#20 Diversity – The Business Case Backfires

Text transcript

Amy: Welcome everybody to this December. Can you believe it? Would the December wellbeing our, my name is Amy McDonald and my colleague is here too. 

Angus: I’m Angus Robinson. 

Amy: And another colleague of ours Nick, is in the background doing all things technical for us. That’s Nick Lander doing things technical for us.

And of course, we have our wonderful death guest, even Oran Geor, who I will introduce more fully shortly. So this for those of you that haven’t been to the Wellbeing Hour before, we are recording this session as a webinar and as a podcast. So you and or your colleagues or friends, family, whoever are interested, are free to check in and catch up with the session if you can’t make it along here today.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with Head Torch, what we do is work with organizations to enable them to create a mentally healthy culture. So we work with senior teams, line managers, frontline people, and it’s all about working with that organization on the, on their journey to ensure that people are proactive in terms of supporting, promoting, prioritizing people’s health, mental health and wellbeing in the workplace.

So if you want to find out more about what we do contact us hereafter. So just to. give you a little bit of an idea of how this session is gonna run today. It’s slightly different perhaps from the model that we’ve been running more recently, but there are lots of similarities as well. So I’m gonna be introducing our guest shortly and then she will introduce herself using a mystery object and then she’s going to, she’s actually gonna pose the question, oppose a question to us, but we’ll have some time to consider that question as she runs through some of her very interesting and novel research.

And then she and I will move into conversation before we open up the floor to everybody here today to consider the question that she has posed us right at the beginning of the session. And there’ll be time there also for you to jump in with other questions that you might have for Arian as well.

After that she’s gonna share some top tips and then I’ll post Orianne some rapid quickfire questions that she hasn’t heard yet. We’ll be looking forward to them as well. With great pleasure. Then let me introduce to you Jor. So Arian is the assistant professor of organizational behaviour at the Yale School of Management.

Her research investigates the effects of organizations’ justifications for why they value diversity on underrepresented group members and managers. In other research, she examines how people respond to information reflecting organization’s achievements in increasing women’s representation in top leadership.

So Oren’s research offers novel insights into how organizations’ efforts to support diversity may paradoxically prevent them from advancing toward their diversity goals. Her work has been published in some top journals in Psychology and Management, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Journal of Applied Psychology to name just a couple.

Her research has also won multiple awards and has been covered by the media in, for example, Harvard Business Review, Forbes and the Economist Arians, currently teaching the managing groups and teams and the global virtual teams courses in the M B A program at the Yale School of Management. Arian over to you.

Do introduce yourself. with your mystery object. . 

Oriane: Thank you Amy, for the very kind presentation and introduction. Okay. So the mystery object that I brought is basically a puzzle . It’s. I am very fan of puzzles figuratively and actually, literally. And so when I graduated from my PhD sorry for the reflections, but my lab at London School of Management offered me this puzzle that shows a lot of pictures of time celebrating achievements.

And in academia, achievements take years. Like publications are the longest process. And so you can see us like celebrating in style when we had a paper accepted and things like that. And what this allows me to remember is that all the, research can be very lonely at times, actually having your tribe, having a group supporting you and pushing you and celebrating your achievements with you is really.

In order for me to keep pushing on my work, and I guess this is true for a lot of people, you don’t achieve on your own. You usually achieve thanks to the support of lots of people that are behind you and supporting you in bad times and celebrating with you in good times. So that is an object that is very dear to me and somehow defines me and my academic career so far.

Amy: Wonderful. So yeah, fantastic. Over to you. Yeah. No, that really lovely. Puzzles are great for just being 

Oriane: in the moment, aren’t they? They are. Like, when I’m doing a puzzle, I am not thinking about anything else. So there’s a way of doing things with your hand and it, you’re not thinking with your mind and that is very relaxing,

Yeah, absolutely. And 

Amy: how many years were you working in London? 

Oriane: Six years. 

Amy: Six years. Wow. Yeah. Fantastic. 

Oriane: Great. 

Amy: Arian, I’m gonna just hand over to you to share some of your research with us there. Sure, 

Oriane: absolutely. So I’m just gonna share my screen with all of you. Bear with me.

Amy: All right. Can you see my screen?

There we are. Perfect. Yeah. Okay. 

