[MUSIC] Okay what I want to talk to you about today is developing a business case. As you know from module 11 of the things that I talked a lot about was the business case because there's an economic imperative to implementing diversity and inclusion. One of the problems though with the development of a business case is that many, many organizations think that a business case is only about saving money. One thing organizations have not been particularly good at and those that are very good. It's about being able to assess and evaluate those things within the organization that are to do with productivity to do with teamwork to do with discretionary effort. So in order for a business case to work one that's got to be the right type of business case for diversity and inclusion. And secondly, it has still got to be robust in terms of its the correct use of indicators the correct metrics. If you only want to use headcount, if you only want to use dollars saved, then you're not going to be able to make a business case for diversity and inclusion. Most organizations are aware of some of the areas in which a business case argument can be made for diversity and inclusion. Certainly in the area of sales, it is easy to demonstrate that by putting people who look like the market look like the customers you might sell more. For example, women selling real estate. This has become an area of some research because women selling real estate are able. To appeal and communicate with the person who apparently from research is going to have the biggest say and that is a woman. So we see in some areas of sales, we see that a diverse workforce, a workforce where the sales staff look and sound like the customer that works. But in looking at the diversity business case, the diversity and inclusion case. There are some very good examples of where organizations came into trouble. There's a story of one large US company that employed a large number of spanish speaking employees in sales, in customer service in the States, the southwest of the US. And in other parts of the country where there were large spanish speaking populations, the company saw two things happen. One was yes, they had increased sales in those areas. The second thing was they won awards for increasing the diversity of their workforce. But the third thing that happened to that company was that they were the subject of a very large and a very profitable for the people who took the case claim that in fact. They were not inclusive and that the only place that they would employ spanish speaking people was generally in the sales area. When people applied to go into management applied to go into facilities into product development, they met barriers. And so that's a really good example of a very short term thinking approach. So the business case, why do we need one? Those of you who work in organizations will know that every new idea an organization needs a business case. Now I've been told that people don't read the business case and that I guess is something that we do need to think about. If you are going to develop a business case for anything particularly to do with your workforce and extra particularly to do with diversity and inclusion. You need a business case that is going to be relevant, it's going to have a sense of urgency, a sense of immediacy. It's got to be a business case which is an argument to take action. If it doesn't do any of those things, if it doesn't make the people sitting around the table hearing the business case. If it doesn't get them to ask you a question, if it doesn't get them to get them to quiz you on the data. If it doesn't get them to ask you, how can we do it, then you don't have a good business case. One of the areas in organizations that's very underdeveloped and is only now becoming something that organizations and education providers are looking at is the area of data analysis. Organizations are drowning as my experience tells me in data about employees. There's all data to do with their employment, their training, performance management and many organizations also collect a lot of data through cultural surveys, etc. Despite the fact that there is a large amount of data about employees many of it is undermined many of it is not used, many of it is only used around headcount and around cost issues. That means we have to rethink it. We have to rethink the type of data and how we produce it. The other thing is when we actually build a business case, we need to be giving people an idea of what are the sorts of things we want to measure. And when we're looking at developing a recruitment strategy for diversity inclusion, there has to be in the business case for some reason, if not reasons for an organization to go down this track. What are we going to get back? Now one of the things about a business cases, as I mentioned earlier, it is not always something that in fact around diversity inclusion, we often don't see a lot of change. So it's important in developing your business case. You are developing one for your organization. Now, one of the things that we do know about the business case for diversity inclusion is that. If you google business case, diversity and inclusion, you will get a lot of snippets of data that will tell you what percentage of organizations employ. What percentage of people you will find data that tells us that many organizations are not ranked by their employees as being diverse or inclusive. Now, all of that is quite powerful, but for many organizations and many managers that's out there in the ISA. What you need to do is to find data to find an argument for your organization and it might be around the cost of recruitment. It might be I was working with one organization a couple of years ago and they prided themselves on taking graduates from what they considered to be the best university in the State. And in fact the university they were talking about has a very, very high reputation. But the particular business that this organization was in the actual high performing students weren't coming from the high performing organization, they were great. But where the really high performing students were coming from was another university in that state. And until the organization actually was confronted by that, they had no reason to change. So the argument in that business case was we go for the best, we need to target the best course. So you need to be able to dig into the issues that are going to make the business case. The desire to do something for diversity inclusion relevant to your organization. It needs to be evidence based. And this again, is one of the problems in the past with diversity and inclusion. When I first became involved in this issue in an organization back in the 80s, we had diversity and inclusion units. Very few people that worked in those units knew much about employment knew much about data analysis, but there were people who had great heart and great commitment and you do need that. But you also need people who understand the business who can actually look at the business, look at the diversity inclusion issues and bring them together. Remember from the first module we have to integrate a moral argument, an economic argument and the legal argument. So we also looked at in the earlier the different types of benchmarks that globally organizations