Employers for Change: Cultivating an Inclusive Environment

Employers for Change is an Open Doors Initiative programme dedicated to helping businesses of all sizes navigate the world of disability, inclusion and confidence. Through engaging conversations with experts, we tackle common misconceptions and dive deep into the latest technology, policy and best practices that can transform your company's culture. 

In this episode we are joined by Denis Doolan, Head of People Experience at AIB, to discuss how businesses can cultivate an inclusive work environment.

Denis has over 25 years’ experience in national, international and global roles.  He joined AIB as Head of Inclusion & Diversity in June 2021.  More recently he also took on responsibility for AIB’s Culture, Wellbeing and Engagement programmes and is an interim member of the HR Senior Management Team.  

Prior to AIB, Denis worked at Special Olympics International, where he set up a Leadership Academy and was a member of the Global Leadership Team.  Before that he ran his own consultancy business, providing project management, strategic planning and learning & development services for corporate clients such as Allianz Care, Credit Agricole and Fexco and non-profit clients including Rehab Group and the FAI.  

Denis’s early career was in Public Relations and Event Management, including working on multiple Olympic Games, and he has lectured at UCD, TU Dublin and Dublin Business School.

Denis is on the Boards of Kerry Respite Care and the Open Doors Initiative, and also volunteers with Killarney Lions Club, Autism Friendly Killarney and Kilcummin.

Employers for Change is a programme of the Open Doors Initiative, funded by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. The service empowers employers with all the information and advice needed to hire, employ, manage and retain staff with disabilities.

Contact Employers for Change at info@employersforchange.ie or check our website for more information  

Transcript

Speaker 1 (Mo)

Intro

Welcome to the Employers for Change podcast. My name is Mohammad Sahid Camara. Employers for Change is an Open Doors initiative program dedicated to helping businesses of all sizes navigate the world of disability inclusion and confidence. Through engaging conversations with experts, dynamic organisations, and inspiring individuals, we will tackle common misconceptions, explore reasonable accommodation, and dive deep into the latest technology, policy, and best practices that can transform your company's culture.

Today, I am joined by Denis Doolan from AIB to discuss how businesses can cultivate an inclusive work environment.

Speaker 2 (Denis)

My role is head of people experience, and that covers culture, Well-being, engagement inclusion and diversity. So, I sit within the HR team in AIB.

Speaker 1 (Mo)

We all know culture is one of the most important pillar for productivity in the workplace. Individuals might want to know what an inclusive environment means, what it means from a business perspective.

Speaker 2 (Denis)

From our point of view, we're quite clear on it at this point. We've been working on inclusion and diversity for over 10 years, but maybe in the last three years in particular, we've really put more kind of resources and effort and so on behind it. So for us, it's number one, that everyone truly feels a sense of belonging, no matter what their, their background or their characteristics or whatever.

And in addition to that, then that everyone has. a chance to achieve their full potential. And that means that, you know, we're looking at equity, trying to make sure that if we need to make accommodations, we do that. And it also means then this, you know, there's a responsibility on everyone, whatever grouping you might, uh, identify with to play a part in creating that environment.

It's not, something that we see as being, you know, the responsibility of one area like HR. It's certainly not that. And also, it's not the responsibility of any one group. It's a collective responsibility. So that's what we would, I suppose, begin with is belonging and the, opportunity to achieve potential.

And we use the term universal inclusion then to capture all of that to say it does apply to everyone. And everyone does have a responsibility in creating that, that good environment, that positive environment where anyone can succeed.

Speaker 1 (Mo)

Inclusion is not just one man’s responsibility; So, within the organisation, how do you currently assess inclusivity within these organisations and what are some of the key indicators of your success?

Speaker 2 (Denis)

We do use some metrics, uh, which is, you know, we collect those maybe kind of twice a year for one of our surveys. And then there's also a survey we're participating along with the Irish Banking and Culture Board, which takes place every two years. So those are the metrics side of things, and I can, I can come back to those in a moment, but we also take feedback from our employee resource groups.

You know, that's always a really good source as well, because surveys are, are numbers and data and that kind of thing. Whereas sometimes it's just really good to hear directly from groups, particularly groups that may be minority populations in our overall workforce, or, or maybe at more at risk of marginalization that we hear directly from them through those groups.

But in terms of the metrics, then, you know, we have. Participation metrics, I'd call it. Like we, we run a campaign around this idea of universal inclusion, and we had over 230 teams that participated in that campaign during June this year. So, I suppose that alone would show, you know, that, that meant a reach right across the bank to a good number of our colleagues.

