Diversity in Leadership I TWB_
19 Dec

Diversity in Leadership starts with Inclusion at all levels

By TWB_ In HR Communication, Internal Communications, Leadership /   No Comments

Companies across India are looking at how to have Diversity at the Leadership level – and mostly they refer to lack of women in management. But diversity is not only about female and male, gay or straight, Hindu, Muslim, or Christian, young or old. It is about the diversity of individuals, ideators and executors, great communicators and less so, introverts and extroverts, controlling type and people type as well.

Having Diversity does not ensure inclusion. Diversity and Inclusion are nearly not the same things. Diversity by itself does not make people feel they belong — inclusion does. Diversity by itself does not accommodate differences of opinions — inclusion does. Diversity helps build inclusion by bringing in diverse viewpoints and creating an atmosphere in which people feel valued and have the same opportunities as others. Being an inclusive organization — where people focus on building common ground incorporating a range of views — rather than focus on differences can be a very powerful growth strategy.

Diversity is not a set of affirmative actions imposed on the organization — it is an output of the culture of the organization. Without adequate diversity being a lone female employee in a consistently all-male leadership team or being part of a minority where the leadership team converses in a regional language is common across the Indian tech industry. For an individual caught in that situation, it is difficult to feel motivated. 

This McKinsey study shows a significant relationship between a diverse leadership team and better financial performance. The top quartile for gender diversity are 15% more likely to outperform the industry average compared to companies in the bottom quartile. For ethnic diversity, that number jumps to 35%.

If the data proving that diverse organizations are more productive is not enough the cautionary tales from movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp should provide the impetus for tech companies to address diversity in their organizations.

What does diversity do?

Diversity at the leadership level is a consequence of hiring people who bring new perspectives to management meetings. Diversity is good because,

  • It gives you a larger pool of ideas: Diverse leadership teams have a larger pool of experience and points of view to draw from, which can help with finding solutions to problems and generating new ideas.
  • It increases staff retention and motivation: Seeing people ‘like them’ in positions of power is very inspiring for employees to stay longer in the organization and strive for promotions themselves
  • It gives you a larger talent pool to choose from: Diverse organizations find it easier to attract great and have a larger talent pool to choose from.
  • Makes for better business linkages: People from different groups and backgrounds often bring unique connections with them, which can lead to more networking opportunities for your company.
  • Makes for better Communication: Diverse companies are less likely to create tone-deaf and sometimes offensive communication than if they had a more varied group of decision-makers.

Lack of diversity stems from bias

People are hired on the premise that they can perform on the job and technical evaluations are pretty accurate. However, most organizational problems stem from a different place — that people don’t get along with other people. Biases in hiring and working together are the greatest bottlenecks. Families, friends, peers, education, religion, ambition etc influences how we see the world, and ourselves. These biases also shape our perceptions of what people are capable of.

A lecture on diversity will not erase these biases. Diversity is deeply related to culture and culture is difficult to change. If it must then it must first change at the top.  Developing diversity involves a cultural change and requires workshops, identifying and creating role models but most of all it involves a commitment by the organization’s leadership.

Building Diversity

The first step towards building diversity is actively seeking diverse people and seeking information from this diverse group. People from diverse backgrounds need to be seen as key variables in the process of problem-solving and decision making. Building diversity across an organization can only happen if there is an atmosphere where they can express their views without fear of repercussion. They can approach colleagues and manager for help and will not be viewed as weak if they do.


The Diversity Checklist

  • Leadership commitment: The first step is having leaders within the organization become visibly involved in programs affecting organizational culture change and articulating policies that govern diversity. To do so, you must display leadership that eradicates oppression of all forms. 
  • Having a Diversity and Inclusion strategy is not enough: Having a strategy has no meaning if it is not reflected in who the company hires and promotes. It only when the CEO downwards the organization realizes that to be the best they need to embrace diversity there is has a higher probability of being really inclusive, including right at the top.
  • Hiring from a range of backgrounds: Hire people who can bring new perspectives to your management meetings and relate personally with a wide range of your employees. But making culture more inclusive the first stop is the leadership team. Employees will always notice who you promote into positions of power.
  • ‘Diversity quotas’ are a double-edged sword: When you set ‘diversity quotas’ for your organizational and leadership teams, ensure that you are not dismissing good people for the sake of diversity. You don’t need a checklist of genders, ethnicity, religions, abilities and sexual orientations to promote talent you need caliber.
  • Building high-performance teams: Moving your workforce from larger organizations to teams that use the full potential of every individual is a great idea. Teams focused on objectives are forced to accept others for what they are.

