Meet the challengers panel

“Diversity and inclusion makes us better humans, and it makes us better in business”

Hybrid working, enhanced mental health and better diversity and inclusion are all key to success in a post pandemic world. The CMI’s Ann Francke and Adidas’ Asif Sadiq discuss at the 2021 Moving Ahead Gender Balance Summit.

Moving on from the upheaval of the past 12 months was a key topic for this year’s Gender Balance Summit 2021 Challenger panel discussion with Ann Francke OBE, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and author of Create a Gender- Balanced Workplace and Asif Sadiq MBE, Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) at Adidas.

Francke’s passion for D&I was prompted by working in a gender-balanced environment early on in her career and noting its ability to create an inclusive environment. It’s something she has tried to pay forward in her own career, building her employees work life around their lives, watching inclusive environments emerge as a natural result that also, tellingly, had the highest market shares and margins in the company.

“As I became more senior though I was the first and only female on the executive committee and board on a number of occasions, and that was a lonely place to be,” she says, “I felt quite ‘othered’. So, it's important to me to promote a culture of diversity and inclusion; it makes us better humans, and it makes us better in business”

Sadiq is equally passionate about the win-win of a diverse and inclusive workplace – and society. “I’m a huge believer of inclusion because it's the right thing to do and from a business perspective. Getting it right generates more profits, better productivity, innovation and problem solving. Get it wrong and you risk damage from a reputational point of view, which in the end will cost you either your staff or financial losses.”

So, in a post-pandemic world, where does diversity and inclusion sit now? Both Francke and Sadiq are clear that although increasing D&I is a challenging endeavour in of itself, the past year has amplified key issues. It some ways it has increased the challenge, with research suggesting that programs and initiatives around diversity and inclusion are at risk of slipping away. The halting of Gender Pay Gap reporting during 2020 was one such high-profile example — now reinstated after a campaign by organisations including the CMI. And with the Covid-19 crisis impacting women and minorities disproportionally in terms of economics, whether through furlough, redundancy or leaving the workforce due to the pressures of the pandemic, getting this transparency back, not only on gender, but also on ethnicity and disability and other disadvantaged groups, is fundamental to the oft-quoted ideal of ‘building back better’.

It’s a challenge that businesses are levelling up to and in some areas even embracing. Sadiq notes that the last 12 months have given organisations an opportunity to learn and a chance to show up in many ways. The zeitgeist issue of flexible working in a post-pandemic world, for example, presents businesses with a chance to affect real change, challenge inequalities and create structural progress that will lie far beyond the physical desk location.

 “I'm a big believer that the responsibility around addressing some of that lies with men, as well,” Sadiq told the Gender Balance Summit audience. “We can no longer just be allies who turn up to International Women's Day events and say, ‘we've done our part’, we need to actively address some of those challenges faced. If you look at flexible working, working from home, women have ended up bearing the brunt of responsibilities, even when the men are working from home as well. How do we address that?”

The hybrid working world also throws up other important questions for the ‘big bounce back’ — how can we make younger generations, who may be sharing accommodation not set up for home work, feel included when working remotely? How do we now talk about mental health in a new light, and set it as a priority within our working life? And how are we going to set our boundaries in a seamless, digital world. For Sadiq, the transparency of the past 12 months has been a huge step forward to allowing us to truly bring our ‘whole selves to work’ however, which is a good start. “We have to set boundaries [at work] for things that are important to us. And we don't need to hide it. I openly talk about what I'm doing, because we have to set that pace,” he insists.

And while the world of work may never be the same after this tumultuous – and often necessarily creative – year, there are new challenges and importantly new opportunities to continue to create inclusion from gender, ethnicity, disability, LGBTQ and social mobility perspectives. Importantly, we must remember that diversity, and inclusion has a positive impact on every single person. “We are creating equity for traditionally marginalised groups, but that doesn't mean we've stopped our efforts on any other space or any other element of diversity,” notes Francke.

“The real opportunity, borne out by CMI’s own research around management and leadership, is that we've learned how to manage with a human face through the pandemic, displaying empathy, listening, communicating much more regularly as leaders, doing town halls and showing people glimpses into our personal environments - and that in itself is levelling and can encourage people to contribute.

“We must continue to build on this; we have to remember to keep managing with that human face, and increasingly, employees will demand that of leaders. What we must not do is just restore factory settings when we come out of the pandemic”.