When it Comes to Inclusion, We Don’t Have to Know Everything, but Every Team Can (and Should) do Something

By Catherine Garrod

For organisations to remain relevant, they need to serve colleagues, customers and communities made up of every demographic. Which represents a responsibility and an opportunity. 

Inclusion is about moving away from one-size-fits-all, towards better serving those that have been historically underserved, or not served at all. And it goes far beyond one person or team with inclusion in their title, updating policies and delivering events. Don’t get me wrong, that work is important, but it’s only the foundation.

The sustainable approach is to embed inclusion into everyday work and decisions made across all teams. 

Your people are full of expertise and understand your organisation’s purpose, but they’re probably more familiar with designing for averages or majority than they are designing for inclusion. They might also be worried about getting inclusion wrong if it’s not an area of their own expertise.

So how can everyone play their part?

Here are five principles that can be adopted in any organisation.  

1. Encourage respectful disagreement  

This principle is for leadership teams. 

Consider how safe it is to tell you something isn’t right, share an alternative perspective or speak up when something doesn’t resonate for people with alternative lived experiences. This is the most basic way to understand if you have an inclusive culture.  

In team discussions, reflect on who gets their voices heard, and who doesn’t. Is it the extroverts? People who have been there the longest? The highest paid? People from overrepresented demographic groups? 

If you spot a trend, develop a familiar set of questions to encourage respectful disagreement. Here are some examples:  

• What does everyone else think?
• What would be the risk if we get this wrong?
• What other ideas could we consider?

Encouraging respectful disagreement equips the team to learn from multiple perspectives around one idea or issue. And remember, you’re encouraging the team to assess the idea, not the person who presented it. 

2. Embed inclusion into design standards 

This principle is for communications, marketing, digital and learning teams. They’re typically working from a set of standards already, so this is usually a simple update. 

Here are some examples that could be added to design standards:

• Diverse mix of people in images  
• Dyslexia friendly fonts 
• Subtitles on videos 
• Options to adjust font size, contrasts etc 
• Simple language for cognitive processing 
• Keep text separated from images (for screen readers) 
• Use language that unites us e.g. ‘we’ and ‘our’ 
• Etc. 

The people in these teams are storytellers and create the content people interact with most often. And they’re in a great position to repeatedly and consistently reflect an inclusive organisation.  

3. Disaggregate data (no more averages) 

This principle is for everyone who analyses and reviews data. 

Whatever you use to track people related success, break it down by demographic to understand who is having the best and worst experiences. 

You’ll usually find that people from overrepresented groups are being overserved. And realise that their population size and relative weighting, has been masking the lesser experiences of people from underrepresented groups.

Here are some examples for where you can break data down by demographic groups: 

Start with your all-important metrics. These are typically the things you review every month or quarter. Then build your data insight maturity from there. 

4. Build deliberate diversity into research, design and testing

This principle is for people working in consumer insight, brand, business development, building design, digital design, employee experience etc.

Most of our thinking is automatic and based on our own experiences and what feels familiar. Automatic thinking is pretty reliable when making decisions about our own lives, but it is unreliable when we’re developing products or services for other people. So feedback needs to be gathered from deliberately diverse groups to help mitigate bias.

Imagine you want to get feedback from 100 people, set some principles for making sure the feedback community is diverse e.g.: 

• 50% women and 50% men 
• No more than 70% white 
• At least 10% LGBT+ 
• At least 20% disabled 
• 15% neurodivergent 
• 30% parents 
• 20% carers 
• Etc.

Then collaborate with customer facing teams, third party researchers, colleagues in employee networks etc. to meet the criteria. A similar logic should then be applied to design and testing, to be confident you’ve considered a broad mix of people’s experiences and needs.

Depending on the nature of the work, you might want to over index on specific demographics. For example – tech teams testing platform accessibility will need more people with visual impairments. 

When it comes to sign off, Executive and Board teams can routinely ask: 

• What do we know about who benefits most and least?  
• How confident are we that the approach is inclusive?

5. Widen the gates for hiring and career progression 

This principle is for hiring managers, talent management, and recruiters.

Consider the last 10 people hired or promoted and see how similar they are to the hiring manager. Did they have a similar education profile? Industry background? Hair colour? Height? Communication style? Post code?

You might think I’m exaggerating, but I’ve been in teams where we all had blonde hair and a similar work profile. And I’ve seen so many leaders realise they’ve been hiring in their own image. If this is resonating, that pesky automatic (biased) thinking will have played a part in favouring familiarity. 

Recruiters can help with diverse short lists, tracking diversity data etc, and they can also help with guidelines for hiring managers. The goal is to equip hiring managers to look at their existing team and recognise all the brilliant skills and experiences they already have. Then use any vacancies as an opportunity to bring in or promote people with new skills and experiences. And go out of their way to make those people welcome when they get there. 

Inclusion is both broad and complex. But it’s also simple when organisations are deliberate about it, and the people working there are guided to understand their part to play. Because unless you’re consciously including people, you’re almost certainly unconsciously excluding people.

About the Author

Catherine Garrod is the founder of Compelling Culture, author of Conscious Inclusion: How to ‘do’ EDI one decision at time*, and guest lecturer for Executive MBA programmes at Cambridge Judge Business School. 

She works with organisations to help them remain relevant, by identifying any gaps in experience for people from underrepresented and overrepresented groups. Then guides them to take action to boost the experience for colleagues, customers and communities.

Catherine’s pragmatic advice and guidance makes inclusion feel doable. Rather than top-down change initiatives involving huge teams, she equips leaders and their teams to embed conscious inclusion into everyday decisions that impact other people. 

She believes when employees can be themselves and influence how things are done, their lives are better, and they’re more creative and better problem solvers. And when consumers are authentically represented in media, products and services, organisations and the communities they serve to thrive. 

Catherine led Sky to become the Most Inclusive Employer in the UK, with 80% of teams increasing their diversity. Now as a consultant, clients using her inclusion diagnostic are achieving a 15% improvement within 18 months.  

*shortlisted for the 2024 Business Book Awards