Diversity & Inclusion only works if your company develops measures in all areas of the company, tests them, implements them, rejects them or finds them to be good, and then starts all over again. In short: it’s a process and it’s also quite extensive. So my tip is quite simple: start with yourself first. I’ll explain how.
I recently reorganized my bookshelf. I realized that the majority of the books I own are written by white cisgender men. For some time now, I’ve been making sure that the imbalance of perspectives in my head is less powerful and therefore buying books written by authors with different perspectives. It may seem like a small detail, but there is so much more to it.
Diversity management first and foremost means recognizing yourself and your perspective and world view and then questioning them.
Step 1: To stay with the bookshelf example. Have a look at your bookshelf, if you have one.
- Which authors have I read books by and why?
- Which authors from which social groups (e.g. in terms of social or ethnic origin, age, gender…) are missing? Why do you think this is the case?
- Which perspectives seem more credible to you and why?
You can also apply this to your immediate (working) environment:
- Who are my colleagues, friends and employees and what social groups do they come from? For example, have they all completed a degree and are they all in their late 20s to late 30s?
- Which social groups are not represented in my company and why? (for example, people over 50, black people, people who see themselves as non-binary, people with disabilities… these self-identities also overlap, of course)
- Do I know a person that I feel differently about? Why do I actually feel differently about them?
Introducing diversity management measures in the company means initiating far-reaching changes.
Question your previously learned patterns and perspectives. Therefore, when you start to deal with strategies, for example as a managing director, employee in HR, People/Culture or Diversity Manager, you should also start to look at your perspective and remain critical. Above all, become aware of your role. If you can start this change within yourself, you can also start it in your company and implement it successfully. Because it means being able to keep cleaning your lenses and keeping an open mind. The long-term goal of inclusion and becoming an inclusive company will only work if all employees work on themselves and their (un)conscious prejudices. And you can be a role model here.
Step 2: Develop respect for the in-group bias
Above all, be aware of the affinity bias, also known as the in-group bias. This function in your brain leads you to better recognize your own social group and to give preference to other groups. Or to put it another way: Birds of a feather flock together .
In terms of social psychology, who we perceive as likeable is influenced by whether we perceive this person as part of our in-group or whether we perceive them as part of an out-group. We trust people in our in-group more and also feel more empathy for them – and this has a serious impact on our social behavior (see Choudhoury 2017). Being open to diversity means being able to endure uncertainty and fear: We intuitively have less trust, cannot automatically fall back on shared values and that is exhausting. A very familiar in/out-group moment is, for example, when you’re sitting in a restaurant on vacation. You don’t know exactly what language you can agree on. What the eating rituals are like in this country. Whether and how much you can tip. And you will probably be perceived as part of an out-group, as a tourist.
Do you often feel part of the out-group?
If you are affected by discriminatory structures yourself, you probably don’t even need to be outside Germany: you probably intuitively understand the feeling of being labeled as part of an out-group. For example, being the only cisgender woman at a conference that is mainly attended by cisgender men. The only black man in a group of white people. The only person with a visible disability in a group of non-disabled people.
Janina Kugel, HR Director at Siemens, describes it like this in an interview with Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk:
“I could never hide. Wherever I go, I’m one of the few women. I’m always one of the few people with a different skin color. And that does something to you. Not necessarily in a negative way. You can also gain a strength from it.”
If you are not yet able to understand these exclusions so well: There’s no need to panic. It just means that you can now question more closely why these forms of discrimination seem so unfamiliar to you. That brings us to step 3.
Step 3: Start observing and questioning your surroundings.
So if you have little personal experience of exclusion in Germany, observe your environment particularly closely. For example, you can probably also observe in your working environment that groups sort themselves according to similarities when they are supposed to find each other intuitively. I observe this very strongly, for example, when the corporate language in a company in Germany is English: the German-speaking employees form one group, the English-speaking native speakers form another, the English-speaking non-native speakers then group themselves according to their nationalities and so on.
These socio-psychological processes run very unconsciously and automatically.
Your main task in diversity management is therefore to keep making yourself very aware of your biases – so that you can then take them into account in your strategy and develop diversity management measures that break through them. To do this, however, you must first be aware of them.
