Big Ideas to Elevate your 2026 DEI Strategy

Speaker A: It's not that these are bad people. It's not that these, ah, people are against diversity or are actively prejudiced, racist, sexist, homophobic in any particular way. They've just not been convinced. They've just not had a good argument put forward to them and they've not had it explained clearly. They've not been given clear actions in terms of the things that they can do day to day. So it's very understandable and natural that they're ambivalent. But if, if what sneaks into our comm strategy is a, uh, subtext of if you're not on board with this, you're somehow flawed. Instead of trying to come to the table and speak to the people we want to speak to directly, we're going to have exactly the opposite of the desired effect, which is we're going to serve to further push people away from the topic.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Inclusion at Work podcast. I'm Kerry Boies and with me today is Phil Cross. Today we're here to talk about big ideas to elevate your 2026 DEI strategy. Yes, it is that time of year already. We have almost hit the end and we are starting to think about 2026. What's been really interesting for us is that most of the narrative around DEI over the last 12 months certainly has been one of doom and gloomy, but we do not think that is the case. And today's podcast is about taking a different approach. We want to share our learnings, we want to look at the really positive things that we think you can do in the world of dei and we want to help you make an even bigger impact in your organization for 2026. So we'll start off by a bit of scene setting, I guess, and the logical place to start there is why there has been this doom and gloom attitude to dei. And I guess without going into too much detail, because we want to stay on the positive side of things today. But the negativity coming out of the US over the last 12 months I think has had a huge, huge impact. Phil, any other thoughts on um, why it's been quite so negative?

Speaker A: I think that's been the catalyst for the conversation. Right. It's um, you know, sensationalist headlines are abound when it comes to, when it comes to the administration in the us their stance around DEI and the knock on effect it's had in organizations. And you can see, you can see the cascade effect, you know, uh, especially for businesses in the US that have big government contracts, etc. Their livelihood was literally being held to ransom. You know, it's either comply with the supposed dismantling of your DEI efforts or your, um, you know, your business, your relationships with the government are at threat. And we saw that have a knock on effect to other organizations as well. So I think there's no denying that's been the catalyst for it all. But as we'll kind of get into, I think a little bit, um, it's also caused a bunch of interesting conversations. And we've talked about this quite a lot in the past. You know, every cloud has a silver lining. And I think anything that causes us to examine how effective we've been and the tactics we've been using in any particular circumstances is not always a bad thing. So while it undeniably hasn't been a, uh, you know, an overall kind of positive news cycle, I think some of the consequences means that dei, uh, will probably come out stronger on the other side.

Speaker B: M agree. And I think what's really interesting is when we take this a stage deeper to a neuroscience level, which is when we are seeing all of this negativity in the media, when we're having a lot of negative conversations over time, what happens is that's self perpetuating. So, so for those of you that love neuroscience, Phil, I know you are one of those people, um, something called Hebb's law says that neurons that fire together wire together. And what that effectively means is the more times we are making connections between two things, so in this case di and bad, uh, things, the more those two things become, become connected and that unconsciously trains our brain, that DEI is, is not a good space to be in. The amount of my friends that say to me, oh gosh, it must be really hard to work in DEI right now. And that sentiment I guess is unhelpful because what it does to our brains is that when we're feeling negative about something, it shuts down our problem solving centers. So we're much less able to think about solutions, it prevents us having good ideas and it makes us much less able to think about the future and the change that we want to see. And I guess what's really interesting for us, and we've been talking a lot about recently, is the parallel with this to the climate crisis. So up until a few years ago, all of the sentiment around climate crisis was negativity. We're all doomed, there's no hope. Um, but what we learned there was that to be able to make change for people, to be able to want to do things differently, there needs to be an idea that that's possible. We need to be able to see the future. We need to see the great things that other people are doing in this space for us to have a belief and to have that positivity and optimism that we can make change. So that's what we're here to talk about today is actually how do we think about dei, uh, from a different lens, how do we think about it from a more positive lens? And what that's going to do to our brains then is open us up to thinking differently, to making better decisions, to having bigger ideas. And, um, that optimism is absolutely vital to us having the best possible strategies. And I guess our role as dei, uh, leaders within our organization is how do we help that flow down to people within the organization? How do we help them see this positive future? Because it can be such an interesting and exciting area, both for organizations and individuals. And we want to help people be able to lean into that if we want to make change.

Speaker A: It's funny, we shared. We actually, um, you know, unbeknownst to you, listener, uh, we did a webinar on this topic the other day, and one of the quotes we shared when we were talking about this was from Noam Chomsky, and it said that optimism is a strategy for making a better future. And this wasn't one of the four big ideas that we talked to people about and that we're going to talk to you about today in this, uh, in this podcast, but almost a sneaky fifth big idea is relentless optimism. I think, uh, in this space, if you do nothing else, carrying that positive attitude, you know, wiring those, uh, associations in your brain between DEI hopefulness, making positive change as opposed to the opposite. It could be the difference that makes the difference for you in 2026. So there you go. Secret, secret, bonus fifth big idea here,

