In episode two, Jenni is joined by Advita Patel, inclusion and communications strategist, founder of Comms Rebel and part of our collective team, to talk about bringing a sense of calm around inclusion in the workplace.
Advita explains the chaos that is created when organisations don’t focus on inclusion or aren’t nurturing an inclusive culture. She shares why performative inclusion is more harmful than doing nothing at all. And helps identify and find ways to create more calm in your organisation.
Advita supports our clients with projects around inclusion, diversity, and equity. She is also often working with Jenni with leadership teams going through change to help them navigate the cultural challenges that can come up. She has worked on projects around inclusion week Building a positive and inclusive workplace and you can read some of the latest thinking on unconscious bias training here: Does unconscious bias training work?
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Our team – Redefining Communications
The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy Edmondson
Advita Patel www.commsrebel.com
Building a Culture of Inclusivity by Advita Patel and Priya Bates
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about inclusion in the workplace. And I’m delighted to be joined by Advita Patel from our collective team. So, Advita joins us as a business communication and inclusion strategist. She is the founder of Comms Rebel, which helps organisations cultivate inclusive cultures through effective communications so that all colleagues can belong and thrive in their work. She’s also an experienced confidence coach, where she works with teams and individuals to help them achieve their goals. She’s also co-founded, I’m going to just say she’s also, and she’s also, she’s also co-founded a leader like me and she’s also one of my business partners in Calm Edge Rebels, which is our podcast and coaching retreat business. And she’s also one of my best friends, as full disclosure for this episode.
So, what I want to talk about today is looking at inclusion in the workplace, but talking about the chaos that can come from not looking at that. And then we’re going to move in to talk about what are the things people can do to bring a sense of calm.
What is the chaos that people can see in organisations if they’re not looking at inclusion or not operating with an inclusive culture?
Well, I think one of the biggest signs you should look out for is the lack of trust in the workforce. And what I mean by that is when people are not speaking up, when they are not being honest about how they’re feeling. If you’ve got high levels of sickness, if you’ve got low levels of performance, if you’re struggling to retain colleagues, all of that’s normally a symbolism that there’s something going on. And it is generally down to inclusive. I don’t feel like I belong here. I don’t feel like I feel safe enough to speak up about some of the challenges that I’m facing. I don’t feel supported. I don’t feel I can be honest with some of the workload that I’ve got. So there’s very obvious signs and there’s very covert signs, I would say, that you need to be mindful of.
So covert signs are normally people who are staying continuously quite late and there’s a certain type of character that stays quite late or comes in very early and they don’t often speak up in meetings or they stay very quiet or when they do speak up, they’re shut down. They’re normally underrepresented often. And it often means that as leaders, we can forget about them, which sounds a bit mean, but it does happen when you’re in a very busy, chaotic workforce.
And when we talk about inclusion, we don’t talk about one specific characteristic. It’s the intersectionalities of everybody, right? So, when I speak to people, people automatically, your brain goes to colour and race, but we’re talking wider than that. We’re talking about women of colour, we’re talking about women, we’re talking about men of colour, we’re talking about people with disabilities, we’re talking about people from socioeconomic backgrounds who may not have the confidence to speak up or be seen if they don’t feel like they belong in that space because people don’t look like them, don’t act like them, don’t have similar experiences to them.
So it’s interesting listening to you talk about it because you talk about people belonging and we’re talking about inclusion. And I think sometimes we confuse and use terms in lots of different ways.
Is there a distinction between inclusion and belonging or are they the same thing for organisations?
There is slightly distinctive characters between inclusion and belonging. So, inclusion is when you are invited to kind of come and have a chat and you’re involved in contributing to the conversation. And belonging is that inner feeling and it’s the output and the outcome of inclusion. So it’s when you feel that you are, you can be whoever you need to be in that space and you belong and you don’t see any difference between you and somebody else.
And you feel, and I don’t like the word, bring your whole self to work. I hate that because I think it’s really difficult for people to do that. But I think it’s about bringing the self you need to bring to do your work well. I like that. So it’s almost like the inclusion is the action of the organisation, belonging is the outcome.
Yeah, it’s a feeling.
Yeah, which I think is where we get confused. There’s been some research this year around internal communication teams saying that their primary purpose is culture and belonging. And I think that’s hard to sort of state if it’s a feeling and if it’s an output, you know, because actually, from what you’re saying, I feel like I’m responsible for my own belonging, if it’s my feeling and that’s an outcome.
To an extent, the behaviours of the organisation have to help you belong. Okay. If that makes sense. So, you, yeah, obviously you’re in control if you belong or not and you need to make a decision whether you want to continue giving your skills to the organisation where you feel like, you know, where you don’t feel like you belong and you’re excluded from things and you may make a decision to go.
But ultimately, it’s driven by the behaviours and the culture to the, you know, this is why we’re seeing culture and belonging being hand in hand. If you don’t have that and it is toxic and you don’t, you feel excluded and that does drive you not to belong. So, yes, you’re in control of how you feel and if you can belong. But if it’s driven by the environment around you, then you’re not, you’re not going to belong. And that’s not on you.