Conclusion

Diversity is not just diversity in race, religion, sex, age but it is what makes an organization succeed — and typically that requires men & women, introverts & extroverts, controllers & thinkers, dreamers & doers, organizers & team members to reach the organizational goals.  

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_ CEO

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker & Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a BTech-MBA & CEO of the world leader in communications for technology businesses with a worldwide Fortune 500 customer base. Rakesh is a speaker on Leadership, Strategic Marketing, Strategic Communications, creating world-class bootstrapped Startups & resurgence in business. He lives with 800 rescued dogs, has no work-life balance and will not have it any other way! Rakesh has been featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies etc.

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HR Employee Communication I TWB_
18 Dec

How to Super-Charge your HR Communication: Inspiring Employees to Excel

By TWB_ In Corporate Training, HR Communication, Internal Communications /   No Comments
If you are reading this you perhaps handle the Human Resources(HR) function in your company and know the strategic role it plays in the workplace culture and employee performance. You are the first touch points for employee’s issues and communication requirements. In this environment, HR communication is far too important to leave to chance. Not doing it right causes employee engagement to drop, productivity to fall and business performance to suffer.

“Companies with highly effective change management & communication are 3.5x more likely to significantly outperform their industry peers. At the same time, only 40% of employees globally are highly engaged with their job – and the rate is declining”

First on ask yourself this question – do you operate across the communication spectrum in a planned way or do you communicate reactively what the management requires?

  1. Increasing Engagement: Communication focuses on connect staff and improve their job satisfaction, productivity, and organizational success.
  2. Employee Benefits: Communication focuses on increasing awareness of healthcare programs, compensation packages and more.
  3. Internal Policy: Communication focuses on new policies and reminders on existing ones.
  4. Health and Safety: Communication focuses on informing employees about health and safety issues and ensuring compliance.
  5. Communicating Change: Communication focuses on changes within the organization and organizations business environment.
  6. Workplace Wellness: Communication focuses on improving employee health, reducing absenteeism, and driving business performance.

Typically items 1 through 4 are overserved and 5 & 6 are underserved. Overall this communication is critical but not always exciting for employees so how do you make this communication stick? First on – use your marketing/ internal/ corporate communication teams’ playbook — better still rope them in!

Designing the communication

  1. Keep it fresh: Your employees don’t want to read the same thing. Reframe the communication, highlight a different aspect if resharing. Reduce ‘message wear-out’.
  2. Measure effectiveness: How many people opened the communication, how many acted on any follow-up action – always have some follow up action 🙂
  3. Use Data: What does the data say about employees’ behaviors and preferences. Capture, analyze, use. What do they need more of? What do they want less of?
  4. Focus on User Experience: What is the response you want to invoke? Marketers design for user experience by default and you should too.
  5. Mass Personalisation: How do you make the employee feel you are talking to him/her specifically? Is your salutation personalized? Do you communicate using their demographic – aspirational – lifestyle language (like marketers do)? Where do you reach them?
  6. Bring a sense of purpose: What makes your employees tick, what are their personal aspirations and how do you connect that to the workplace? What is the emotional connection to this and the emotional investment you see?
  7. Go Mobile: In the world where that is the preferred screen – how do you talk?

HR not just helps employees get aligned to corporate goals but increasingly they influence employees’ personal finance, their health, and their future. Creating a great employee experience starts with getting the right person getting the right message at the right time.