Speaker B: uh, for you certainly makes the work more fun.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: So, in sort of line with all of those things, what we wanted to share with you today, as Phil said, is four what we think of as big ideas that really, we believe will help elevate your strategy for next year, which, by which we mean make a bigger difference. And those four things are, um, firstly, how do we make comms really central? So, so often when we work with organizations, comms is an afterthought. At the end of writing a strategy, we're like, well, how do we communicate that? But actually we think it's got a much bigger role to play, so we'll talk to you about that. The second is how do we run our ergs like real teams? So how do we think of them as high performance entities, not just this random volunteer group over the side that we might find a bit frustrating? Idea number three is how do we use meetings as a driver of change? We all have so many meetings and they're also the point at, uh, which we interact with others. So they can be either an opportunity for inclusion or exclusion. How do we use those more broadly in culture change? And then finally, it wouldn't be a future facing podcast without some AI chat. So what's the role of AI in all this? And we're going to talk to you about how you can use AI to challenge yourself as part of your DEI strategy. So Phil, do you want to jump us into the first idea?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just very quickly before we do that, one of the reasons why we're sort of framing these as big ideas is because time and time again we see these four really impactful things being missed out on by organizations. They're not often as incorporated as strongly as they could be into organizational approaches. And when we do see organizations embrace them, when we work with organizations to put them into place, the impact is pretty profound. So please feel free to swipe with pride, uh, whatever piques your interest as we talk about these. So the first one I think really follows on nicely from what we were just talking about in the intro, um, which is making comm central to your strategy. So doubling and tripling and down on the effort that you put into talking about DEI in your organization. Really thinking about it, because we know that there is that sales job to do. We know that again, a, uh, lot of the exposure people have to DEI at the moment is one from the news media, is one from maybe podcasts that they listen to, maybe experiences from previous organizations. And it's not always as positive as it could be. So despite our best efforts, sometimes people are not bought in. And we can see that in the data. We can see that in attendance numbers for events or programs. We see that in sentiment or engagement analysis. There is a job to do in convincing people. And strategies have fallen flat. Great strategies have fallen flat because this hasn't been integrated. Um, and organizational comms is difficult. So we're entering a space here where comms channels are already saturated via emails, teams, whatever, yammer, whatever internal channels your organization uses, they can already feel quite overwhelming. And we're trying to talk about a really complex and complicated set of topics around dei. We're up against that legacy positioning. So how it's been talked about in the past or how it's been talked about in other organizations and the exposure people have had. We've talked about that before. Um, and of course there are mixed levels of buy in and understanding from people in the organization. So it's really difficult and especially when it's an afterthought, you know, when, when we put together our strategy and then it's like, okay, how do we talk about this as opposed to foundationally thinking about comms as we go through. So really the opportunity here is positioning dei, uh, to cut through the noise and connect with the people that we want to reach most. Kerry, any, any builds on that. Before we dive into some of the particulars of how.

Speaker B: What we're trying to say here is we start with that. We start with actually how do we need to position dei, uh, to cut through that noise and connect with the people that we want to reach. And it's a real flip in terms of how we see most organizations work. Most organizations, it's what do we want to do and then how do we communicate it actually, how do we communicate in a way that's going to resonate and that then influences the type of things that we do as part of our, as part of our strategy.

Speaker A: I mean, how do we make it resonate for a lot of organizations is the key question to ask when they're, when putting together a strategy. Because if it's not going to resonate, it's not going to have the impact, it's not going to cause the shift that you want. So for some organizations it is the starting question and kind of linked to that is really as a first step thinking about who it is we want to reach. And by default, and very unintentionally, most DEI strategies tend to speak to people who are already familiar and engaged with the topic. So if we're just using the sort of typical language around DEI strategies, focusing on the events that are, uh, very commonly focused on running the kind of programs that are typical, that tends to be attractive to people who generally don't need convincing. But it can fail to connect. And we see this in the data with a large portion of an organization's audience, for want of a better word, for who the language and the positioning and the initiatives don't resonate, that it's not immediately obvious to them what the benefit is and why we're doing this. So really the first port of call is looking at your data, looking at your organization composition, um, segmenting things like your engagement scores, if you've done any Inclusion, uh, surveys, et cetera, and having those conversations and finding out who this isn't working for, um, and then really opening up the conversation there, um, and getting clear on okay, what are the shifts we need to make? Because very often the goals are quite straightforward with a lot of dei, uh, strategies. We want people to think that it's important. We want people to feel clear and motivated and we want people to take part in activities and make inclusion part of their day to day. So a sort of standard kind of think field do um, matrix there. But all too often we see people not doing that, um, uh, and for various reasons. And I'll just share a quick example from an organization that we've done some work with here. When we dove in, we knew very, very quickly from looking at the data that people weren't engaged, uh, with the, with the topic. Right. People weren't showing up to events, they weren't um, they weren't taking it seriously. So we had to find out why. And when we dug in we found out that really this was the, I think the third or fourth time the DEI strategy had been relaunched in, in a handful of years. And really people were feeling, were thinking this is just a tick box exercise because the organization relaunched the strategy several times but really didn't take any meaning. So they were feeling just a bit frustrated, overwhelmed, quite negative. And they weren't taking part because the organization wasn't meaningfully taking part. So their, their action was mirroring the organizations. So that gave us a really clear idea of okay, what do we need to do and what sort of positioning shifts do we need to do? We need to put into place here. But yeah, any, any thoughts, any builds on that, Kerry, before we move on?

