Shownotes: 

My guest on this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast is Alexandra Evreinoff, Managing Director at Involve a global network and consultancy championing diversity and inclusion in business since 2013. 

We spoke about role models and why it is important to see people like ourselves succeeding in the workplace.

Involve publishes several annual role model lists recognising and celebrating business leaders and future leaders who are breaking down barriers at work and inspiring the next generation of diverse talent 1) HERoes Women Role Model Lists showcasing leaders who are championing women in business and driving change for gender diversity in the workplace; 2) the Global OUTstanding LGBT+ Role Model Lists showcasing LGBT+ business leaders and allies and the 3) EMpower Ethnic Minority Role Model lists showcasing business leaders who are working hard to smash the ceiling for ethnic minorities in the UK, Ireland, Europe, and people of colour in the United States and Canada.

A quick glance at the lists shows that there is no shortage of talent in across industries (no surprise there)

We also talked about the importance of benchmarking, monitoring and evaluation of DEI initiatives,

• The dangers of self-certification as an ally
• Keeping the agenda at the top table; 
• Those who are doing it well....
• How organisations can kickstart their own journey
• 'If Not Now, When? campaign that has been signed by over 80 business leaders pledging change including BP, Tesco, StarlingBank, TimeOutGroup, Talk Talk, Greene King, Kier Group and Discovery UK.

Memorable Passages from the podcast

👉🏾 Thank you very much, Sudha. It's a real pleasure to be here with you today and having this conversation. And I'm very excited and very happy about my appointment and as I truly love working with Involve. And I helped Suki Sandhu create Inolve back in 2013. So it's incredibly important for me to actually see it succeed to the best of its potential and its potential is incredibly high.

So in terms of my background, well my father is French and my mother's Spanish and I was born in Brazil and then I spent my childhood like actually spread across the three countries. So Brazil, France, and Spain. Then I went and did my studies in Texas and lived there for five years. And then I moved to London and lived there for six years. That's where I met Suki Sandhu because I was working in recruitment, so Suki's our founder and CEO at Involve. And really the rest is history. So you may say that I have a bit of a diverse background here. 

👉🏾 At Involve, we're a global network and a consultancy and we're driving inclusion and championing inclusion in business. So our aim is truly to break the glass ceiling for diverse talent. There just isn't enough representation of LGBT+, women, let's say just diverse talent in general. So for us it's our aim, is to really make sure that we're driving those opportunities that we're helping, supporting that talent, but also making the business world a more inclusive and equitable place.

We're actually a type of environment in terms of driving justice as well, is actually key here. So everyone needs to be brought into the conversation from your senior leaders, exec's board to really all the line managers, hiring managers, anyone who has any decision-making power.

👉🏾 We basically produce three lists of role models every year. We have our outstanding lists which were the first ones that we started with in 2013 which celebrates LGBT plus leaders and allies in business. Then we have Empower and that celebrates ethnically diverse talent and role models and their advocates as well. As well as Heroes, that champion women in business. Women who champion women in business, as well as the men who champion these women.

So role models are incredibly important in terms of your own journey and career development. If you don't see yourself represented at the senior leadership level, you won't really believe in your career progression with a specific company. So in order to advance that, we thought of really featuring these role models in business is incredibly important, just as important as featuring role models in many different areas such as entertainment or the arts world. But yeah, business is just as important. 

👉🏾 So basically monitoring and evaluating initiatives is incredibly important to basically gauge the effectiveness of these initiatives. It really allows businesses to get a sense of whether these initiatives are actually working and then adjusting these initiatives or actions and rectify to ensure long-term impact. So in order to do this, we've developed a tool, it's an auditing tool called Radar. So it enables organisations to set up an internal benchmark from which to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the current program and initiatives. And we really take a 360 approach and evaluate a business in terms of recruitment and retention, attraction, development of your talent, accountability, and resources. Basically it allows us to get a picture of where the organisation is in terms of their inclusion maturity, and then make recommendations as to how to improve in that journey.

So we will highlight basically the areas which need improvement and really try to share best practice advise on practice, on how to move forward. 

