Hello and welcome to today's University of Western Australia podcast. My name is Jane. I will be your host for today as we continue our conversation with Chrissie Tucker looking at developing an organizational diversity , and inclusion strategy. Without further ado, let us continue. Let's start talking about inclusion and diversity strategies and plans. How important do you think it is for organizations to have an inclusion and diversity strategy, or plan? I think in line with supportive leaders, it's the most important element because if you don't have a plan in place, you can't measure. You don't know where you're up to and therefore, you don't have a target to get to, and then work out your strategies to get to that. It's very important. It sends a message both internally and externally, that if an organization has a diversity and inclusion plan, its serious, and it mean business. What do we mean by a diversity and inclusion plan? Well, when we say what makes an effective strategy and plan, it means having in place a document that has been developed with care in terms of consultation. I'll probably just talk about plans generally. It's having a set of targets, whether they're numerical, or just having a cultural change in an organization that are achievable and tailored to your organization, and your services, and output, and products. It has an introduction, it has a link to the business case, and it has a vision statement. You link that with your corporate statement. Whatever your corporate mission is, you link your diversity inclusion plan to that. The actual content of it is that it has headings, there's a template for it. The actions in it drive what you want to achieve over a set time-frame. I always seek three years, it's a good time for a D&I plan. Then you have people responsible for it. You have a committee that drives it. You have a shared responsibility throughout the whole organization. You might have diversity action groups. That's what we had at the ABC. Every division had their own action group, and it was the director of that division, whether it was radio, television, news, finance, technology, whatever. They all had their action groups. Their responsibility was to get the overall organization's plans and tailor it to their division, and get some outcomes that way. What do you think makes for an effective D&I strategy plan? What I usually do is I have four headings. One is leadership, starting with leadership. That has a set of strategies that might be looking at the corporate language, the documents, so they could be struggling a mentoring program. It could be that you start up your own champion group within the organization, which I did at the ABC. I've done that also at the age of Civic Broadcasting Union, where you invite some of the heads, the leaders, senior managers, to choose an area of diversity and to be a champion for it. It involves training the leadership. They might undertake unconscious bias training. They could be women in leadership training, things like that. The second area is representation. You have to know where you're at. [inaudible] groups, where there are the women, where there are the men, where are the people with disabilities, non English speaking background, etc. Where do you want to be? Is it reasonable what you got, or is it an under-representation? When you have the data, you say, well, at the end of the three-year plan, or four year plan, whatever it is, we want to increase that representation by three percentage points, or whatever it is. The next actions within the plan will be, how do you do it? Do you look at your website? Is it DNI friendly? Does your job advertisements, do they have paragraphs that relate to diversity and inclusion? There's practical things that you can look at and implement. Women's groups. You might have a women networking group to support women once they're in the door. You might look at steps including who goes to training by gender. I won't go into all those details, but there's a whole lot of practical steps that you can implement that will change your target representation. The third area that I recommend is a positive work environment. You think that was a no brainer, but all right. You've got people in the door. You want to be able to support them, and you want to be able to raise awareness for all staff. You will probably if you don't have one already, introduce a discrimination, harassment, and bullying policy. That policy has to also have with it grievance procedures so that people reaches. People know where they can make a complaint. That's a topic on its own. Workshops that introduce or build on the policies, so people can talk about these issues in those workshops. You might introduce International Women's Day, Mental Health Day, Awareness Days and NAIDOC week, things like that. Just a whole range of activities that improve the environment and make it inclusion, that's the inclusion of diversity inclusion. Then the fourth area that I usually recommend is that you look at your services. In the example of a media, its content, and services. You look what's your product? What is the audience? Does your content or your product or your service match the community? The percentage of people in the community, cultural diversity, disability, gender, all of that. Then you can take some steps and actions within your plan to address that. Whether that's through training, whether it's through scholarships, whether it's just looking at your program and saying, we have too many male presenters. We don't have enough people from cultural diverse backgrounds. We don't have enough people with disabilities. A lot of organizations have done that. The big banks, if they've looked at communities where their branches are, or who they want to target or if they want to get more customers to open up accounts and things like that. In their ads, their promotions the