Speaker B: Yeah, I guess of course we can do research and understand the organization, of course we always should. But I think in any organization, because most organizations are reflective of the population in some way, there is a huge chunk of people to whom DEI isn't top of mind or top of their agenda. Now it doesn't mean that they're bad people. It means that they have other priorities or they haven't understood and connected with dei. And I guess that's really what we're talking about here. There are a portion of people probably relatively small, probably 10 to 20% of an organization that are super passionate about this space. But there are a big, big chunk of people that aren't and they're really who we need to convert and talk to and connect to. So the example that Phil just shared was us saying how do we know more about that group of people because they're the ones that we need to talk to. And how do we make sure that our communications and how we talk about our strategy works for them? Because pretty much anything we do is going to connect with the people that are already brought in and super passionate that dei. That's not where we have to focus. They're gonna, they're gonna be on board and give us a big tick. We have to work how we look at that big middle ground and how we work in a way that's gonna get them to be engaged. And it's not an easy task.

Speaker A: No. And um, something that sort of sneaks in sometimes and we, we've seen this in, you know, we've seen this in certain circumstances is, is maybe an attitude towards the people who aren't fully bought in. And as you said very clearly there, Kerry, it's not that these are bad people. It's not that these are people are against diversity or are actively prejudiced, racist, sexist, homophobic in any particular way. They've just not been convinced, but they've just not had a good argument put forward to them and they've not had it explained clearly. They've not been given clear actions in terms of the things that they can do day to day. So it's very understandable and natural that they're ambivalent. But if what sneaks into our comm strategy is a subtext of if you're not on board with this, you're somehow flawed, uh, instead of trying to come to the table and speak to the people we want to speak to directly, we're going to have exactly the opposite of the displayed effect, which is we're going to serve to further push people away from the topic.

Speaker B: And that's really important. Right, because DNI's ended up with a bad name because there has been a lot of execution in this space that has been very judgmental. Telling people that they're bad because they've got bias. For example, telling people that are leaders that they are racist, um, or sexist when they're doing things unintentionally. And what that, yeah, as you said, serves to do is alienate people, means they're too scared to lean into this work. Whereas we need to find the uh, big. That's what we're trying to do here is connect. We're trying to work out how to connect them with dei, understand why it's important and therefore know what they need to do and be on board with making change and taking action.

Speaker A: M and it comes back to the neuroscience once again. You know, we've heard stories of workshops being started, um, and you know, the opening line from the facilitator is something akin to everyone in this room is a racist and all that's going to do is send people into fight, flight, freeze or please, they're going to shut down, become defensive, angry, and all of a sudden you've created an uphill battle for yourself in the room. So uh, the difference between being right and effective, uh, a lot of the time is, is worth keeping front of mind. So kind of moving on from that. We think about positioning shifts here. So what are some of the positioning shifts? And we'll give you some examples of ones that we often um, bring to the table when we're working with organizations. So positioning can come in the form of, of how we communicate and the language we use, but also the initiatives we choose to champion. You know, what we pay attention to, what we incentivize as an organization. These are all parts of a positioning matrix without us going too far down the rabbit hole of marketing and comms theory. So some things to keep in mind, one shift is away from a, I guess a compliance focused, um, attitude towards dei, towards a more values driven approach. And by that we mean you're saying all the right things on your comms channels, that this is important, that this is part of our values, this is who we are. But the only actual active thing people are experiencing the organization is a off the shelf, uh, compliance driven piece of learning and development. You know, it's a 10 minute video that is on the learning management system. It's not been tailored to the organization. Oftentimes these videos come out of say the US as well, where a lot of the language and the context isn't super relevant to an Australian audience. The signal that you're saying, the positioning that you're unintentionally lacking as an organization is that really uh, we're doing this because we have to, as opposed to taking the care, the time and attention to put in place initiatives and to talk about it authentically, which shows that it is an actual values driven, uh, values driven thing. Another example of this, um, and this is a sort of shift in, in maybe language or how we talk about things. But DEI can be seen as a very soft and fluffy thing, um, by some people. It's just about how people feel and very often this is um, from the position of people. And again this is no judgment to these people as a, you know, middle aged straight white man m Myself who's not really had much in the way of kind of activities, discrimination or kind of, um, exclusion in kind of organizational life. Um, it's hard to see from those, from the perspective of those people. Um, so two people who. It's not natural to take the perspective of others. We need to find additional ways to connect with them and to make sure that we're sort of ticking all the motivational boxes. So, yes, it is about how people feel, it is about people's experience, but that is also a driver of effectiveness. It's a driver of team performance, it's a driver of business results. It means that we all operate better together as well. And very often that narrative doesn't get talked about because I think, uh, maybe there's a. I don't know your perspective on this, Kerry, but there's a perspective that it's distasteful to talk about that sometimes. I've heard that from other DEI professionals that we shouldn't have to talk about the business impact of it. It should be just enough to talk about the impact on people. And again, there's a difference here between that being true and it being effective.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I think we know we need budget to do this work. And therefore one of the number one people that we need to convince and connect with is a cfo. And therefore business results are, ah, their number one motivator and driver. So as Phil said, it's about being realistic and doing what we need to do to get the work and to

