Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in a Global Workplace

Mobility Perspectives and Strategies

 Like all organisational functions and business units, Mobility has an important and unique role to play in ensuring all employees have equal opportunities to excel. In two recent insideMOBILITY® forums attended by over 60 Mobility professionals around the globe, we learned about some impressive progress in this area.

In this article, we share highlights from the peer-to-peer discussions at these meetings, including strategies that have helped overcome inclusion barriers as well as diversity and inclusion challenges yet to be resolved.

 

*Source: 7 May 2019, Ideal. Diversity And Inclusion: A Beginner’s Guide For HR Professionals

 

Mobility’s role in enhancing Diversity and Inclusion

Organisations should grant assignments or job-related relocations based on merit, skills and qualifications. Mobility Diversity and Inclusion efforts are not intended to bypass that mandate. Rather, Mobility’s Diversity and Inclusion efforts should help address the fact that too often, not all qualified candidates are equally in the running for assignments due to personal characteristics and situations.

Granted, some employees may choose to not pursue assignments, assuming their personal circumstances would disqualify them from consideration or would preempt their success. Other employees, though, are removed from assignment consideration by HR or business leaders due to those personal characteristics. Mobility needs to make sure the pool of qualified assignee candidates is not limited due to self-imposed or institutional bias and discrimination (whether intentional or unintentional).

 

A multi-directional role

Mobility’s general mission within an organisation encompasses a range of both strategic and tactical activity – working with business units to ensure that talent is optimally assigned and then managing all the aspects related to efficiently deploying that talent.

Mobility’s role in promoting Diversity and Inclusion reflects that same dual focus.

First, on the strategic front, Mobility should:

• Be at the table early on when assignment options are being discussed to make sure local living conditions are accurately portrayed
• Help highlight and promote assignment opportunities so they are available and inviting to all potential employee candidates
• Assure qualified employees that they will be fairly considered for the position

Regarding the second, more tactical aspect of supporting Diversity and Inclusion within the organisation, Mobility should:

• Design unique relocation packages where necessary to help address specialised needs and concerns based on the assignee, family members and the location
• Craft general relocation packages so that they are less standardised – i.e., not written as if every assignee was the head of a household of four moving to a ‘westernised’ country
• Offer a heightened level of ‘duty of care’ to help ensure the employee’s and family’s wellbeing and ease throughout the course of the relocation process

 

“I saw the HR leadership strategy for 2019 and part of it was promoting diversity through international assignments, but I had not been informed in advance. I offered to help and HR did not understand how I could be involved!”

 

Assumptions and unconscious biases

Why do some organisations fail to open an assignment opportunity to a wider, more diverse group? All too often, qualified candidates are ruled out, or never even considered, based on the business’ assumptions about how the employee might fail to fit into a challenging environment. These assumptions might include:

• The location is too dangerous for this person
• The person will not feel comfortable with the local norms and standards
• The employee will not want to, or be able to, move their family
• The local infrastructure will not serve the assignee’s or the family’s needs
• The older employee might have trouble adjusting to a different lifestyle

Clearly, an open discussion about these kinds of concerns up front with a candidate is a far better approach than deciding for them, but many organisations still hesitate to handle these concerns head on.

“80% of our assignees are white males according to our statistics, so I conducted research where I sent questionnaires to women asking about mobility options. The majority felt they would not be considered for an assignment because they have a family.”

Going beyond bias

Localised bias and hostile locales are real issues of course, even while the organisation does everything it can to support a move. It is important to be upfront about the challenges certain employees are very likely to face in certain environments. Personal danger, discriminatory practices and even legal restrictions cannot be ignored and should not be minimised. These kinds of realities might preclude someone from pursuing an assignment, but, again, that should be their choice based on the facts.

Preventing self-deselection

Unfortunately, qualified employees occasionally don’t apply for assignments because they feel they will not receive serious consideration due to gender, age, race, sexual orientation, family situations, ethnicity or other personal factors.

Mobility should pre-empt this tendency by working with talent to ensure targeted employee outreach in the course of periodic performance reviews and check-ins. Mobility should also encourage assignment opportunities to be promoted in all offices – even in locations where employees tend not to seek assignments.

Participants identify opportunities for improvement

‘We need to understand about qualified employees who are not applying for an assignment and why.’ – insideMOBILITY London participant

‘We need to discuss assignments more openly. Employees from some countries don’t tend to put themselves forward and that needs to be addressed.’ – insideMOBILITY Geneva participant

‘We need to update our relocation policies to reflect our diverse workforce.’ – insideMOBILITY Geneva participant

‘Most discussions on Diversity and Inclusion are still based on gender and don’t account for other factors.’ – insideMOBILITY Geneva participant

Tips for supporting a diverse programme and diverse employees

• Engage top leadership level support to push for business-wide engagement of a more inclusive approach to mobility management
• Involve the organisation’s overall Diversity and Inclusion function to ensure these standards are correctly carried over into the Mobility programme
• Help employees envision a positive assignment by sharing success stories or case studies of others who have managed through distinct and varying circumstances
• Offer a ‘mate system’ for assignees to help ensure strong, local support before and after the move
• Describe relocation policies in a Q and A format that addresses a full spectrum of circumstantial, diversity-related scenarios

Promoting Diversity and Inclusion within and across the Mobility and Talent functions is not always accomplished through a single programme approach or an over-arching policy. Rather, Diversity and Inclusion in Mobility is also supported on a case-by-case, human-centric basis. As one participant put it at a recent insideMOBILITY forum, ‘The relocation policy should support the circumstance.’

To really promote change, broad culture transformation is imperative and this can come to life if you have the right stakeholders on board, you have great success stories to tell and can lead by example from the very top and heart of your organisation.