Inclusion or Diversity First: Why Workplaces Need Both Running Together

Most organisations put diversity first without ever deciding to, because recruitment is easier to count than belonging. At Includability’s recent Hot Inclusion Topics session, Sara Matthews and Saski took the question apart with a small group of Committed Employers.

Hot Inclusion Topics, or HIT sessions, are small, hour-long conversations for Includability Committed Employers. Two experts talk for around ten to fifteen minutes, then the room takes over, comparing what is happening in their own workplaces. It is peer-to-peer learning in a space where people can say what they think.

The first session asked a question most organisations answer by default: inclusion or diversity, which comes first? If inclusion leads, the goal is usually equity. If diversity leads, the goal is usually representation. The two are not interchangeable, and the gap between them has a cost. Ciphr’s survey of 1,000 employed UK adults, carried out in June 2023, found 84% of people who feel they belong at work plan to stay at least another year, against 43% of those who do not.

Sara Matthews

Sara is the Culture and Inclusion Director at Includability. She has thirty years in HR and inclusion, including Group HR Director at Ladbrokes and Chelsea FC.

"Diversity without inclusion leads to churn, tokenism and a performative process. Inclusion without diversity leads to stagnant thinking, where everyone approaches a problem the same way.

Think about how that plays out. A recruitment team works hard on representation, bringing in people with different cultures, genders, ethnicities and backgrounds through inclusive recruitment and selection. That work fails if those people do not feel they belong, if the environment does not feel safe enough for them to be themselves, and if they do not feel valued, respected and heard. They leave, and the recruitment spend leaves with them.

It works the other way too. You cannot design inclusive practices without involving a range of people, because their views and experiences are what make those practices fit different needs. Diversity is also too often treated as a single identity: a man, a woman, a disabled person, a gay person. People have multiple, intersecting identities. A Black woman’s experience at work can differ significantly from a White woman’s or a Black man’s.

I have been the only woman on an executive team of twelve, and the business felt it had done its diversity work when I arrived. Changing the culture of a room like that takes more than one appointment.

The foundations of inclusion sit in policies, organisational values, culture and everyday behaviour. Values are often a good starting point. At Chelsea, we used values work to help the leadership team define the culture, then took the conversation out to groups across the organisation with different experiences. It surfaced the positive parts of the culture and the parts that were not, and it opened up difficult conversations without them turning antagonistic.

Plenty of organisations have built successful businesses on established processes, structures and ways of working, often shaped by people with similar experiences and backgrounds. From there it is tempting to say if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Customer expectations are changing, workforces are becoming more diverse, and new ideas depend on drawing on different viewpoints. A service that does not consider accessibility will exclude customers without meaning to. A product designed without input from different user groups will miss part of its market. A workplace that focuses only on representation will lose talented people, and a workplace that prioritises inclusion but lacks diversity will struggle to find the range of perspectives it needs to grow."

“Workplace culture is created through our everyday interactions, the conversations we have, the decisions we make, and the assumptions we challenge.” Sara Matthews

Turning values into policy, practice and evidence is the work the Includability JEDI Toolkit is built for, covering Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. JEDI Inclusion Toolkit

Saski

Saski is an LGBTQIA+ inclusion and allyship specialist, working on everyday Pride, inclusive events and training. She is the course lead for Everyday Pride on the Includability Academy.

"Diversity, for me, is about who’s in the room. Inclusion is about what happens when they get there. You can start with one without the other, but I don’t think you can sustain one without the other.

I see this a lot in LGBTQIA+ inclusion work. You can recruit diverse people, but it doesn’t mean much if they don’t feel safe, heard and able to be themselves. Without that safe space, people are unlikely to stay, and the plan that looked good on paper doesn’t work.

When someone is the only person like them in a room, the question is whether their voice gets heard. Nobody should have to be the one who shouts loudest. That’s where allyship comes in. Allyship doesn’t mean agreeing with everything everyone says. It means understanding and respecting difference, and noticing when a colleague is being talked over or sidelined. Your manager may not be the one who makes room for you in a meeting, so colleagues can: I liked what you said there, tell us more.

It helps to separate culture from conformity. When nobody checks their own unconscious bias, people settle into “this is just the way it is here”, and that gets mistaken for culture.

A policy is a good start, but actions speak louder than words. I worked with a senior leader in a large public sector organisation who told me his team knew they could come and talk to him. He said it with his arms folded. An open door policy only works if the door looks open.