👉🏾 Absolutely, so it helps organisations basically draw on evidence-based strategy. We've seen organisations follow a little bit of the D&I trends. So you'll see lots of, you know, rainbow flags during June and lots of conversations happening at certain times of the year, which is great to showcase some role models, some stories, personalised experiences, et cetera. But you need the evidence and in order to get that evidence, you need to listen to your employees and give them the opportunity to voice what it is that they think are their concerns and what they think the organisation could be doing to improve the environment for all. So it's really very impactful work.

👉🏾 So, yes in a way I do see myself as an ally, but I would say I see myself as an active advocate rather than an ally. So as I said, like, some people will have kind of like appropriated the tagline of being an ally and then won't have done much with it. If you're not doing much with it, you not supporting the cause if you're not participating in events, trying to educate yourself by listening to podcasts and different initiatives.

👉🏾 But what I would encourage people to, if they are calling themselves ally's, they need to truly prove that they are ally's. So for me I'm kind of like, a little bit beyond that because I am well living and breathing really and advocating on a daily basis, obviously that's my job. So in that way, I'm quite lucky, but even outside of work, 

how can I actually educate myself in other areas that I might not cover during my work time. And also I just wanted to say that in terms of calling ourselves ally's or advocates, it might be worth considering as well, the implication of self-certification here. So, yes, I do identify as an ally but this self-certification and calling myself an ally is not always necessary, and can sometimes kind of like detract from the communities that need support.

👉🏾 So I would kind of like really highlight the importance of understanding that the work being done by allies or active advocates is always evolving. So real allies real advocates will understand that the label itself doesn't mean that the work is done. So rather there's always work to do. So things that allies can do to signpost their allyship, is adding for example, pronouns to email signatures and zoom names, like on this call or social media profiles, as a real way to signal a safe space for others.

👉🏾 So I think for some organisations they are taking the right approach and they are truly listening to what their employees are saying - diverse communities within their employee base. And I think that is powerful because that is guiding basically their strategy. And I think that's really impactful and those that are following trends like I said, those that are just using this as a box-ticking exercise and not really integrating D&I into everything that they do. Because diversity equity and inclusion is not about just an additional task that you add to your to-do lists.

It's about integrating it into every single step and every single part of a business strategy. So if it's not in the values, if it's not in the strategy, it's pointless. Like it's not gonna have any effect. So until actually businesses realise that, they're actually falling behind. Then they're just doing it as a box-ticking exercise. So I think for some organisations it's here to stay for others, they still need to be humble. And, perhaps listen a bit more to what other organisations are saying or external organisations are advising them to do. 

👉🏾 It's actually funny you mention that because one of our biggest clients this past year has been a hospitality business and we have done amazing work with them. I think I can name them and I think they would be quite happy for me to name them. So it's been Whitbread, and so we basically did a number of workshops with for their executives and boards and they then asked for us to roll this out. A wider program for all of their employees, all of the employees with line management responsibilities.

👉🏾 So it's been really impactful and it goes to show that when an organisation really believes in it and truly integrates D E & I as part of their business strategy. It works, like it makes a difference. And I do believe they will start seeing the fruits of their labor very soon, as well as things have started to open up. In terms of that D E & I fatigue I think that there's been mainly a sense of fatigue from having very centred conversations, very focused conversations. I think the answer here would be to open it up to, okay, let's talk intersectionality. Like how do we all feel about these issues? And yes, there are communities and there are groups that will need more attention than others at some points. And we should not forget that or dismiss that. However, let's open the conversation and invite everyone to actually also share their own experiences and also their thoughts around these topics and how to improve the environment for all. 

👉🏾 So in a way, I also think it's important to hold these companies accountable and to really make sure that D&I doesn't fall off the priority list. I think businesses need to put in place systems that hold them accountable for them. 

