#24 Building and measuring inclusion in today's workplace with Amina Folarin

“ You need to put inclusion at the heart of your business strategy to drive business transformation” 

In this weeks episode of let’s talk Amina and I discuss the role of inclusion in today’s workplace. From an HR, business and leadership perspective, people must be at the heart of any organisation’s diversity and inclusion strategy in order to truly understand what an inclusive culture looks like. We discuss 2 questions : how to build inclusion into your systems, your business & your people strategy, and how to ‘operationalise’ and measure inclusion so that it can become part of the company’s DNA. Organisations should be striving to be people-centric and engender allyship, but what does this mean for executives, leaders and employees in terms of skills and behaviours and how they can contribute to deliberately designing their system for inclusion ?

Amina shares her wealth of experience as a global Hr professional, as a leader and as an employee, and her learnings and recommendations from driving inclusion through HR and business operations.

The main insights you’ll get from this episode are : 

• leaders must be absolutely committed to developing a more inclusive workplace because it is not easy - they must ask themselves difficult questions and answer honestly; they must educate themselves, listen to their people, develop high levels of understanding and empathy and foster constantly evolving two-way communication
• organisations should strive to be people-centric and engender allyship: this is crucial to creating a sense of belonging and to understanding issues surrounding both exclusion and inclusion because nobody should feel excluded in the quest for inclusivity
• COVID has highlighted inequalities, and also the need for human beings to belong, be heard and be listened to so that we understand everyone’s different situation and challenges: how can the organisation be made more equitable? what barriers must be removed? how can we maintain connections and effective communication?
• ambassador and changemaker networks that meet regularly with senior leadership are an example of how to provide transparency across the organisation and offer all employees the opportunity to get involved in shaping future policy and feeding back invaluable information to leaders
• data segmentation, trends and points all provide tangible resources to act upon and measure inclusion and diversity, but empowering and engaging employees, asking for their input and ultimately understanding their position is the most important factor for success