That’s on the people around you, which is why, which is a slightly different topic, but which is why I do confidence coaching because there’s a whole reef of things around imposter syndrome. And what often happens when people are not contributing or they’re not feeling like they’re belonging or they can’t speak up is people go, “Oh, they’re a bit, they’re introverted. They’ve got a bit of imposter syndrome.”
It’s like, you’ll find that actually imposter syndrome is driven by the environment around you. And if you are not as a leader, if you’re not aware of what’s going on around you, then that’s on you, not on the individual.
What does genuinity over performativity look like?
So, before we go into kind of three or five things to help organisations and teams go from chaos to calm, I want to touch on something that might feel a little controversial, but it’s the kind of performative work that you and I have talked about a lot from either individuals or organisations. And what’s the, what’s the chaos that comes from that?
So if you’re doing it from a more performative perspective and just saying, you know, we’re going to have this inclusive culture, we’re going to do this. What does it look like if it’s performative? So how can people spot that? To know when it’s not quite genuine, I suppose?
Well, let’s take International Women’s Day as an example. So, what you’ll find is that one day a year, which is 8th of March, people will do posters, they’ll do interviews with women, they’ll talk about how supportive they are and how they’re helping. But if you dig a bit deeper in that information, you’ll find there’s a gender pay gap. You’ll find that there’s no representation of women at board level or senior management level. There hasn’t been any progression for women in a number of years. And yet the organisation is still celebrating the fact that they support women.
And my advice is always do your inside work first and get that fixed. You don’t need to promote and say, “Look how supportive we are of International Women’s Day” if you haven’t done your work, because you’re just going to get called out.
Last year in the UK, there was a gender pay gap bot that called out organisations who were saying how supportive they are of International Women’s Day and doing really these grand statements and then getting called out. So, why have you got such a big gender pay gap then if you really care? And that’s what we mean about doing work and that’s performative. It’s tokenistic. And I always say that’s more harmful than doing nothing at all.
What should people do if they can only be performative?
So I’m thinking about people that might listen to this and thinking, we have got a pay gap. We haven’t got women represented on our board, but we still feel that we should show up for International Women’s Day. Is it better to just not do anything?
I would say I would be very mindful about what you’re saying and be honest and open about that you’ve got work to do. And this is your plan of action to address the gaps and the challenges that you’ve got, rather than saying, oh, here’s Susan. You know, she’s been with us for 25 years. Look, here’s her story. It’s like Susan’s really fed up and she’s a bit tired and she doesn’t really want to be part of this, but she feels pressured because she’s one of very few women in the organisation that has to show up for things like that. So, look at the gaps, do your plan, and be honest.
How can you make that shift into being less chaotic and more focused?
So, if we look then at how we help organisations and teams shift into this sort of calm. So, we’ve talked about that chaos of people leaving, people not feeling like they can speak up. What would be your advice, maybe three or five tips to help people really make that shift into being less chaotic and maybe more focused and certainly more calm?
1. Be observant
One of the first tips I would say is be observant in what’s happening in the environment that you’re in. So, who is speaking up? Who isn’t speaking up? What are the challenges with individuals? And approach it with sensitivity, but go to them and say, “I noticed that you haven’t spoken up in a couple of meetings. Everything okay? How can I help you? What’s missing?” So just be, as a leader, be quite observant of your team.
2. Be mindful of psychological safety
The second tip I would say is be mindful of the psychological safety, because that is a critical element, in my opinion, on building inclusion.So, how safe is it?And what I mean by that, not, you know, obviously the health and safety thing, but how safe is it mentally and for people to be part of your organisation?
And the book I would recommend, I know you’ve read it, is the Fearless Organisation by Amy Edmondson. She shares, I think she was one of the first ones actually that talked about psychological safety. So, she shares some really incredible tips on that. And then.
3. EDI strategy?
The third thing I would ask people to do is to think, have they got an EDI strategy or do they have a comms strategy for EDI? Because two are very different. And if you’ve got a comms strategy for EDI, I would say that’s going to be tokenistic and performative. Whereas if you’ve got an EDI strategy that comms support with, that’s very different outcomes. So be very mindful about actually what are we trying to say? What actions are we taking? And what other behaviours are trying to do?
And it’s okay not to focus on everything at any one time. Just pick two or three things that you really need to focus on and absolutely get sorted. Then you can move on to your next challenge.
I love that.
Thank you for listening!
Thank you so much for joining me today. If people want to get in touch with you, where’s the best place for them to do that?
You can find me on commsrebel.com. So all my links are in there, but I’m always on LinkedIn and Twitter and Instagram. Perfect. We’ll put some links in the show notes for that as well. I know you’ve got your own app. I know you’ve got a book that you’ve written with Priya Bates. So we’ll make sure there’s links to all of that in the show notes. So, thank you so much for coming along today. Thank you.
So in the next episode, I’m going to be talking about data. And we’re going to be exploring the importance of data in organisations to diagnose root cause. And I’m going to be joined by Benjamin Ellis, who is our data scientist and one of our partners, and he runs Social Optic.
Thank you for listening. As always, I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn, and you can also join my community by subscribing to my mailing list. So, please connect, ask questions, follow up with Advita if there’s anything she’s talked about today, and share some of your thinking with me.
All the details are in the show notes: links, books, getting in touch details, all of it is in there. So, thank you for listening. And we’ll be back next week.