Speaker A: get the next round of budget signed off to do things as well. If we can prove that it's had a tangible uplift on things, then, yeah, we get more money to do more good work. Um, another positioning shift is away from it being sometimes seen as a separate and siloed thing. Um, so this is a really common one. Right? Again, we talk a lot about dei, ah, but the only time it comes up is once or twice a year, uh, uh, in conjunction with, um, some events or some days of significance. So Pride and ADOC Week, for example. Um, and while of course, there's nothing at all wrong with celebrating or acknowledging those days, um, it signals, if that's all we're doing, it signals that this is something we do sometimes, uh, as opposed to making it part of the culture, weaving it into our, uh, comms, our learning and development, our overall, uh, ways of working in a way that feels daily rather than episodic and confusing and nebulous language, like using words like episodic in the middle of a sentence, um, so, um, this is a space that's filled with terms that are not part of day to day language and that are not always understood by people. And if you're using language that people aren't quite sure what it means in that context, you run the risk of making people feel stupid. And when people feel stupid again, we get that amygdala firing, we get that fight flight freezer, please. We get people being defensive, shutting down, not wanting to engage, not wanting to learn. So how do we just make this clear and compelling? So some examples of that that Kerry, jump in with, uh, any additional ones? But equity is a word that. It's the E and D, E, I. But we've run enough workshops where we've asked, okay, does anyone know the difference between equity and equality? That it's not clear. People aren't clear on what this word means. And again, in what context are we using it? Can we replace it with a synonym that is comparable but a lot more digestible? Something like fairness, for example? Kerry, any. Any examples you'd like to share?

Speaker B: Yeah, I guess I was going to bring. Do one that brings it kind of all together. That's not just language.

Speaker A: Yeah, sure.

Speaker B: Because we've been talking about it recently, which is around International Women's Day. So I think when we first started doing International Women's Day, we thought about, okay, well, what's the change that we want to see and how do we best deliver that in a workshop when we now many, many years later think about International Women's Day, our starting point is what's going to motivate people? Because what we used to see when we first started was what happened at International Women's Day. We ended up with a group of women that we're talking to about gender equality. So what we now do is, yeah, what's the motivating factor? So in previous years, we've run International Women's Day around effective decision making, for example. And of course it's about how you can do that in a way that is inclusive and also benefits women. But making better decisions. Yeah, everyone wants that. Or this year we're looking at actually about habit formation and how do I make personal change and create habits for myself. And of course, the lens is gender equity, but there's also a secondary benefit there, which is that's going to apply to other elements in life. So the whole positioning piece, starting with what is the thing that is going to motivate, what's going to get people to engage and connect, is such an important, important starting piece,

Speaker A: making that shift in the IWD talks, in the International Women's Day talks, we've seen the composition. Assumedly this is not an unfamiliar experience to some of you who are listening, but you go along to an International Women's Day Talk, and probably 90% of the audience is women. Um, when, of course, the hope is that we are connecting to and having a conversation with a broad representative audience in the organization. So we see that composition shift. We see people getting curious and going, okay, this is, this sounds different. This sounds interesting. Let me, let me see what this is about. Which is exactly the reaction we want to provoke.

Speaker B: The other example that I know we both love in this space is around feedback. Um, and obviously all organizations talk about feedback with different terminology. One of the organizations, though, that we've worked with relatively recently had a sort of head office team, and then they had a team that were more operational and actually worked sort of going up electricity pylons. And the head office work that had been done was all around courageous conversations. And they wanted to roll that out for their operational staff. What we very quickly were able to share and identify is courageous conversations is not going to work for that audience. That's an instant turn off. So we worked with them to say, actually, how do we frame this in a way that's more motivating, more relevant? And really the content was the same, but a shift in language from courageous conversations to straight talk, and how they just have direct and honest conversations with other team members, especially around areas like safety, which is so important for them, was much more motivating. Got a much higher level of buy in attendance, and then sort of listening once they were in the room than if we'd tried to get them along to some courageous conversation training?

Speaker A: Yep. So we could go on and on about this. And Kerry and I are, uh, guilty of talking about comms an awful lot with our clients, but for good reason. We see that if difference it makes when it's put front and center. Uh, so really the key takeaway here, if there is one, is that considering your audience from the start and thinking about how we're talking to, how we're positioning, how we're cutting through with that audience, and is our strategy accomplishing that is really, really important. So a couple of takeaway reflection questions for you, if you're listening to this and you've been nodding along so far, are, do we understand our audience? Have we taken the time to break down our audience to think about who our strategy is connecting with and who it's not, and do we have that clear positioning? Are we able to measure what's, what's, you know, what's, what's hitting home and what's not in terms of our initiatives and our strategy? So yeah, that's point number one.

