Culture fit, culture add, culture what? Welcome to this episode of the Culture & Inclusion podcast. What is this all about? You may have heard about these terms of culture fit and culture add when it comes to hiring new people. How you should, or shouldn’t hire for culture fit or culture add and so on.

I want to give you my take on this subject. Hiring for culture fit, for culture add, none of those, something else? I’ll give you my points of view, and I insist on the plural, and then you can decide what you want to hire for.

Let’s take culture fit. Culture fit is seen as hiring more of the same. This happens when for instance you rely on your network when hiring, because most people in your network are just like you! It happened when you think you need to hire people coming from certain schools or universities or having a certain degree. These people will be more similar because they have experienced the same culture.

Now, this is not the best if you are a homogeneous group because you will keep on getting people from that same homogeneous background. It is not the best either if your culture for instance is totally results driven, however the results are achieved. You keep on hiring results driven people who will see their quarterly targets as more important than their people, their team.

Now, in contrast, let’s say that your workplace is diverse, inclusive, innovative and anything positive you can associate to a culture. Then, you would want more of that, wouldn’t you? In that case, culture fit doesn’t seem so bad.

Shall we turn to culture add now? As it suggests, hiring new people is about adding to the existing culture. This is a great approach when you have identified a gap in your organisation. It is the way to go when you decide you need people with different experiences than what you already have, people from different backgrounds that who you already have, when you want to bring different ideas and expertise to your organisation.

However, if you are already not sure what your culture is actually, if you have let in people whom you’d rather not have in the organisation, then adding to an already suboptimal situation will not help.

In this episode, I receive Tom Hannigan, an experienced recruiter to talk about recruitment and inclusion.

I was glad to hear from Tom's experience that most companies he's been working with have in their minds diversity and inclusion when they want to recruit and that companies are keen on improving in general on these topics.

However, the approach taken by companies will differ a lot depending on their culture, if I can say. Tom shares interesting differences between companies from different countries. Different approaches are used because regulations and laws can allow certain things in some countries that are not allowed in others.

The approach seems to be also shaped by the more widespread discussions in the society. For instance, companies will think more of racial diversity for instance when the topic is more prominent in media and society as a whole.

Tom shares his insights on what recruiters can do to help companies fulfilled their diversity and inclusion goals. Recruiters can help diverse people to apply. Work well on the job description. Make it inclusive and keep it simple and to the point. Give an idea of how it feels like and is to join the organisation.

We had an interesting discussion around the use of anonymised CVs.

We finish with Tom giving you his advice, so listen to the end!

If you want to continue the discussion with Tom, you can follow or connect with him on LinkedIn

I this episode I am giving you my take on the relationship between culture and inclusion. Is there a relationship? Is inclusion all what culture is about? Is it part of an organisational culture?

A culture is shared by people who share the values, what is important, appropriate for that culture. They share behaviours, communication patterns and ways of seeing the world. Cultures are made by people. People within a culture choose what they want their culture to be. This is true for your organisation. Its culture has evolved and is shaped by its people.

And it is here that inclusion comes in. An organisation, via its culture, can choose to be inclusive, or not.

Inclusion is an action. As an organisation, and as an individual, you decide to behave inclusively or not. This is how inclusion becomes part of your culture, or not. But this is not just an add-on to your culture. Because being inclusive has ramifications to everything everyone does and says in the organisation. Deciding to be inclusive will shape your messages, your procedures, processes and rules.

Inclusion is part, or not, of your organisation culture because it is underpinned by the values of the organisation and is exhibited, or not, in the behaviours and actions of the people within the organisation.

And it all needs to be in sync. No point of saying you value diversity and you are an inclusive organisation if you are not really diverse and if people do not feel they can express themselves, their ideas are belittled and they are not valued and recognised.

Inclusion is not words. The people interacted with your organisation, whether employees, customers, suppliers, partners; they will judge if you are inclusive. So, yes you first decide if you want to be or not, and by the way, I would more than strongly encourage you to be, and then put in place what is necessary to translate inclusion into actions, which it is. When you do it well, people will notice!

Today's guest is Janina Neumann, a German/English Creative Director and Intercultural Trainer and the host of the Bicultural Podcast. In this episode, Janina shares her experience of how her biculturalism helped her understand cultural differences, how people reacted to her being from a different culture. She shares some tips and practices when interacting with people from different cultures and share many insightful examples.

She also shared the framework of principles developed by Dignified Storytelling and give touching examples about some of them. The principles are:

1: It's not my story 2: I do no harm 3: We are all multi-dimensional 4: Consent is more than paperwork 5: I am biased (repeat) 6: I do my homework 7: I am empathetic 8: I protect others' data like it's my own 9: Truth over headlines 10: A story can change the world.

If you want to continue the discussion with Janina, connect with her on LinkedIn

In this episode, we are going to talk about where the culture of an organisation applies. So, in short, the answer to the question in the title “Is an organisation culture only internal” is no, an organisation’s culture is not just internal.

Any culture is internal because it is based on very deep underlying assumptions. These deep, basic assumptions are the internal layer of a culture. It is about what we hold as true or false. For instance, how a culture views time is a basic assumption of that culture. Another assumption is our relationship with the wider world, our environment, nature. Basic assumptions are what that cultural group holds as true or false. What do you hold for true in conducting business, dealing with customers, suppliers and so on, providing products or services and about everything an organisation is at a fundamental level? This is the basis of your organisation’s culture and that is internally focus in the sense that it is the basic assumptions of the people within the organisation.

