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POWERED UP - AN INSIGHT BY THE IN GROUP

You take one step forward, I take two steps back

the different positions their colleagues are in? Are participants surprised or do they feel it’s no big deal? This exercise isn’t meant to instil guilt but rather to demonstrate the levels of discrimination across various categories. It shows us that we all have a relative level of privilege. The next step is to acknowledge it on a personal level. Doing so lowers defences, demonstrates vulnerability, and sets the tone for inclusive behaviours.

To demonstrate the meaning of equity and show that we don’t all start from the same point in life, I gave our participants a series of statements and asked them to take either a step forward or a step back, depending on their answer to each. Examples included: • Take a step forward if, when you’re walking alone at night, you rarely feel threatened or in fear of sexual assault. • Take a step forward if, when watching TV or going to the cinema, you can see your sexuality, race, religion or ability accurately and often portrayed. • Take a step backwards if you have ever felt isolated in a room. • Take a step backwards if you have ever been called names regarding your race, socioeconomic class, gender, sexual orientation, disability or neurodivergence, and it made you feel uncomfortable. Specifically designed to be emotive, these statements led to a really interesting discussion that helped increase our understanding of each other and the shifting nature of inclusion. Inclusion’s not just a point you achieve in your life that you don’t ever need to revisit. It’s something that changes with you and your relationship with the world around you.

Inclusivity means different things at different times

How participants answer these questions may change during their lives, as discrimination and diverse associations are fluid. Today, someone might be a white, 30-some- thing, middle-class man. Yet tomorrow, they may be diagnosed with a neurodiverse condi- tion – such as dyslexia – that automatically changes the way people see them. Or they might fall in love with a partner of a different ethnic heritage and experience discrimina- tion against them, their partner and, in the future, their children. It might even be some- thing out of the blue, like having a football injury, that results in them being classed as having a disability. Changes in our lives alter our relationship with the world around us and other people’s perceptions of us. Inclusivity in life ebbs and flows according to what happens to us and the decisions we make that also change what might happen to us. That’s when we can take advantage of our privileges to benefit others – by bringing them to the table, fostering an equitable workplace, being an ally and speaking out against injustices.

CREDIT - PEXELS

People are complicated and labels are limiting

An example would sound something like this: “I have come from a poor background and a family with a deep religious belief system, and that’s why I make sure I work extra hard to provide for my children so that they can have a better life than I did.” This is not a case of identifying as “poor” or “a religious person with low socioeconomic metrics,” but more associating that story with how they see themselves and live their life, today.

Our approach was to allow our people to define themselves rather than limiting them to specific categories of self-definition that would hopefully paint an accurate enough picture. Utilising enei’s (The Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion) resources, we surveyed our people on their protected characteristics – age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation – and then asked each person to write a few sentences about how they actually identify. In describing themselves, it was interesting that our people chose to use a storyboard approach touching on the past, present and future.

The meaning of equity

Once we understand our diversity, the next step is to ensure we’re being inclusive to this diverse group of people and their varying needs. At Investigo, we approached this by holding a series of Inclusivity Workshops for all teams across the business, featuring group exercises to help them learn something about themselves and their colleagues.

Inclusivity means different things to different people

This kind of discussion gets really challenging – and really productive – when you ask people how it feels to be in front of or behind their colleagues, from their personal lived experience. What do they think about