👉🏾 So we have an initiative that we started last year in response to George Floyd’s murder, 'If not now when' and you're familiar with it. 80 CEOs and companies have so far signed up to this initiative and this initiative is to really drive inclusion in the workplace. But these CEOs that have pledged to this, they know that 

they will have to produce reports and identify areas of improvement that we will support as well through the production of like tool kits and round tables, and we've started doing this and it's been incredibly interesting. But just to make sure that this is not just a tick box exercise, and it's not just a marketing campaign, it's really incredibly important.

👉🏾 I will start with, who's not because I think I've already said that. So the companies that aren't prioritising this, and that are kind of like putting it on hold or addressing D E & I as just unconscious bias training, those companies are not getting it. And I don't think they will have much impact with their D&I initiatives. Now that's up to them and I won't cite any because obviously that's not what we're about at Involve. It's not about shaming and I will talk though about those who are doing it well, however, because we have many partners who are doing amazing work, actually, and I could name for example Barclays, who we've been rolling out workshops and trainings for actually their global workforce at this point, which is pretty amazing. And really they've also been very open in the way of running these workshops into that we actually basically gave some advice around how to run these and they truly listened. So it is amazing to build in a constructive way with a partner.

👉🏾 Obviously being such huge businesses, they could just want to dictate what they want to do, but they're humble enough and into saying, okay, were doing great, we could do better. So that is an amazing way of operating. 

👉🏾 We're working the of Kier for example, Kier group. Very, very challenging industry there and we've just completed Radar. Radar is an auditing tool and we've assessed their business. And they're really, really putting this as a top priority for them. So the construction company doing this is incredibly powerful in my opinion, but then I could name so many as well, many others like ITV, for example, who've just appointed a Chief Diversity Officer who reports directly to the CEO, so Carolyn McCall. And we're seeing also that trend in the D&I world, which I hope it's here to stay, is that D E & I actually sits within the business rather than sitting within HR and that is where we're seeing kind of like the difference and the impacts that it's having. 

👉🏾 So I think one thing that I would really really stress is don't be afraid of having these conversations because you really need to initiate conversations in order for change to happen and change won't happen from one week to the next or from one month to the next. Even sometimes from one year to the following year. Like you need to have a plan and you need to actually take the time to actually listen to your different pockets of employees and really make sure that you're galvanising efforts in a constructive and cohesive way so that you don't have separate initiatives going on here and there. But that those people who really want to drive this are actually communicating with one another and really cementing goals, long-term goals so that you can then plan how that will affect kind of like your strategy on a day-to-day basis. So start tracking, reporting, collecting data. I think that's incredibly powerful and important and if you need any expertise, if you want to hear from best practice from other organisations, there are always external organisations and obviously I'm talking on behalf of Involve. So, we have a number of solutions and we've been working with huge organisations and smaller as well, small organisations as well, since 2013.

👉🏾 So we've been gathering a huge amount of best practice and really which has helped us develop a bank of knowledge and expertise to advise companies. So I would say don't hesitate if you're going into D&I or anything, don't hesitate to have a third party actually come in and support you. One single person should not be expected to like drive a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment for all. These are very big responsibilities and they need to galvanise the approach basically. 

👉🏾 So, what really drives me is actually knowing that what I'm doing is having a positive impact into people's lives. And that is why, like when Suki needed someone to kind of like, start this network back in 2013, honestly, it was kind of like, yeah, there's no doubt about it, I'm absolutely in. Like this makes sense. And I've always been very aware of the differences in treatment that people get throughout life. And since I was quite, small, like I've always been aware of that and I think that really drives me on a daily basis in order to hopefully make this world a more equitable and inclusive place. And also obviously with the aim of us to have like a just environment and driving social justice and social change. So always happy to be very involved in these conversations because I do think they help. Even if it helps one person that is one person that, you know it will have made my day basically.

👉🏾 A pleasure to Sudha and really keep up the amazing work you're doing with this podcast and actually all the work that you're doing is really fantastic.

Important Links: 

Alexandra Evreinoff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-evreinoff/?originalSubdomain=ch

https://ifnotnowwhen.uk/black-inclusion-in-business-campaign-if-not-now-when-is-launched-with-new-signatories-committing-to-action/

https://www.involvepeople.org/