The Best Practices of the 100 Best Conference by Avtar and Working Mother had power-packed sessions that highlighted the companies’ best practices on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. One of the sessions highlighted the best practices from EY on Social Equity and Standard Chartered GBS on Future Workplace.
The session began with EY’s Executive Director Chung Tham presenting EY’s pillars of Social Equity Impact: Equitable experience for employees throughout, Inclusive leadership, and creating a sense of belongingness. EY believes in equity, inclusive leadership, and enriching neurodiversity. EY created a group called “Purple Champions” for people with disabilities to create a “Centre of Excellence” team for enabling people with neurodiversity. EY keeps a check on its leadership policies to ensure their inclusiveness and take action if needed.
This session was then followed by the topic “Future Workplace” by Mathew Brady from GBS. As a result of the pandemic, GBS eventually moved to a permanent hybrid workplace. This shift started by taking one step at a time and involved multiple survey feedback from their employees. Analyzing months of data, GBS realized that employees had a change in mindset about the workplace flexibility policies. Initially, they enjoyed working from home, but later, they realized the need to work from the office. GBS decided to understand every role in-depth, including its limitations. They recognized the need to redesign the workplace to foster collaboration.
Some commonly asked questions:
How did EY break biases?
Biases can be addressed by analyzing the process. Ask questions like— Am I hiring because I have a preference? Or because I have hired them in the past? Am I looking at the requirement?
In an ideal world, what steps should an organization take to achieve equity?
Equity is a journey and diversity, equity, and inclusion must be broken down to achieve them. People from all levels must work together at the same time to achieve it. One should understand that different countries have different maturity levels. Though there is equity, the primary objective is belongingness.
What can be done to redo workplace integration?
This can be achieved by taking one step at a time and by understanding all the challenges their people have to work from home. Although innovation is good, getting the basics right is the key while doing so respectfully.
How should we start implementing workplace policies?
GBS started implementing from their Operations team in India. They over-communicated and made people understand the “why”. All the talented people from their organization came together to build a strong foundation.
Key Takeaways:
EY is moving beyond diversity, expanding its hiring pool, and providing equal opportunity irrespective of their background.
For a culture to take off, it has to be across all levels.
People with neurodiversity must be looked at from a different perspective. People with autism are amazing at managing tasks that require performing mundane tasks such as managing data.
GBS worked together with their people leaders on making all the initiatives operational by understanding the crux of the problem.
GBS realized that their people could deliver their outcome irrespective of their physical location.
To conclude, organizations like EY and GBS created detailed feedback mechanisms to support people from their organizations whose job roles were impacted. Both organizations believe in creating an inclusive culture as the primary step for making policies.