way they interact with people, what products they give, need to alert those people to say, we're interested in you. That's content of the plan and make it work. The best things are the leadership at the top to link it to the business case. Why do we have this plan? A range of legislation. It can be. Some organizations are directed to have a plan, some might just have women. But in talking about products, the business cases, we want to improve our reach where a number of customers or our audience from all of the groups. The other thing is communication. You must tell people about the plan, alert them that it's coming. You talk about it a lot. You send out messages about it, you do reports on it. You look at the progress. You have someone responsible. Most organizations know have the D&I Manager and that's their sole job. Years ago, a lot of organizations didn't have a dedicated person, but now many do. Also externally, it's very good to let people know you've got a diversity inclusion plan as well. It's interesting as you were saying at the start, that you have your corporate plan and the D&I plan, is that what you're saying? We have the two and they need to obviously work together. If you've got a corporate plan, then you make references in that plan to your D&I plan. Of course. It becomes then a KPI, and that's another area of great importance, is that your senior leaders, the executive team, the directors of each division and the next level down, that in their KPIs, in their performance agreements that they're measured on for everything else, they measure in their work and what they achieve. They must also be accountable for the D&I plan, that's relevant to their area. It's a shared responsibility, I guess, throughout the organization? Yeah. KPIs are very important. Despite D&I strategies being around for decades, do you find that there's still resistance to these plans and strategies coming into place and coming into organizations? Oh yes, whatever reasons. I think if you said to people who were involved with diversity, say in the mid-90s, early 90s, there would still be a need for these specific plans and specific people to embed them in an organization. That was still necessary 2022. I think they'd be shocked. They'd throw their papers down and be like, I'm out of here. Because I remember years ago there was a terrific program called The Springboard Program for women, and it was for women who were not managers, so UK program. Women are paid for by their work to attend it's four days over about three months, and it's about their personal development, putting themselves forward, how can they advance managing their profile, all of that thing. I implemented that in both the Reserve Bank and the ABC. If you told me then that we would still need Springboard in 2022, I would be surprised, and yet it's still being offered and there's still a need for it. So just in terms of the resistance, it's diminished over time, or a bit slowly. I think that the main reasons over time have been that people have felt threatened. Men were threatened when the 6th Discrimination Act came in Australia. They thought that the women would take their jobs. That hey leave their families, that they'd be dismissed breakdown of society. That didn't happen. But that was just a precursor of how men felt then, and it didn't diminish that quickly. People thought that they would lose their jobs and that women would jump in, and then with the other groups as well, that they didn't deserve it. That, for example, women would up to the jom, they didn't have the qualifications, and there was a narrow, rigid approach. It has reduced over time with technology. With more women in tertiary education, with breaking down the silos of occupational segmentation. Women, people with disabilities, those from different cultural backgrounds, they won't fitting. They'll spoil this very comfortable work environment. In the case of management, that they won't be able to manage because of their personal attributes and then your responsibilities. I think a lot of the opposition came from people who felt threatened, and there was this general societal thing that these people aren't quite up to the task. I guess that's obviously shifted, but it's still we have different things to be threatened by sometimes. That's right then age came in. The rationing in 2004. Then you have the generational diversity issues and people who over 50 were sometimes seen as people who weren't embracing technology. They didn't have the goods, the ideas. There was a lot of stereotypes about mature age workers. That was a whole new area that was recognized when people wanted to continue working and their age was held against them. Heard of people being made redundant, and they had a wealth of experience, knowledge and the way to work, and they just couldn't get a job. I think one of the key things about DNA is that over time, it's recognized that there's a range of groups and areas that need addressing. Of course. We've acknowledged obviously that there is still resistance in these things and often coming from people who are feeling threatened themselves. As the specialist yourself, have you had to deal with that? It can be somewhat emotional sometimes resistance? Yes. A lot. Can you give us examples of it as well, how you've dealt with it I guess? I think it's subtle in many ways and people will say that's a nice idea, but we don't have the budget. Or it is immediately reaction. Not even while we do it, but we can't do that because of such and such. There's always this opposition to new ideas and practices and policies because, the immediate reaction is no, and therefore you then have to work through that and say well, these are the benefits, here are some examples. Other organizations are doing this. It won't really cost that much. It won't take people away from their work. There's a lot of resistance, sometimes