None of this is an overnight change, and it looks different in every sector. There is political pushback on inclusion work at the moment, and some organisations are treating it as permission to ease off. Plenty are still pushing forward."

“Diversity is about who’s in the room. Inclusion is about what happens when they get there.” Saski

Saski’s Everyday Pride course on the Includability Academy covers LGBTQIA+ inclusion and allyship across eight modules. Everyday Pride

From the room

One attendee had seen inclusion handed to a single person and turn into a tick-box exercise. Their organisation moved responsibility to a group drawn from across the business, argued for a strategy running longer than the twelve months first proposed, and now tracks how people from different groups progress through each stage of recruitment, rather than only counting who is employed.

Another attendee described writing a policy as the easiest part of the work. A policy is words on a page, and how those words reach teams depends on leadership. They had seen women with long boardroom experience still struggle to be heard.

A third attendee argued that inclusion, like health and safety, belongs to everyone, and that the moment it becomes one person’s job, everyone else steps back. Asking staff who could not do their job, and why, turned up a basic facilities barrier keeping women out of some workplaces. The same attendee was candid about a recent recruitment round. A mostly female team ran it with a focus on attitude and behaviours, and it produced a heavily male intake, because the process had quietly rewarded extroverts.

Sara and several attendees agreed that quotas made them uncomfortable. Nobody wanted to be in a room because they filled a number.

Diversity and inclusion need building together

Nobody in the session settled on a single starting point. Every organisation begins from a different place, with different challenges and opportunities. Diversity brings people into the room. Inclusion makes sure their voices are heard and valued once they are there. One without the other is unlikely to deliver lasting change.

Sara left the group with one piece of analysis to try: compare how much your organisation invests in recruitment with how much it invests in inclusion. If people do not stay, the recruitment money is wasted.

An Includability Cultural Roadmap looks at Diversity and Inclusion alongside Mental Health, Wellbeing, Sustainability and Impact, Talent Management, and Leadership and Governance, so an organisation can see where to start and in what order.

Hot Inclusion Topics sessions are part of being an Includability Committed Employer. Partner with us as a Committed Employer

About Includability

Includability is a UK B Corp that partners with organisations to build inclusive, diverse, mentally healthy, evidence-based workplace cultures. We do that by developing Cultural Roadmaps: six conversations with independent Partner Experts across Diversity and Inclusion, Mental Health, Wellbeing, Sustainability and Impact, Talent Management, and Leadership and Governance, brought together with an organisation’s own data into one clear direction for the board.

We work as a strategic partner to leadership teams, a trusted colleague to the people leading inclusion, wellbeing and culture, and a community of more than 100 Committed Employers and Partners who learn from each other through sessions like Hot Inclusion Topics. We don’t grade or certify anyone. We work alongside you.

Sources and further reading

1. Ciphr, Employee experience in the UK 2023, June 2023. An online survey of 1,000 employed UK adults. https://www.ciphr.com/employee-experience-statistics/#belonging-at-work

Further reading shared during the session:

2. McKinsey and Company, Diversity wins: How inclusion matters, May 2020. The third report in McKinsey’s diversity series, built on data from more than 1,000 companies gathered in 2019. It found the link between executive team diversity and financial outperformance had strengthened over time, and added an analysis of employee sentiment on inclusion, covering equality, openness and belonging. The findings show correlation rather than cause. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-inclusion/diversity-wins-how-inclusion-matters
3. Bernadette Dillon and Juliet Bourke, Deloitte, The six signature traits of inclusive leadership, Deloitte University Press, April 2016. Sets out inclusive leadership as six traits that can be developed: commitment, courage, cognizance of bias, curiosity, cultural intelligence and collaboration. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/six-signature-traits-of-inclusive-leadership.html
4. Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, Why Diversity Programs Fail, Harvard Business Review, July to August 2016. Drawing on three decades of data from 829 US firms, it found mandatory training and control-based programmes often backfire, while voluntary engagement, contact between groups and manager accountability work better. https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail
5. CIPD and Reed, Inclusion at Work 2022. A YouGov survey of 2,009 senior decision-makers in UK organisations, carried out between May and June 2022, on what employers are doing on inclusion and diversity and what they find effective. https://www.cipd.org/uk/knowledge/reports/inclusion-work/