Speaker B: Okay. Second big idea then is about ergs. So an ERG is an employee resource group. You might also call them an employee affinity group or this might just be for you a DEI committee, but basically any volunteer group that you have working on a DEI agenda. And what we find when we normally talk to organizations about their employee resource groups is a sort of sinking, visually sinking feeling that they're having. So they sort of shut down a little bit and they tell us that it's really frustrating, it's hard work, they know the team's not happy, they're not happy, there's no impact, there's a lot of wasted time. Some organizations even find that their ergs are causing high levels of risk because they are raising issues that the organization might not be able to deal with at that point in time. So the idea here is, rather than having that group as something that's negative, frustrating and sort of seem quite separate to our normal teams, is to treat them like a real team. So what that means for us is trading like a high performance. That's what we ideally want for any team in our organization. And if we can treat them as a high performance team, that then becomes a vital driver of our DEI strategy. So the aim here is that this should be a group that's exciting for you and you feel really positive about and you can see a really clear impact versus one that I know many of you feel is a big waste of time and very highly frustrating. So if we're thinking about them as a high performance team, then the logical first question is, well, what is a high performance team? And our version of thinking about this looks, uh, at six areas. So the first is any team has to be really clear on their purpose, their why, why are they in existence and then have a strategy, a how for delivering to that. So that has to be motivating. It has to be clear. We need that vision, that strategy, uh, and that plan for what it is that we're trying to do. And almost every time we work with ergs, this is missing. There isn't that clarity and that's partly because of the skill level of people in erg. It's not their expertise area. We don't expect them to know everything about dei. Uh, we don't necessarily expect them to know everything about how to define a Strategy. So as an organization it's definitely something we need to help with. The second area is around clarity of roles. So both their role within the group. Do we have chairs, co chairs for example, are they part of certain project teams? But also what is the role of the ERG within the broader organization? Some ERGs are just about connection with other people in different groups. So there's a pride network that we work with and for them it's just about bringing people together to connect and share. Some EAGs, ERGs and organizations, there's a much higher expectation it might be about driving a DEI strategy or driving a strategy for a particular group. So we need real clarity on that. Then defined ways of working, how do we work as a team? How often do we meet up, how do we disagree productively? And how do we work with our other stakeholders? How do we get budget approved? How do we uh, define our strategy and know if that can move forwards? The fourth area for high performance teams is about, about capability and capacity. So for ergs, that's again skill. We talked about that. We don't always have the skills to be able to deliver what we need, but also capacity. It's a volunteer group. What is the expectation of time commitment? And as an organization are, uh, we allowing that? Is their leader on board with the fact that they might need four hours a week or four hours a fortnight to be able to do this work? Do we have that expectation stated clearly? And is everyone agreed? No. Fifth area team connection. We need to have trust, understand how each other works and all of those sort of basic things you would do in any team around team building and how you connect in a way that gets the best out of everyone. And then the sixth area is diverse representation. So do we have the right people on the team? And yes, that's about demographic diversity, but also diversity of thought, how we think to get better ideas. And then really importantly for ERGs is organizational diversity. Quite often we see ERG is just full of most junior people in the organization. Actually, if we want to get things done, if we want to have a business perspective to this work, we need some seniority in there as well. And we also want to represent different parts of the organization. I use the sort of context of a head, uh, office versus an operational team earlier, there would be very different expectations and thoughts from different people across those types of teams. Anything I've missed?

Speaker A: No, no, nothing you've missed there. I think you're going to get onto this next in terms of uh, working with the RGS to help kind of bring all this to life. But I wanted to highlight an important point here or an important common thing we observe in this work, which is there is often a, despite the frustration, despite a kind of fairly universal acknowledgment that things aren't working as well as they could be, there's sometimes a hesitation from uh, people and culture leads and HR leads to do anything about that because they don't want to rock the boat. Um, they don't, they don't want to be seen as being dismissive or being negative about this group of very well meaning, very positively intentioned, um, volunteers who are coming together to try and do a really good thing inside of an organization. But that's sort of uh, using radical candor language. Uh, for anyone who loves that model, that's ruinous empathy. That's not giving the feedback and the support that's necessary in order to get the group to where it needs to be. Because being part of a high performing team feels really good, feels really positive, feels really motivating. We all like being part of a team that's kicking goals and making progress and doing the thing. Being part of a team that's stagnating and feels impotent, feels terrible, quite frankly. So one of the key things here is getting over that initial hurdle, that mental hurdle of going, okay, we do need to do something about this. And, and, and we do need to invest, um, some time and energy as an organization into supporting these groups because otherwise we're having the opposite of the intended effect.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it's as with anything that we do, if we're thinking about productive disagreement, for example, it's what is the goal that we're aiming for. So both our organizations and RE want the same thing. We want to make the biggest impact for the people that we're trying to support. Uh, that's, that's our goal. So we've got the same goal. It's about helping make sure we get there in a way that's effective and everyone benefits. So yeah, I think it's a really important point and the way that I guess we come in and work with organizations to do that. Of course, as with any strategy, stage one is understanding where we are now, what's our current state. So work with ERG teams to understand that through normally some kind of pretty simple assessment. And looking at all of those six areas I've just mentioned in terms of high performance teams, um, there's one I might use as an example that we've run recently. They Were super strong from a team diversity perspective. This was a group supporting pride. Um, super strong from a team diversity perspective. Had pretty well defined ways of working, but huge gaps in terms of what their purpose was. No strategy in place, real lack of clarity around their role as part of the organization. Um, and obviously that made it really challenging for them. They were frustrated. The people team were frustrated. And what we were able to do pretty quickly with this one was go in and work with them through a workshop and define very, very quickly what their purpose was, what their role was, and what their measures of success were. How do we know if we've got this right? And importantly, we had a representation. We had representation from the broader organization as part of that conversation as well, to make sure that we weren't misaligned. And one of the really important areas for them was they wanted to do more. But every initiative that they felt like they put up got shut down. And that was because there wasn't alignment in terms of what they were trying to do. Right. So what we were able to get to in that session by having the organization representative there as well was what does an initiative need to do? What are the criteria for an initiative for it to be successful? So once we had that combined checklist effectively, it just made everything much simpler going forwards because they come up with an idea, they could demonstrate in a very simple one pager how it ticked all those boxes. And then of course it's going to get approved because it delivers to what everyone agrees we need to deliver to. What that then snowballed into time, over time was actually, let's give rergs a clear budget budget. So for the first year, they just got a 10 grand budget. They still had to get approval. But over time, as they could increasingly see the success of their initiatives and how, yes, they not only drove support for the pride group, but also they were increasing engagement levels across the business and they're linking back to things like retention. Then that, uh, budget is going to increase over time. So we get to a stage where it's really effective, but our ergs just can't work if they are in isolation, if they're operating in silos. They have to be connected into the organization. They have to have support from the organization and they have to have clarity from the organization. And when we do that really well, we do get these really high performance groups that can deliver to their community and their cause, that are happy and motivated, but are also making that impact that the organization wants to see. So that's kind of the gold Standard is when we, when we get to