in the guise of funding, and in workshops at the ABC, when we introduced the brand new policy on bullying, harassment, and discrimination, we rolled out to every staff member and managers, including the managing director, are creating a better place to workshop. I went around the country and spent many hours running this three hour workshop. Then the issues come out in those workshops. Those people have a range of views. All of them are quite daunting to address, and so you have to find ways to talk to them about their experience with that. Just trying to draw out ways that could influence them to change their mind and come along the journey with everybody else. Of course. I think it's interesting approaching it in a more empathetic human way because it takes all kinds to make the world and people have different values and different opinions. I think writing people off and saying, well, you are this or you are that or you think that way so therefore, you're a bad person I think is not necessarily helpful. I think as you're saying, identifying where these certain ideas of people or values come from and then being able to speak to them I think is a very more constructive way of approaching these things. That's right. Sometimes you just have to find a trigger with people because it's often ignorance in terms, people may not know the data. People may not be aware of why there's been underrepresentation, why people have had disadvantage. When you can give examples of that. People do seem to think, I didn't realize that. The other thing in the workshop group I found that was very helpful was if somebody had an opposition to why are we having this policy and I've been bullied to come to this workshop. Sure. My rights are being challenged. I said, " I've never heard that before." Thank you for joining us, and guess what, we have a bullying policy that we can now learn about. Quite often I had some people come into the room, folded arms, and say, "I've been bullied to come to this workshop." You'd then have to spend a number of hours, and there were a whole range of people in the room. One of the beauties of the workshop is that quite often someone else in the room will speak up and you can use that. Someone will say, "Well, in actual fact, my spouse or my daughter or something was bullied in the workshop or was a victim of sexual harassment." Then they say what the effect was, and then that person usually acknowledges that and say, "All right, I didn't realize that." Some people also, particularly older men, would often say, "I didn't really believe in all this stuff but my daughter is having a hard time in the workplace because she wants to work part-time because she's pregnant." The parent, the man in the room would say, "I support her and I think she should be able to have part-time work." Sometimes it's the truth there. But yes, I did come across that a lot. What advice do you have for someone who wants to implement a diversity inclusion strategy or plan? Probably summarizing what we've chatted on. Yes, exactly. Listen to the podcast, do all of that. It's having the buy-in from the top, having a group of people who form a committee, and enlisting people who may not be the usual suspects who might be on board but people who may be able to come to the party with a range of views and you bring them on board that way, looking at the business case, particularly, for your organization, tailoring it to your organization, what your mission is, what your values are, what your customer base is, your clients, your service, tying that all in with legislation, with what you're required to do, and implementing your plan. It's clear and very achievable. There's no point in using a plan that we want to increase this group by 20 percentage points when you're a low base. Sure. It's got to be good because you want it to work. You want people to see that they can make a difference at all levels in the organization. It's achievable. It's something that's time-frame-wise if people know when they've got an objective to meet that it's reported on and communicated widely and that you have fun with it too. You have lots of activities that involve [inaudible] you have special days that you acknowledge to bring everyone. We had, with our mental health, Are You Okay day, we had one of our personalities, Annabel Crabb, she's also a great baker. Yes. We had a Bakerthon. People had to bake cakes with the Are You Okay on the icing. We had a competition around that. You have a broadening of what you can do, what your activities are. I think I might also mention, if I can, we introduced a program called Men and Work, it was usually Men at Work. That was only for men. That was run by academics and psychologists. It was about men's mentoring and father roles, their working life, responsibilities, their health, and what their issues were. That was a great initiative in terms of that, we gaze something that wasn't just what people thought was only just for women, something that we broaden. We say to people, there's something that affects everybody. Everyone has a gender and everyone has an age group. A lot of people have different cultural backgrounds. Indigenous people are important First Nations people in their country and people with disabilities, one in five. It's no longer it's them and us or us and them, it's all part of community, all who we are, and a plan will make the difference on that journey. Chrissie Tucker, thank you so much for chatting with us today. It's been a real delight. There's been a huge amount to take away from this. I really appreciate your time. Thanks, Jane. Thanks very much. Thank you so much for listening to this two-part series on developing an organizational diversity and inclusion strategy. Thank you again so much to Chrissie for all of her work and all of her insight. This has been another UWA podcast. We shall see for the next one.
