” First time I was told I had “only gotten into school to boost diversity targets” not because of any other reason. And it was the first time in my entire life where someone yelled the N-word at me while I was simply walking down the street.
Flash forward to my career. I began to experience a lot of “only’s”: The only Black person in the room, the only Black woman in my department, the only Black person in my entire company for a number of years. And was often the only person willing to speak out about workplace racism and discrimination - which often led to very serious consequences for me professionally.
In the workplace, lack of diversity shows up in different ways, too - the way we speak to each other, how we make space for each other's ideas, and the ways in which we create products and services for our customers with heart.
And despite research that shows, time and time again, that more diversity creates better business outcomes - organizations still struggle to prioritize ED&I into the core DNA of how we do business.
So let’s go deeper and define what these words really mean:
Let’s start with Diversity. Diversity simply means the presence of difference. It’s really that simple - race, gender, disability, religion, etc. but in the simplest terms it acknowledges difference.
Next, Inclusion. Inclusion means that everyone has the opportunity to feel they belong and can be their authentic selves. In fact, inclusion acknowledges that your uniqueness is just as important to your job as your skillset. And when the two of those are working together you can truly be your best creative self.
On to Equity. Equity is not the same as equality. Equality assumes that if we are all given the same resources, we will achieve the same goals. However, equity recognizes that not all of us are beginning at the same starting line. What you might need to be successful, might be very different than what I need to be successful and by understanding those differences we can both get the appropriate resources to truly achieve the same goals.
When we can focus on all three: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, we can begin to center our workplaces around a sense of belonging. If there is an imbalance of one or more, it can create very real serious consequences for our people and our businesses. Let me share a few examples:
Situation #1: Inclusion and Equity, not enough diversity I call this #SOMANYWHITEGUYS:
Imagine the boardroom full of mostly White men. It's not that hard to imagine because it is all too common the case here in Germany and around the world. Often, with little to no diversity, innovation is too slow. Innovation is either seen as too risky or just misunderstood. In the meantime, they continue to lose their competitive edge and that $1B idea either left and went to your competitor or became your competition.
Many of you may have heard of Whitney Wolfe-Herd - she was one of the original co-founders of a popular dating app Tinder. When her ideas about improving women's experiences online were ignored, she left and started her own app, Bumble. Bumble just recently IPO’d at a whopping $14B valuation just this year.
Examples like these go across industries from fashion, media, publishing, to cosmetics and beauty and more.
Next, situation #2: Inclusion and diversity, not enough equity - #THEPOWERSTRUGGLE:
Picture the bold company - that prides itself on an inclusive culture and recruits talent from different backgrounds - sounds like a dream! In this scenario, all too often those with diverse backgrounds are recruited into low-level or entry level positions.
With little or no equity in leadership roles, the career journey for someone like me can feel like climbing a mountain with no map and no compass. There's a gutted feeling inside of you that no matter how hard you work and no matter how hard you try, the only way to move up is to move out.
The cost of turnover in Germany is real. It can lead to burnout, absenteeism, low recommendation - where your employees are telling their friends "definitely don't apply here, this place is crazy!" And it can also lead to turnover. According to a Gallup study released earlier this year, estimated that in Germany alone, the cost of turnover cost businesses over between 96-114 billion euros every single year.
My last example, situation #3: Equity and diversity, not enough inclusion #IHEARDYOUBUT…:
Unlike the other two, inclusion is hard to measure because it's a feeling. Picture you're hired into a leadership role, everything that you've done in your career has brought you to this moment. Your bright ideas and bold solutions have brought you on this journey! However, when you get inside of your new organization you start to hear things like - “Can I play devil's advocate for a minute” or "Things like this, in a company like ours, takes time. Change here is slow." It’s dismissive and its gaslighting.
Imagine that now your ideas are only taken seriously when you begin to behave just like everyone else. Think about having to code switch every day - to be a different version of yourself at work than you are at home. It takes a toll on mental health and is the easy recipe for resentment and burnout to quickly disrupt your business.
If you want to learn more about what code switching feels like you can watch a number of Ted speakers who have come before me.
Now, if we business leaders can create a working culture where all three of these are constantly being addressed, we can create a workplace centered around belonging. Where each individual, despite their background is given the opportunity to live and work to their full potential.
When we work inside organizations where we hold a high sense of belonging, it means we're more engaged employees. We are energized and ultimately perform with better creativity, and productivity, which improves our business outcomes.
Think about where you work - whether you are a project lead or an executive - I strongly urge you consider these three 3 things to improve your workplace sense of belonging:
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes - after all, we are all humans trying to make the right decisions. It’s not about getting everything right, it's about making small improvements everyday which in time will transform your work culture.
Question your surroundings. In many places in Europe, it’s illegal to ask about different diversity dimensions and companies feel stuck. Even if you can’t measure diversity we can assume that if someone like me, the "only" in the room - then we already have enough data to know we can improve.
Finally, shake up the systems of reward and recognition - it is no longer enough to just reward leaders for hitting their sales targets. We must also reward leaders and employees who are challenging our systems, changing mindsets, and changing behaviors that are leading us to the culture we want to achieve.
This work isn’t easy, and I'm not going to pretend it is. There's no clear waterfall project model to get this done.
As the world changes, cultures change - so our work is never over.
When I was 18 I learned what ED&I meant the hard way. Being informed means, we as business leaders, must do whatever it takes to make even that 1 “only” employee feel they, too, truly belong. It’s not only the right thing to do for our people, it's critical for our businesses to survive.
The choice is yours.
Thank you.
