Last week, I had the pleasure of sitting down and chatting with Martin Mason from Unleashed with the purpose of learning more about Diversity & Inclusion. Please watch the video above to hear our discussion.
Martin gives us some brilliant insight into the world of D&I and provides some actionable steps and recommendations that businesses (of all sizes) can be making to ensure they have a diverse workforce and an inclusive organisation. The discussion is summarised below:
About Martin and Unleashed
Martin has a wealth of experience in Talent Management, Performance and Learning & Development. He was most recently Global Head of Talent and Performance at The Body Shop, after having worked in Talent Management roles within Halfords and Wolseley. In early 2020, Martin set up Unleashed, with the aim of helping organisations become more successful, by making them more inclusive.
Martin and his team at Unleashed are incredibly passionate about unleashing people’s potential and have a deep-routed belief that everybody is talent, and that each person will apply that talent differently. The business ethos is about placing tools, services, and products in the hands of their clients, to remove the barriers that exist for entry into the workplace, as well as some barriers that people might experience at work, with the purpose of developing and fostering inclusive cultures.
Why Unleashed was formed
The forming of Unleashed was very personal for Martin, having worked in corporates from the age of 15. Although the businesses that Martin worked in were all in different industries, he saw some common themes across all: many people were struggling in certain organisations to fulfil their potential, and it was nothing to do with lack of potential or ability, often it was to do with their gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. This was something that didn’t sit right with Martin, and he set out to start making subtle changes to the infrastructure within Talent and L&D to influence senior leaders, in order to prove how successful it is to have a diverse workforce. Now that Diversity and Inclusion has been much more accepted within society and business, Martin has loved being able to go into a diverse range of organisations and support them with D&I.
What is Diversity and Inclusion?
Diversity focusses around difference. Being a diverse organisation is about having representation of different characteristics, cultures, beliefs, opinions, and views across the entire organisation.
Inclusion is about bringing people together and creating an environment where people feel that they belong. The nirvana point is to have a diverse set of people in an inclusive workforce, so that everybody across the organisation can feel safe to be themselves and hold their own unique talents, views, beliefs and opinions in a respectful environment.
D&I for business performance
Diversity and Inclusion isn’t just an ethical practice that businesses are recommended to get involved in from a moral or societal standpoint – those things are hugely important, of course – but having a diverse and inclusive business genuinely affects bottom line – it’s been proven time and again.
As Martin mentioned in our discussion, the reason that Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty has been so successful is because she has tapped into a market in which the make-up does not cater to different skin tones. In the beauty industry, senior teams are predominantly made up of white people. As such, the lack of variety in skin tones for make-up was never deemed to be a problem. Rihanna’s organisation has demonstrated that, by having diversity at the senior table it can and does make a huge difference to the bottom line.
How to be more inclusive within recruitment and development
Recruitment
One of the terms that we regularly hear is ‘unconscious bias’. Unconscious bias happens to everybody, and is the concept of an individual unconsciously making judgements about people based on how much they are/are not “like myself”.
Although everybody has unconscious bias, Martin and Unleashed subscribe to the notion of ‘Conscious Inclusion’ when it comes to recruitment of staff. This is about being mindful of the unconscious bias that everybody has, but taking additional steps to make sure that everything possible can be done to make the recruitment process more inclusive.
Many businesses will advertise for roles and heavily focus on the candidate being a ‘team player’, ‘be collaborative’, ‘part of the family’, ‘one of us’ etc – these are all ways of subliminally telling candidates that if you are not like us, you’ll struggle to do well here; this is a huge problem for many businesses when it comes to D&I. There has been extensive research undertaken by Harvard University around the psychology of language and the research has been able to pinpoint certain language used within job descriptions as being a deterrent for certain ethnicities and genders.
There are many tools available that can be used when formulating job descriptions, such as https://www.totaljobs.com/insidejob/gender-bias-decoder/ and https://textio.com/ that can help with this.
The other thing that Martin recommends is for organisations to really think about what they need for the role itself. Martin often talks to business leaders who inform him that they’re looking to fill a leadership role and the skills required are, for example: adaptability, good decision making, emotional intelligence and problem solving sills – then when the job advert comes out, it says: ‘must have X amount of years’ leadership experience must have a 2:1 degree etc, so there’s a clear discrepancy.
Really thinking about removing some of the barriers to applications, such as experience and qualifications and focussing on what is really needed from the role can have a huge impact on the numbers of diverse applications for roles.
There are other ways and means in which recruitment practices can cater for diversity and inclusion for organisations of all size. Making sure that hiring managers are supported by another member of staff that is different to them, and who could offer another viewpoint on the applications and interviews of candidates. This mitigates the risk of unconscious bias and gives another person the ability to provide feedback. For small businesses that might not yet have a diverse range of staff, look to network with other organisations and buddy up as part of the interview process, in the spirit of small business collaboration.
Development
In addition to ensuring businesses are adopting the best D&I practices within recruitment, there are also ways in which D&I can be implemented as part of staff development.
Martin developed ‘You Unleashed’ as a passion project in early 2020, which was focussed on developing the person as a whole: Martin was keen to produce a psychometric assessment that looked at identifying what someone’s potential is, what their emotional intelligence is, how quickly they learn and how good they are at problem solving. The idea was that if somebody was recruited and on-boarded into an organisation, the tool could very quickly and easily identify where somebody’s strengths lay, but also where they needed additional support and development.
Unleashed has been able to use this tool with many of its clients. As a recent example, Unleashed has rolled out ‘You Unleashed’ to a well-known brand to support them in hiring more women into a previously male-dominated team. Martin and the team ascertained, through using the tool, that there were some clear gaps around how certain team members interact with others. Some training was provided around communication and empathy which enabled this team to reach its diversity goals.
To learn more about Unleashed
In addition to the ‘You Unleashed’ psychometric tool (which is very proudly powered by Evolve Assess), outlined above, Unleashed provides an array of consultancy services to its clients: more information can be found via the Unleashed website. Unleashed is proud to work across a broad range industries, and are passionate about bringing together many clients in their online network:
The Arena Network
The online Network that Unleashed has developed is called ‘The Arena Network’. The network was originally established because, during COVID, many people in the HR community were feeling pressure and needed help and support within D&I. The result was ‘The Arena’, which was founded to bring all of these people together who had common problems and challenges and to help them work through it as a collective. For individuals and businesses who have common D&I or Talent challenges or issues, they are placed into teams with some facilitation from Unleashed. The membership volume has almost trebled in recent months and is a fantastic community to be a part of.
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Summary
Being aware of Diversity & Inclusion and having a strategy in place is absolutely paramount for business success. Society is changing, we’re getting better, but we all need to act together to ensure that our recruitment and development processes are as fair as they can be.
Adopting small changes in all sized businesses can make an enormous amount of difference, and by incorporating some of the tips, tricks and recommendations that Martin has talked through in this discussion will make huge differences to the success of businesses – not only to ensure an enriching and diverse environment, but also to the organisations’ bottom lines.
Evolve Assess is proud to work in partnership with Unleashed, by powering the ‘You Unleashed’ psychometric tool; we can’t speak highly enough of Martin and the work the guys at Unleashed are doing. Head over to their website, to see how they can support your business.