Speaker A: that stage and just uh, an additional build on that as well. Connected to each other and leveraging off learnings and being centralized as well. Most organizations have several ergs who are focused on different groups and um, uh, going back to the challenge of comms, um, oversaturating when ergs, uh, are operating in complete isolation, we see um, that contributing to the potential confusion to the oversaturation of communications for example, as opposed to them coming together and coordinating and thinking, okay, how are we going to support each other? How are we going to avoid talking over each other inside of the organization, um, and how are we going to use common language? How are we going to use the well thought out strategy and the uh, positioning that we know will cut through as opposed to going away and trying to do it ourselves and potentially missing the mark. So uh, I think that coordination between uh, ergs is also, also absolutely critical here. And it's, you know, it's not a high performing team on its own. It's a high performing team of teams.

Speaker B: Yeah, I completely agree. I might give you a couple of examples of when that's worked really well, which is we had uh, an organization we were working with doing this and all of the ergs, for example sending out their own comms. Actually they simplified into one newsletter that covered all of the different ERG events. Originally they were all going off and reviewing policies and the HR team was getting all these policy change requests from lots of different organizations. We streamlined it so all ergs focused on one policy at a time. So lots of ways that we can get efficiency when we think about it more strategically and from a holistic perspective. So yeah, agree completely. So we're trying to leave you with a couple of questions after each of these big ideas because we know there's a lot to think about. But I guess the question here really Is are your ERGs currently operating as high performance teams and if not, what are the plans that you've got in place to support them and how do you make sure they're making a real impact that's benefiting the group they're supporting, but also your organization? And as I mentioned before, this applies for any form of sort of volunteer group you've got internally, whether that's a DEI committee, an erg, um, whatever that group is. But if we're going to have them, let's do them well and let's make sure they actually make an impact.

Speaker A: Beautiful. The third idea we wanted to talk to you about is a criminally underutilized lever for change. Um, and that is meetings inside of our organizations and using them as a driver for culture change. Because DEI is ultimately very often a culture change piece. And meetings are that daily microcosm of culture. They're where a tremendous amount of interaction happens and in that lies a really potent opportunity to driving change. And one of the reasons to focus on meetings is quite universally meetings suck. Um, I don't think it's too controversial a statement to say that a large portion of people in most organizations are probably not happy with the volume and quality of meetings they have on a monthly basis. So, so the kind of, the opportunity here is not only to make meetings more inclusive but also more effective. And doing that in a really practical and pragmatic way. And going back to our comps piece before you've immediately got a compelling hook for doing this, how do we help improve this thing that almost everybody is not having a, uh, super optimal experience of becomes really compelling. There's some really, um, Atlassian did a study on this and they published the results, which I, uh, thought was great. Um, and your mileage will obviously vary from these numbers, but I think they paint a, ah, pretty common picture. Whenever we've shared these in workshops, we get a lot of nodding. So I don't think they're too far off the mark. But uh, they found the average person had about 62, uh, meetings per month, which is pretty high volume. But again, in that lies an opportunity. Right? Those are the frequent interactions that they're having with people where small changes to how we work with each other can add up to a, um, you know, add up to a big, big impact. 50% of those meetings were considered a waste of time. So that's having either meetings that needn't have existed or potentially having the wrong people there. Because there's nothing worse than being in a meeting where you don't, there's no expectation of your contribution or your insight isn't valued or you don't have any particular takeaways from it. Um, that doesn't feel good. So how do we make sure the right people are there at the right time? And ultimately when we're not getting this right, there's a massive cost. If you get six, eight people in a room together for an hour and all of those people are on a decent salary, that is a tremendous cost to the organization. And that's happening day in, day out at scale. So the less meetings we have and the more effective our meetings, the better for everyone. And part of the challenge here as well is dispelling some of the myths that often kind of bubble up when we say the word inclusive meetings. It's often why we say inclusive and effective meetings in the same breath to try and kind of um, get around this. But people have a mental ah, picture of these endless meetings where everyone has to attend, everyone has to speak. Um, all decisions are made by a quorum. Uh, but nothing could be further from the truth. Intention and clarity are probably the big watchwords for what we actually mean by inclusive meetings. So it's fewer, focused, valuable meetings with the right people there, the people who need to be there and who are going to contribute, and the people that are there have the opportunity to be heard and can participate in a way that suits them. And that's really what we're talking about here. It seems quite simple. There's obviously a lot of nuance to making it happen, but fundamentally that's what we're aiming at. And again, I, uh, don't think of that. I think that's quite compelling to most people when we share that. Any builds. Carrie?

Speaker B: No, I just definitely agree. I think it's been such an interesting area. The more and more we lean into this, the more that we see and, and Phil will share some results soon. How big a difference this can make. Yes, in terms of inclusion, but also from a business efficiency perspective in terms of time that we can save based on not being in wasted meetings. So huge opportunity, Erin.

