Beth Ridley argues that inclusive culture comes from everyday moments, not just big programs. Leaders should model inclusive behavior in meetings and one-on-ones, then reinforce it through hiring, performance reviews, and recognition.
Now is the time to really embrace and encourage diverse perspectives, different ideas, because companies have to get creative and innovative with how they're figuring out how to manage and ultimately thrive in this new normal. Again, my philosophy, you don't need to spend a ton of money and have big, huge strategies. In fact, smaller steps that you can do is better because the best strategies are those that actually get implemented. And as it turns out, the things that employees really care about when they reflect on their overall employee experience in their companies are those everyday day to day moments. So it could be the emails that they read, it could be the hallway conversations that they have, team meetings, one on one, those all add up to the employee experience. So therefore, if you want to drive a more inclusive culture, if you want to have a better workplace, positively impact those micro moments, those micro experiences, those day to day things like meetings. Right. So meetings make up such a huge part of the employee experience. That's why I'm going to focus on how to use meetings to drive an inclusive culture. But meetings is really small. It's that micro moment. So I want to zoom out for a minute just so you can have a better appreciation of the important role that these micro moments play play within an overall organizational culture transformation. So here is a highly simplified process map that I use with clients to help them walk through culture transformation. And that could be trying to get their culture to be more innovative, or it could be trying to get their culture to be more inclusive. Whatever the elements of the culture needs to be transformed. But it starts first with strategy. Right. So really understanding how the values and the behaviors that you want to drive forward align with the overall vision and mission of the organization. Right. So there you're really making the business case for investing time and potentially resources in driving these behaviors forward. Then leaders really need to model the behaviors. Again, clarify culture of the organization starts at the top and this is where the micro moments come in. So I really work with leaders to think about what does your average day look like, what are you doing? You in meetings, you have one on ones, you're sending out emails. How do we make small changes to those things that you do so you're better reflecting and modeling and inclusive behaviors and those things that you're doing anyway. And that way they do them and they're able to do them consistently. So so you link the behaviors that you want to drive forward into, you integrate them into these micro moments and then you encourage other folks to embrace and demonstrate these behaviors as well, but through positive feedback, recognition and rewards. And then ultimately, you do want to hold everyone accountable. So you have already made the business case that these behaviors are an integral part of business success when you did the strategy alignment. So it stands to reason that our hiring criteria are going to be based on these behaviors. We're going to make sure that we give professional development around these behaviors so folks have no excuse for not being able to develop and demonstrate them and then ultimately integrating those behaviors in employee performance evaluation.
