Discussing the key ‘ingredients’ for successfully promoting and achieving gender diversity, Susan McPherson, Founder & CEO of McPherson Strategies, stressed that transparent, internal and external communication about a company’s diversity goals is a crucial deliverable: “How to effectively communicate the diversity strategy often happens to be an afterthought in companies. While the senior level knows the details, these don’t get distributed to staff. And this is where many are failing. Therefore: communicate, communicate, communicate; the good and the bad. Report on the progress – or the lack of it. Get everyone to buy in, to trust, and to understand what you try to achieve and how.”
The panel members agreed that the other crucial success factor is the company culture. “It obviously starts with gender or broader diversity focused recruitment but setting up staff for success is what really matters. Mentorships are critical to help staff to be successful, and so is a culture where people can make mistakes and learn from them rather than every little failure getting overly scrutinized,” Prisca Bae, Vice President of the Asian American Foundation, explained.
The experts, however, admitted that it is one of the hardest tasks to set up a culture where staff feel they can speak up and contribute fully with their different backgrounds. To achieve a culture where everyone can thrive, the panel suggested to take the following steps:
- Establish a ‘culture of curiosity’ which could be brought to life with the help of ‘listening groups’ where colleagues can really learn about each other by sharing their background and perspectives
- Train and equip team leaders with the knowledge on how to build diverse teams
- Ensure a regular feedback loop from staff to senior management to check whether team leaders are doing what they are supposed to be doing
- If you make mistake along the way, broaden your audience to get fresh , different ideas, and
- Link specific gender and other diversity targets with financial incentives, for example staff compensation.
Discussing how companies can see whether their gender diversity strategy is working, Dee McDougal said: “Hitting the target numbers is only one facet of success. What’s more important is how staff experience the organisation. How do they get treated? Do they get the training they need? Do they get access to information they need to progress? Staff need to feel genuinely supported and not just fast-tracked to help fulfil a target. We mustn’t forget in our drive for gender and other diversity that behind every target, behind every number there is a person.”