Speaker A: And, um, part of what makes it so impactful is it's something that can be scaled quite quickly to the entire organization. And again, going back to that point of view, there are so many opportunities to practice this on a weekly basis. Even if we are cutting down our number of meetings, we still have a lot of opportunities to all do those 1% behaviors that um, ultimately add up to a profound impact. So one of the ways we've run this in larger organizations is through uh, a combination of things. So doing some uh, leader upskilling workshops. So we work with leaders on best practice, we work with leaders on creating psychologically safe environments. We then have to roll out some self paced learning to everybody else in the organization. We know that it's not always feasible from a, uh, time and budget perspective to run workshops for everybody in the organization. But we can get across some of the core learnings here in the self paced learning. Self paced learning on its own though is not usually that effective. What makes this work is that the leaders with their teams then come together to have a team discussion where they talk about the, they pull the lessons out of the workshops or the self paced learning that they engage with and they talk about, okay, what are we doing great, what's working for us as a team and importantly, where can we improve? What are some of the areas where we are having meetings that we needn't have? Where are some of the meetings that people don't feel like their voices are necessarily being as heard as much as they could? Uh, where are the norms that could be improved and could give everyone a bit more chance, uh, to contribute in meaningful ways? And the feedback we've gotten from this process and we get feedback from those teams after they've had their team discussions in terms of how they've felt about the process, what they've seen in terms of the shifts and um, what they're doing. It's really profound. The stats on how effective this has been in terms of not just the ratings of how valuable was this program, which was I think a 4.6 out of 5, but nearly 75% of, of teams in the organizations almost immediately saw that their meetings were more inclusive. Now this seems like that number's really high considering that, you know, there are a large portion of people who, for whom they don't really feel excluded in meetings, you know, that they might feel that their meetings aren't, aren't great but, but exclusion isn't something that they feel or necessarily see. But when they're on the lookout for that, nearly 73% I think is the actual number that's really profound. And in one organization we ran this for, there was a 32% reduction in low value meetings across the organization. So in terms of time cost and uh, savings and the stripping back of frustrations, it was really, really profound. So again, this is a relatively simple, not easy, uh, thing that organizations can do, but with the right structures in place, it can make a massive impact.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think the one thing I just, I don't know how much we've lent into, but one of the reasons this is so important is your meetings are a microcosm of your culture. Right. So the behaviors that are showing up in meetings are a really good indication of what's happening more broadly because this is the point in time at which people come together. So we obviously think about this from an inclusion perspective and effective perspective more broadly. But sometimes we work with organisations on if there's a specific behaviour that they want to do. So for example, if it's focused around how we productively disagree in meetings and it might be that that's the thing that we lean into. But we use meetings as the way to have that conversation around productive disagreement. And the same principle applies that Phil just shared, which is we need to help people understand what that looks like. Like, and then give them the skills and then have the conversation as a team. Like, where are we doing this? Well, where can we improve? And what are we going to commit to and do as a team? And I think that's part of the beauty of why this has worked so well. It's actually those team discussions and the team debriefs. So often L and D work is one to one. And actually the way it comes to life is when it's team commitments and you've got that social proof, social pressure. And I think that's a big part of why this is working so well.

Speaker A: Yeah. And the teams holding each other accountable to the thing that they agreed, um, you know, 101 thing you learn in coaching school is that, um, it's the ideas people generate for themselves are the ones that they're going to stick to, not the ideas that you give them. So the teams coming together and deciding independently what they're going to focus on makes it far, far more compelling for them than anybody just coming in and saying, hey, here's the five things you're going to do. So, um, yeah, super, super effective. Um, so to leave behind questions for you here as well. So are your meetings as effective and inclusive as they could be? Um, and also how do you, how do you know, are you gathering data around that and what guidance are you providing teams and leaders in terms of, uh, hosting and participating in meetings more effective and inclusively?

Speaker B: Okay, so our final big idea for today is about how you use AI. And um, what we're doing, talking about as a big idea is how you use AI to challenge yourself as part of building your DEI strategy. And I guess the sort of problems that we have when building DEI strategies, which is the starting point to think about how AI can help, is that DEI is an incredibly complex topic. We have so many different types of people, so much diversity that we're aiming to try and get a sense of. We have a huge volume of stakeholders because in an ideal world we'd be speaking to every person in our organization. But then we have really limited time and resources, so we know that's often not possible. And very often our dei, uh, practitioners that we work with tell us that there's no one else with that skill set in the organization. They're kind of operating on their own. It can be quite a lonely place so what we see then is that AI can be a thought partner to provide a range of perspectives, sense check thinking and quickly generate ideas. So we might go into each of these in turn and just give you a couple of thoughts, thoughts on how we see AI could help. So first one is about providing a range of perspectives. So we talked earlier about all the different types of diversity. Yes, Demographic diversity, diversity of thought, organizational diversity, and how do we get a quick sense check as to how things might work for all of those different groups. So let's think about, for example, you've written your DEI vision and you're really happy with that DEI vision that you've got too. But actually if we quickly put that vision into AI and say, please provide me a perspective from people in different roles across the organization and it might come back and tell you what the frontline teams might think or your executive leadership or your board. And what we often find is when we think from different perspectives like that, there's a whole load of things that we just might not have considered. So that's a quick way to get a range of perspectives. The next one is just checking thinking. And we often um, encourage leaders to do this in our inclusive leadership training, for example, or when we're teaching people about bias. One of the number one ways to overcome bias is to question ourselves. But it can be very hard to think of why we might be wrong or what biases might be at play. But if we're making a big decision, we share the context of that decision with AI and we say what biases are at play or what's the reason that this might not be the right decision. It can work really well as a way to challenge ourselves in terms of