The second layer, the intermediate layer of the culture of your organisation are the norms and values of your organisation. Norms are what is considered right, appropriate and acceptable in a group. Can you talk about politics, religion? Can you say openly how much you earn? Is it ok to challenge your boss if you have a different idea? What is the dress code? And it is here that your culture begins to get external, even if your values and norms are internal to the organisation. Your organisation probably has a list of values somewhere on its website. Your norms and values are also the filters through which you will judge, even if is unconscious, the people you interact with, whether they are internal or external to the organisation.

And finally, you have the external layer of culture. This layer consists of the artefacts and products of your organisation. This is what someone experiences first when they come in contact with your organisation. This how you do things in your organisation, your standards, the expectations, the behaviours you encourage. This is also, if you have offices, the plan and deco the organisation has chosen. It is what your people say about your organisation. It is all the external aspects that everyone in contact with your organisation, its people or any of its messages or products that people come in contact with. This is the window for the world into your culture. And this is purely external. It is driven from the more internal layers of the basic assumptions, norms and values of the organisation. It is how these are translated into actions, behaviours and messages. But all these are for other people, hence the external aspect of it.

So, I hope now you can see that with everything your organisation and its people do, say and so on, you show the culture of your organisation.

You may have a thought here that it will also reflect the culture and personal opinions of the person involved. But this is also a reflection of your organisation culture: that actually your people haven’t been transmitted your culture consciously in a way that they can convey it. If people express their own view when representing your organisation, you need to make your culture stronger.

In this episode I am talking to Dr Richard Beal, a professionalism expert.

We discuss the relationship between professionalism and the culture of an organisation. Richard shares his experience and deep knowledge on the topic in wonderful nuggets of insights.

In short, there is a strong link between the level of professionalism and the culture of an organisation. The standards and expectations, or lack of, are a reflection of the underlying culture.

To summarise, professionalism rubs off others and to the whole organisation, positively or negatively. So, a good way to improve your culture is to increase the level of professionalism you require from your people and from yourself.

Today, I want to talk about what is required to understand culture and inclusion, particularly when an organisation is looking for people to work in that field and improve inclusion in their organisation. This topic came to me after seeing many times that if basically, you are not from a minority group, you cannot understand inclusion. In short, it seems that you have to experience being in an underrepresented group, having been discriminated against, maybe bullied or harassed because of your differences.

Here, I want to raise the view that this is not enough and that lived experience doesn’t give you all the tools to tackle diversity and inclusion. This lived experience needs to come alongside a robust theoretical knowledge. It doesn’t replace it and cannot substitute for it. So, when you want to improve your organisational culture and inclusion, a crucial step is to bring this knowledge to people and that people with the responsibility for your culture and inclusion have a strong knowledge about the subject.

Finally, the last thing that is required to fully understand inclusion is the need to understand the specificities of your organisation.

Listen to Vinay Raman sharing his view on how data can help with inclusion.

We tend to think that culture is something intangible, fluffy, a soft aspect of an organisation.

Not at all. Like many other things in an organisation, culture and inclusion have results that can be measured.

This is what we discuss in the episode.

- People management and data are not often used together, in the same sentence. - How can data and their analysis help with knowing where you are in your organisation with inclusion?  - What kind of data should be collected when it comes to inclusion?  - How could you relate these data to more conventional KPIs?

Raising your level of awareness, and the ones of the people around you will improve inclusion and belonging in your team or organisation.

I am going to touch on two subjects. In the first part of the podcast, I will delve into why we react the way we do to diversity. In the second part, I will discuss some steps you can take to raise your awareness to differences.

It was found that the more familiar something becomes by repeated exposure, the more we “like” it. How does this occur? Our brain has both an avoidance reflex towards the unfamiliar and an approach reflex. The studies showed that familiarity decreased our avoidance reflex. It did not change our approach reflex. So, it seems that familiarity reduces the “fear” we have for something.

This is why familiarity makes us feel safe. We may not like it but we feel safe in familiar environments.

On the other side, novelty attracts us because it activates a different part of the brain, the motivation centres. This is what allows us to try new things, explore new territories.

How could this then explain and be used with how we react to diversity and our view of inclusion.

It looks like exposure is a very important part. Without exposure, something cannot become familiar. Now when we think to our exposure to diversity, we should recognise it is not that much for most of us. Let’s take the UK for instance, where I live and the idea of race/ethnicity I mentioned earlier.

In the second part, I am going to give you 5 steps that will increase your awareness.

There is a lot of talk about becoming more inclusive. We may think of it at the level of an organisation but at the end, it is all about people. It is people in whatever group they are part of who exhibit inclusive behaviours or not. So, becoming inclusive begins (and ends) with people, with you.

So, let’s go through the 5 steps.

The first step is to Become self-aware

The second step is to keep learning

The third step is all about respect

Then, accept

Finally, integrate, make the differences yours

In this episode, I receive as a guest Henrika Tonder. Henrika is originally from Finland. She has lived half of her life in France and is now located in Helsinki with her husband of 2 decades and their 3 teenage boys. She stands for equality and believes that we can’t afford to waste another generation of unused human potential. As a self-employed Peace Performance Coach Henrika helps international high achievers, start-up founders and CEOs in growth companies raise their level of awareness, develop emotional intelligence and create their best possible lives! She works globally in 4 languages: English, French, Finish and Swedish.

We discuss the power of coaching and how using coaching among other approaches will improve the implementation of inclusion in organisations.

If you want to continue the discussion with Henrika, you can reach her:

LinkedIn

Website: https://www.henrikatonder.com/