are using. These are very useful at a high level and these are very, very useful in terms of reputation. So, I would encourage your organizations for you to look at these types of benchmarks about behavior of the organization. Are you an organization that advocates on behalf of others and so on? But the real business case is one that has four levels to it. The first is what value will your change? Will your diversity inclusion bring to your shareholders? And that's about profits. That's about the sales argument. So, you need to be able to think about that type of argument. You also then have stakeholder value and stakeholder value is something that has grown in interest. That's about your employees, that's about your community in which you work, that's about the different interest groups that are interested and connected to what you're doing. And they can be also located here where you work, but they can also be global. There's also the regulatory context and of course, that's the legal framework and the final one is global value chain. Now you might be now turning off and saying, well, Jackie, I don't work in a global company. Well, two things. One is no business, no organization, no public sector institution, not for profit. Can say they are not connected to the world, you are connected to the world because even at the basis level of googling an idea, a topic that actually connects you to the world. The other issue though, is some of you might already be in organizations that are part of a global value chain. And so how you operate as an organization is really very important in terms of building that value. Also these days, and in fact on this particular project, I'm working with people from Colombia and working with people from Thailand, from the US, from India and a few from Australia. So, you must always be thinking of that connection. And again, as I said in the very opening of this course, this is a global issue. What you were doing in your organization, in your city, in your location for diversity and inclusion will have residents elsewhere in the world. I think one of the things about the business case for organizations is that we do need to provide a bit of a framework in which it can become relevant for people. Now again, when you look at business cases for diversity and inclusion, you'll find lots and lots of different activities that are listed different areas that should be part of your business case. What I've done is to come up with six, some you're being familiar and others will have other names. The organizational business case should have these first of all, overall business performance and that's something that is really going to be important for your shareholder value. Recruiting and retention, we often think about recruiting as one part of the puzzle of employment and then retention elsewhere. The link between recruitment and retention is actually quite high and later in this course we'll look at that. Markets and customers so that sales, but it's also extending our reach, our partnerships, if you like. Then we have reputation and brand and this is a burgeoning area. If your organization isn't aware of its reputation and brand and doesn't see that that's a critical part of the business case for diversity and inclusion, it's going to be left behind. Finally, Innovation now, innovation is a word that I think is scary to many people. It's a bit like entrepreneurship. We haven't allied minds, at least I do and I think a lot of people do that to be innovative you have to invent something really big that changes. The entire world that entrepreneurs and people are like the Tesla's of this world who go out and build something very big, invent something huge. But innovation in organizations is not only about what we produce I have a great idea for a new widget. It's actually about how we do business, how we go about doing something. Every team should be encouraged to be innovative, innovative is let's do something different because it actually might be better. Some really simple ideas of innovation, which actually our diversity and inclusion related. There was an organization, in fact that I worked in several years ago, very old public sector institution. They always had their major meetings of the year for staff with the director general of the CEO at 7:00 o'clock on a Monday morning at at the beginning of the year. Now that's 7:00 o'clock Monday morning apart from the fact it was seven o'clock in a whole range of parents couldn't attend that meeting or found it difficult to arrange childcare or whatever. The other thing about the 7:00 AM in the morning was that there were people in this large, very large city who would take them two hours to get to work on public transport. So even though there had been low numbers, there have been complaints, etc. This organization believed tradition was important until one day at one of these Welcome to the New Year addresses by the CEO. Somebody put up their hands and said, is it possible that we could have this at another time when more people can attend revolutionary in that organization. Revolutionary because no decision was made then but people discussed it. It actually raised the issue of time. That was one of the most innovative things I've seen in an organization. Small, done out in the open challenged in a really good way, got people talking and after that there were different times for different meetings. And so that's what a business case is about and that's what innovation is about. So when you are looking at the business case, you do need to make sure that you have factors involved that are going to be relevant to the organization. That you are able to provide data in support and establish metrics for performance. You also need to make sure that it's quantitative and qualitative. We discussed briefly the issue of surveys, staff surveys a lot of that data is not used. A lot of organizations through those surveys and then do not use the survey itself or responses to actually get some discussion about the behavior of the inclusion of the organization. That's data you need to find. You also need to have priorities. There needs to be priorities and those priorities could largely need to do with the business as they should be. But when looking at implementing diversity and inclusion activities initiatives, efforts, you need to plan a strategy. It's a strategy if you need, if you don't have data for example, then that should be the first step in your business case. We are going to invest in good data. And I think the other thing is it must be a bad impact. Of course we're doing it for moral reasons. Of course we're doing it for legal reasons, but it must have impact. It must have impact on behaviors, on business outcomes and if it doesn't have that, then people won't feel engaged. So that's an overview of the business case. It's very hard to do a business case without your own data. You'll go online and you will see lots and lots of templates for a business case for diversity and inclusion. Use them by all means as a guide. But remember I said, a business case needs to be relevant and if it's going to be relevant. And if it's going to generate action, which we wanted to do, then it needs to be one that's very much grounded in your organization. So, good luck with the business case. I'll see you later.