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_ CEO

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker & Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a BTech-MBA & CEO of the world leader in communications for technology businesses with a worldwide Fortune 500 customer base. Rakesh is a speaker on Leadership, Strategic Marketing, Strategic Communications, creating world-class bootstrapped Startups & resurgence in business. He lives with 800 rescued dogs, has no work-life balance and will not have it any other way! Rakesh has been featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies etc.

Are you looking to create or improve your HR Communications?

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Internal Communication with TWB_ I www.twb.in
12 Dec

Internal Communications & HR are strategic partners

By TWB_ In Internal Communications /   No Comments

Organizational goals are achieved faster and more effectively when HR and Internal Communications partner to achieve higher employee engagement and employee happiness.

Have you faced a situation where critical changes in a company, be it senior management changes or M&A news comes to your employees via social or news media rather than from internal corporate sources — such as Human Resources (HR) or a corporate announcement? When it happens you surely know the adverse impact on employee trust & commitment. There is a tremendous body of research that points to the relationship between organizational success and employee involvement and open and effective communication with employees.

While there is a cost of failed communication and an incentive to manage communications the question is who should do the messaging? Should it rest with HR which is most concerned with employee needs, or should it rest with Internal Communications who are professional communicators? Both HR and Internal Communications are about influencing & persuading employees but they go about it differently —  it’s HR’s job to formulate policies and the communication professional to brand the message.

The need to partner

The role of HR communication is centered on what a business needs to achieve and why an employee would be motivated to achieve it. However, the HR subject-matter itself can be complex, wrapped in policy and difficult to communicate – let alone inspire a workforce. Internal Communication, on the other hand, focuses on employee engagement and how communication is created, managed and optimized and is a complex process that demands a unique set of skills. More often than not Internal communication professionals have a strong PR and communications background. It is imperative that specialists be hired for each role, but they work together for organizational goals. 

Internal Communication & HR 

  • A strategic relationship with HR: To begin with, most HR knowledge and information is kept confidential and on a need to know basis. In such a culture not just what to communicate but how to communicate is critical – which is not the core skill of HR staff members. Some organizations consider Internal communication an HR function but it is a strategic relationship.
  • Communication is strategic: With an empowered Internal Communication team one great advantage is it not only communicates the HR message to the employees but carries the employee message and perspective into advertising, branding and public relations. This further gets weaved into communications with areas like finance, marketing and CxO messaging.
  • Outside in-view for employee needs: The HR organization ‘is’ the employee engagement process and therefore a lot of communication needs and responses are assumed or implicit, something that the communications specialists are not likely to do. HR and Communications bring different perspectives.
  • Specialists understand branding: Internal branding is as important as external branding and professional communicators are trained to weave a branding & language depending on whether the message is going to employees or some other including current customers, prospective customers, shareholders, regulators, legislators, media and the external community.

Working effectively together

There are several ways HR and Internal Communications can build a strategic partnership, including

  • Empathy in communication: HR often has a very intimate & personal understanding of people, their motivations and goals which allows communication to touch their feelings and include their points of view.
  • Active listening: HR engages in a lot of active listening and being included in some of this engagement can make a tremendous difference to the communication that goes out to employees.
  • Trusted communication: Having an honest feedback mechanism between the HR, Internal Communications and employees is the best way to create a trusted communication channel, create high employee branding and minimize information gaps.
  • Common Intent: Dovetailing communication strategies and intent allows both HR and Internal Communication to focus on corporate goals and minimize duplicated effort.

Organizational goals are achieved faster and more effectively when HR and Internal Communications work as complementary departments to achieve higher employee engagement and employee happiness.

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_ CEO

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker & Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a BTech-MBA & CEO of the world leader in communications for technology businesses with a worldwide Fortune 500 customer base. Rakesh is a speaker on Leadership, Strategic Marketing, Strategic Communications, creating world-class bootstrapped Startups & resurgence in business. He lives with 800 rescued dogs, has no work-life balance and will not have it any other way! Rakesh has been featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies etc.

Are you looking to create or improve your Internal Communications?

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