Uh, and that indicates that we're, you know, getting some engagement around inclusion and diversity. And we also, even at the beginning of that campaign, we had a keynote interview with former leader, uh, chief executive officer of the Special Olympics International, Mary Davis, and there was a thousand people, rough, almost a thousand people joined that call.

So again, you know, that would tell us that there's, there's good engagement across the board. And then. our survey metrics around things about like people being able to be themselves, people being able to achieve their potential, able to speak up if they see something or experience something that they don't feel is right.

So, you can see there's, you know, there's, there's a few different metrics or angles or lenses that we use to assess how we're doing when it comes to this.

Speaker 1(Mo)

So, you were mentioning earlier, um, about these resource groups. So, tell us. What supports are in place for these resource groups, and especially with individuals who have disclosed their disability, what are the supports that are available?

Speaker (Denis)

So, you were mentioning earlier, um, about these resource groups. So, tell us. What supports are in place for these resource groups, and especially with individuals who have disclosed their disability, what are the supports that are available?

Well, I'll start maybe with the bigger picture. So, we have five employee resource groups. We call them inclusion networks. And, um, they are supported through, well, first of all, our HR team in general, but in particular, the team I work in, the People Experience team. So, we would support those five groups with any, let's say, administrative support, but also guidance, links into the wider organization.

We also provide them with financial resources as needed. You know, so if they want to organize, like for example, coming up very soon, now we have Diwali and we want to do a couple of activities for that. So, we provide the financial resources to allow that group to organize that. So, we have five groups, the Women's Plus Network, uh, Pride Plus Network.

Our life and family plus network, our origins plus network and our ability plus network. And you might say, why do I keep saying plus? And it's because we really want to emphasize that in all of those groups, they are for allies. as much as they are for people directly experiencing something. So, the abilities plus network, for example, you know, we're actively encouraging colleagues with disabilities to be part of that group, but also colleagues who are not directly experiencing a disability themselves but want to ally with that group and try and ensure that we're doing everything possible to accommodate and include people with disabilities in our organisation. 

So that's the other piece is we do have a reasonable accommodation, uh, policy, but also, you know, a guidance document that allows anyone in the organisation, particularly our people leaders to understand what reasonable accommodations are and how you access them in the organization. So, so yeah, we try and support across the board with each of those networks and that that's the specific one for the ability network around reasonable accommodation.

Speaker 1 (Mo)

One big problem in Ireland is with recruitment of persons with disability. So, this brings to the question, how do you ensure diversity and inclusion are integrated into your recruitment process? Because it's not about individuals in the workplace with disability, because as a disabled person, I know for sure once we are in the workplace, we find ourselves going up, but one of the biggest challenges is getting to the workplace.

So, what are the measures? What. How do you ensure diversity and inclusion? 

Speaker 2 (Denis)

We're still learning every day, so I'm certainly not joining this podcast trying to pretend everything's perfect. We know we have things we can do better and work on, and actually, recruitment is one of the areas that we have done a lot of work on.

Because of that, over the last year, 18 months, we realized that there was more we could and should be doing. First of all, we have a talent team in HR, and then we have the team I'm part of. So, we've worked closely together to look at those improvements and try and make them. So, we've put in place some, let's say, basics.

So, ensuring we have diverse interview panels. We're piloting a language decoder at the moment so that to try and make sure our job descriptions, our role descriptions are not too complex and not too off-putting for anyone to apply for. But obviously, particularly anyone from a minority group. We're using different advertising channels than we were before now.

So as an example, Open Doors have a jobs board. And we, we, we feed our links through to that if there are roles that are available in AIB, which there generally are. We also then partnered with Open Doors at the end of 2022 and for all of 2023. We rolled out inclusive recruitment training using an inclusive recruitment toolkit that was done by Open Doors and Atlantic Technological University.

We used that to train over a thousand hiring managers. in AIB through the course of last year, uh, with the help of Open Doors so that they're better positioned to have, you know, to have the right mindset to be involved in recruitment and to be open to people with a disability or other people from, you know, different ethnic backgrounds or different sexual orientation, whatever it is that they would be open to and, uh, to hiring anyone and that they would conduct the recruitment process in a way that that is welcoming and embraces people who do bring something different to the table.

So those are probably the main things we've done, but let's say there's more that we're hoping we'll do in the next while as well to keep to keep adding and keep improving the process.

Speaker 1 (Mo)

Do you guys have opportunities for growth and advancement for every category in your business or workplace? And how do you ensure that each and every employee has access to these opportunities regardless of their background or abilities?

