We are giving up on Diversity and Inclusion as we know it
Many of us spend 70% of our time at work or thinking about work, and that is a lot of time either spent personally and professionally fulfilled or not. The business world as we know it no longer works for employees. According to Charity Times, in the charity sector, six in ten employees are looking to leave their current organisation in search of a similarly impact-driven role elsewhere. Despite the best of intentions, our sector is not yet fulfilling employee expectations around Diversity and Inclusion promises. This leads to high employee turnover, low employee satisfaction, disengagement and lower service delivery impact.
The challenge of Diversity and Inclusion is not going anywhere. Times have changed, and now the top challenge facing CEOs, after securing income and multi-year delivery contracts, is their unhappy and unproductive workplace. In this sector, employees are regularly asked to step forward and achieve more than may seem possible. Over time, we have found that disengagement and reduced productivity fester and proliferate within organisations struggling with their workplace culture. You will find yourselves surrounded by employees who are either:
Disengaged to the point of silence: employees that don't bother speaking up anymore because they have no confidence in the potential for real change.
Planning their escape: employees who are actively looking for new roles right now, and as a result their work productivity noticeably reduces.
Despite this knowledge, these broken workplaces exist throughout the sector. One focus group interviewee who was planning their escape explained their experience this way: "when everything happened in the summer [of 2020], there were so many grand promises about the change to come, but 18 months on, everything is back to normal, nothing significant changed, even the things we thought would make a big difference made no difference at all."
Much has been done, and too little achieved, to create new systems and embed new practices. The sector needs to ensure an accurate and lasting turnaround that invigorates creativity, passion and productivity in the short and long term. We're giving up on D&I as we know it, taking the lessons and making something new, significant, and bound in systems change.
Introducing Melding: a full-service Diversity and Inclusion platform for the UK's charities and social enterprises. We help industry-leading CEOs overcome fragmented workplace culture by facilitating collaborative Diversity and Inclusion sessions so they can better serve all employees and their communities.
With Melding, we're working to ensure every member of the charity sector workforce can feel safe, secure, heard and seen in their workplace and industry. Melding will empower the charity sector's workforce to adopt inclusive practices, increase diversity, improve employee experience, mission and vision alignment, effective leadership development, and utilise qualitative and quantitative data to make decisions about how to develop and invest in culture.
Melding creates simple D&I strategies that impact organisations can implement at every level. We take the hard work off your plate: providing tailored solutions, data-driven recommendations, and targets for your D&I growth. We cannot ignore the need to attract, hire, and retain a workforce that reflects our entire society as a sector. CEOs in this sector are under-resourced. Few have the professional experience to take Diversity, Culture and Inclusion effectively while ensuring financial sustainability and delivering on the mission and vision of their organisation. It's impossible to do all of these adequately at once.
Melding is an investment in your people, your leadership, the sustainability of your organisation and the development of solid company culture. Melding works across all levels of your organisation to deliver tailored solutions, measure and track progress, and provide training and guides for effective and measurable implementation. We will ensure that D&I becomes part of the core DNA of your organisation.
If you would like to find out more about Melding, head to the website here.
Please register your interest in working with the Melding team here.