Speaker A: getting a range of perspectives and why that can be, uh, some of the reasons that can be so powerful using ah, a tool like this is, as you pointed out Kerry, sometimes it's access, um, sometimes you don't have access to people from different groups, different backgrounds inside of your organization to provide a, a, ah, real human perspective on a particular topic or a positioning or a piece of work. Um, and the second is you're not always going to get honest answers from people. Again, there is sometimes a real hesitation from individuals to say anything that could be perceived as negative around things in the DEI space for fear of being, quote unquote cancelled or what have you. So just being able to say, hey, I don't understand that statement, it doesn't work for me. You're not always going to get that unless you have real high degree of trust and psychological safety, in which case you're probably doing quite a lot right in your organization to begin with. People are not always going to give you the honest answer, but. And we'll get onto some of the limitations of AI obviously in a second. But you will get that more unfiltered perspective. Um, because the machine's not worried about hurting people's feelings.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So that was perspectives how we can sort of of center check our thinking, but also it's really great as an idea generation tool. So for example, if you've identified that you've got a problem around decision making, putting into AI, we're focused on how we can make our decision making more inclusive and effective. This is our organizational context. What are some ideas for how we might do that? And it will generate a whole range of ideas. Now of course these probably won't be perfect for your organization and they're just a starting point for your thinking. But it's much easier to have some starting points than to have an absolute blank slate. So we think there's so much potential here for how it can help. There's a couple of things that I think it's worth mentioning. One is so often when we speak to people, they feel like AI using AI is cheating and I think there can be quite a negative sentiment around it. But what we're talking about here is using it to m. Make your thinking better, to check yourself and to improve the work you're doing. And I think we all need to shift our thinking on that. Uh, this, this is something that's here, it's coming and we want to use it to make the work that we do even better. Phil talked earlier about the difference between getting things perfect and between getting people on board. And it's the same here. What we're aiming for in the world of DEI is a fairer, more inclusive workplace. And anything that we can do to get there more quickly I think is a real, a real benefit.

Speaker A: Mhm. I think one thing that, that's worth saying on this topic as well, in terms of using AI and the researchers, uh, you know, the research that's kind of quite hot in this area has kind of borne this out in terms of how you're using it where it's most dangerous because we all know AI can make things up, it can hallucinate, it doesn't give perfect answers. It's. It fabricates sources sometimes, you know, it can't be taken 100% at face value. Where it's most valuable is if you are a Subject matter expert on something, using it as that thought partner. Because if you're a DEI specialist, you go ask it some questions, you'll be able to quite quickly see where it's getting things wrong, where it's not quite connecting the dots properly. And you're on guard for that, you know, while it's still generating some useful and usable, um, ideas for you. I think where it's most dangerous, um, and where it's, it um, you know, doesn't supplant subject matter expertise, is if you're not an expert in something, you don't have a lot of knowledge and you're trying to use it as a substitute for actual human expertise. Because we don't see the holes in those arguments, we don't see the logical fallacies sometimes. And um, it can be quite dangerous to take what it's doing wholesale and try and put it into practice. So um, you know, if I was, you know, trying to try uh, to do something I'd never done before, I wouldn't just take what came out of one of these, uh, one of these tools as given.

Speaker B: I think the other really big important thing is we are of course not saying that AI should replace conversations with your people. So absolutely we need to be developing DEI strategies based on insights from our people. Whether that's our engagement survey data, DEI survey data, focus groups, interviews, that does not change, that's still really important. And then sense checking with our people afterwards, getting feedback, seeing what we've got right, seeing what we've got wrong, all of those things absolutely remain. But what AI allows us to do is to get some quick sense checks. So maybe once we've written something before we take that to our people, we get some watch outs from AI first and we can refine it before we then get to that next stage, which saves time.

Speaker A: I think one area it's been really great for, um, and you see this already integrated into things like engagement, uh, survey tools is AI summaries of free text answers, for example. Because back in the old days where we had to just look through a wall of um, free text answers on a spreadsheet and kind of try and make sense of them and pick out the patterns there, that was really difficult and it fell prey to things like confirmation bias. We would often zone in and pay more attention to the things which we as limited bias, human beings, as we know we all are, had as top of mind. Whereas what AI is really good at doing is actually looking at all of that, say free text data. Ah, in an engagement survey and pulling out the themes that you might miss, um, as an individual. So for particular things, it can be just a really, really powerful tool to make your strategy as robust and as, uh, full of good ideas and diverse perspectives as it could be be.

Speaker B: So I think the question then we're going to leave you with on this one is what part of our strategy could use perspectives or new ideas? Where might you want to consider asking AI for a different perspective, asking where you might have got it wrong, or helping you to generate some new ideas?

Speaker A: Yeah, so we covered quite a lot there, I think, and hopefully you've got, um, you've got some takeaways. We'd love to hear from you. So we'd love to hear what resonated. We'd love to hear what you're taking away from this conversation and, um, putting into practice in your organization for 2026. And it should go without saying, if you would like to have a conversation with us about making some of these, um, you know, some of these things we've talked about today real for you in your organizational context, we'd be more than open to that. So you can always reach out@helloady thisforgood.org for a conversation. And of course, if you got value from the episode, make sure you subscribe. Make sure you send it to your, your friends, your neighbors, your colleagues, um, so they don't miss out on the next one. With, uh, with all that said, have, um, a wonderful rest of your day and we'll see you in the next episode.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Inclusion at Work podcast. If you'd like to help others benefit from the conversation you just heard, the most impactful thing you can do is share it with a friend. You can also give us a rating or a review on itunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And of course, if you'd like to talk to us about accelerating your organization's DEI efforts, or if you'd like to provide feedback on anything you heard today, you can reach us at, uh, hello at, uh, leadersforgood. Org.