Speaker 2 (Denis)

A really good question, because it's really hard to do that, but we're certainly trying to do it. So I would say, um, it starts with policy, really. So, the first thing we do is we make it really clear in all our policies and procedures and so on, that we don't tolerate discrimination on any basis, whether it be gender, age, sexual orientation, whatever it is.

So, it starts there. And then we back it up with those recruitment activities that I, that I mentioned, but also in our talent management work then. So, you know, to your point about progression, you know, that's, that's our talent management work. So, we have put a lot of work there on gender. to try and ensure that we have a good gender balance all the way through our organizations.

Because, you know, we're no different to a lot of other organizations where there might be a lot of gender balance in certain levels and then less so as you get towards the, the upper levels of the organization, for want of a better phrase. So, we've really tried to balance that well and, and we're, we're doing okay in that.

We have, uh, a gender-balanced board, a gender-balanced executive committee and most of the levels in our organization are gender balanced. There's just one or two that we're still working on. And our aim now next is to then build on that work and use the same techniques to ensure that we're getting representation, for example, ethnicity.

Uh, and disability through our, our ranks as well. But it does start with recruitment. I think you, you asked about that earlier on and I think that's absolutely spot on because if we're not bringing in people who are representative of the communities and customers that we serve every day, then we'll never get that representation all the way through our ranks because we, we just won't have the, the sufficient volumes to do it. So that's really where, why we've been focusing on recruitment as the main thing to begin with.

Speaker 1 (Mo)

And I guess in doing all of these, there are some challenges and what are some of these challenges and how have you guys tried to overcome them; what's Like the best advice you can give to other businesses out there?

Speaker 2 (Denis)

I think the biggest challenge is mindset. I think if you can have a mindset that's embraced by the majority, you may never get everyone on this journey, but let's say if you could get the majority, and that goes back to our idea of universal inclusion. That's why we're really, that's the mantra we push the most, that this It means everyone should be included, everyone should have opportunities, and it means everyone has a responsibility to make that happen.

So, we, so if I start with mindset, you know, because the barrier can be If someone just doesn't believe I have potential or doesn't believe that I'm capable of doing a job that can impact badly on recruitment, it can impact on, uh, you know, progression. And of course, it can impact on retention. So, starting with the mindset, I think is, is, is the biggest thing to address.

challenge of, of low expectations or misplaced, uh, perceptions. And then practically speaking, you know, you know, it's reasonable accommodations, you know, is the term for, for, I can understand why that's the term, I suppose, if I put it that way, because you do everything you can, but maybe some things just aren't possible with the type of service or, or environments that you're working in.

So, like say, look, you know, we're doing, you know, everything we can with that attitude of let's accommodate as much as we humanly can. Um, but obviously sometimes that is quite challenging, and it might require a lot of changes that we, we would seek to do. Uh, and by and large, that's always what's possible, but you know, sometimes maybe that's, that's not always possible as well.

So just to be honest about that challenge, I think it's a real barrier that can be there in certain circumstances. 

Speaker 1 (Mo)

 So will that be a final message or you have a final message for my audience?

Speaker 2 (Denis)

I wrote down three things actually so as in three things that I would We try and do here and that I'd suggest are worth thinking about so number one is to make it relevant Start with the business case, you know, inclusion and diversity is not a, a nice thing or a nice to do, or a good thing to do.

It makes sense for a business to do because it drives creativity. It drives retention. It drives better decision-making. You have that diversity of thought. So, there's lots of really good reasons. And that's, I think, so starting with that relevance. for people, whatever part of the business they're working in.

Make it, make it relevant. Make it interesting. You know, that's storytelling. That's videos. That's the element of surprise, doing things a bit differently. Cause you do want to stop people and get them to think about this for a moment and say, oh, okay, the way we've always done things, maybe isn't the way we should continue to do things going forward.

And the third is make it personal. You know, if you, if you are asking people to tell their story or to explain what's happened to them in their lives and how that has impacted them positively or negatively, then, you know, it's making that relatable, not a lecture, you know, we see this maybe with some of the, the climate piece, if you lecture people, they may be just, you know, disengage because they feel it's too overwhelming or too hard to do.

So, it's just making it personal and real and, and I think people then gravitate to that as human beings to try and do the best things that they can do. And we're still working on all of those things every day, making it relevant, making it interesting, making it personal. They take a lot of work, but we know that as we do make that progress, we are reaping the rewards.

And as I say, it's not just good to see that from a, let's say, moral point of view. It's good for business as well.

Outro

The Employers for Change is a program of the Open Doors initiative, funded by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration, and Youth. To stay informed, you can subscribe to the Open Doors podcast and follow Employers for Change on all social media channels. My name is Mohamed Sahid Kamara and until next time, bye-bye.