For an organisation to thrive in times of complexity, constant transformative change and unforeseeable crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemics, it needs to build resilience. Working towards a culture of inclusion is a key factor for resilience because it trains skills that are essential for it: adaptability, trust and open communication, desire and capacity to learn, and acceptance of change.
An inclusive environment is one that embraces, promotes and capitalizes on the differences that unique individuals bring and can therefore enable innovation, higher performance and employee well-being. Inclusion is thus not a “nice to have” element. It is essential for our capacity to deal with the major challenges humanity as a whole faces.
Through the COVID-19 pandemic many of us experienced the most rapid change in working culture of our lifetime. Juggling home office with child-care created many struggles for parents, especially women*. At the same time, this disruptive phase accelerated the adoption of new ways of working.
Many teams across sectors have come up with creative ideas and fundamentally changed their working practices for the better. Our aim is to find these practices and bring them to the awareness and benefit of Swiss organisations and the public.
Anne has a background in social entrepreneurship and history with a focus on sexism and racism. Sometimes, she gets lost in her thoughts but she says that’s okay when it comes to the big challenges of our times that we should have started solving yesterday. She loves spending time in the mountains and is very concerned about intersectionality.
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Johanna loves to be able to work from anywhere and believes in the powers of global teams. As a progressive entrepreneur, she aims at finding ways to balance business rationale with impact, relationships and well-being. Fun fact, as a kid and teenager Johanna was very conservative when it came to food she didn’t know.
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Anna is a project lead, facilitator and multipotentialite at heart. She firmly believes that human-centredness and inclusion are core qualities today’s work places need in order for people to thrive and do meaningful work. She loves co-creating and designing programs that enable learning and connection. Her motto: Let’s create ripples of positive change!
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“Language and pictures shape the way we see our world and also reflect our values. How we talk to people, who we portray in our pictures and take as examples, affects our surroundings and makes the people we address feel more or less taken seriously and included in our world view.”
Valentina shares with us a practice that promotes inclusion through the use of language. Capacity Zürich has developed guidelines that define the principles of all team interactions when it comes to inclusive verbal and visual communication.
Valentina encourages all teams and organisations to develop their own guidelines for inclusive language use based on their values, mission and context.
TIPS FOR IMPLEMENTATION
“Diversity and inclusion has to be a continuous process and ingrained into organisational culture. This practice of inclusive recruitment process is just one example. The continuous promotion and building of a strong inclusive culture in the organisation doesn’t happen overnight but is often a long journey of internal organisational and individual reflection.”
Rashid shares with us a practice called “Collective Accountability” and its implementation in a recruitment process. This is about promoting collaborative goal setting & creating institutional spaces for team members to participate in decision-making and the strategic direction of the organisation. It is important to have everyone’s voice being heard on organisational decisions (such as who to hire) that impact staff members and their roles.
TIPS FOR IMPLEMENTATION
“Teams that reflect the diversity of their users are better suited to solve their problems. Not just because they share similarities but because they’ve learnt to integrate different viewpoints. To train this muscle constantly is what allows you to also empathize with your users.”
Simon shares with us a practice that promotes inclusion by giving people the same meeting experience no matter where they are currently based.
In hybrid meetings, people often use one camera that films the whole meeting room and one screen that shows all the remote participants. In this setting, the remote participants cannot participate equally in the meeting, because they are missing the non-verbal communication and side-discussions that happen in the meeting room.
TIPS FOR IMPLEMENTATION