Oriane: So what I wanted to do in this session, it was first to ask you a question. And the question that I had for all of you was, what is your company’s one word? Why, for valuing wellbeing at work? So if you had one word, what is the reason that they would invoke for valuing.

For justifying why wellbeing at work is really important to them, if at all. And the reason why I am asking you this question really is because as a researcher, I’m really fascinated by the justifications that organizations use when they talk about their commitment to social causes. So that could be diversity, that could be sustainability, that could be wellbeing in the workplace.

And so I’m less, I’m gonna let you mull over this question throughout the session, and maybe after I present you a little bit more of my research, maybe we can go back and hear some of your responses to this question. So today what I’m gonna present to you is work in the domain of diversity because that’s where the bulk of my work has been happening.

And what I’ll do at the end of this very kind of blitz presentation of 10 minutes will be to ask you a few, draw a few implications for wellbeing and ask a few questions that you may want to ponder on in the domain of diversity. So when it comes to diversity we know that more and more organizations are actually voicing their commitment to it.

And often they do that by justifying why diversity actually matters to. And so just to dive in and give you the kind of a sense of the kind of justifications that some, sometimes companies or organizations in general can provide. I wanted to share with you a an email that I received right around the time that I was starting to write up my dissertation.

And so this email was from the 30% Club which is an advocacy group that’s trying to advance women’s representation in top leadership and on boards. And the email was celebrating the launch of a new report on gender diversity. And the title was, are You Missing Millions? The Commercial Imperative for Putting a Gender Lens on your.

And so of course this title may sound a bit extravagant, but what I will argue in the stock is that what is meaningful about it is its framing of diversity as a business asset. It is this framing that is colloquial called the Business Case for Diversity. And what I will show you today is this framing is hardly unique, but it’s also highly consequential because it has the power to undermine job seekers from underrepresented.

So just to start, I want to clarify a little bit what the business case is and give you some definitions. So I define the business case as a line of argumentation that argues that diversity is valuable because of the benefits that it yields for organizations. And in terms of benefits, you can think direct or indirect benefits.

It could be greater creativity, better decision making, being able to hire better talent being able to build a rapport with customers and so on and so forth. So there’s a long list basically, but what is important here is that the business case really frames diversity as a means to an end, which is organizational performance.

And because of diversity is only a means to improving the company’s performance. Again, directly or indirectly, I characterize this rhetoric as a an instrumental rhetoric. And of course there are other arguments that organizations can use more moral, less economic and they can make what I call the fairness case, which is again, a light of argumentation that argues that diversity is valuable in and of itself be and basically argues this on the grounds of moral principles, equal opportunity, social justice, et cetera.

Because the fairness case frames diversity as an in itself, not as a means to improving the organization’s performance, I characterize it as a non-instrumental. And a you’re gonna see the business cases is very widespread but we know very little about what are the consequences of these two types of dis discourses are.

And so this led me to wonder what are the consequences of the business case for diversity relative to the fairness case when it comes to underrepresented job seekers who are hoping to join companies. So right at the beginning when I was starting to get very interested into what companies were saying about diversity, I also started to see the business case everywhere.

I saw it making regularly headlines in the general press, and I saw it being the subject of numerous reports on diversity. But that in a sense did not really tell me what organizations themselves were saying. And so what I did was to go on the websites of the Fortune 500 companies and using collecting all the texts that they were providing about diversity.

I used a machine learning algorithm to actually classify their rhetoric into either a business case or a fairness case category. And I found that more than four, in five of the Fortune 500 companies actually use the business case to to convey their commitment to diversity. You have about one in five that actually makes no case.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t talk about diversity. Rather, it means that they don’t provide any justification for it, so they value diversity. We’re not sure why. And then finally, you can see that around 1% only of those Fortune 500 we’re actually making the fairness case. . So given the prevalence of of the business case out there, that made it even more important to empirically investigate how this discourse actually affects the audiences who hear it, and in this case underrepresented job seekers.

So what I did was to measure start measuring the consequences for their anticipated sense of belonging to a prospective organization. How much they expected that they would feel welcome and valued there. Their desire to join the company and for social identity threats. So that sounds like a very jargony term.

Basically, you can think of social identity threats as their worry that they may be seen and judged and somewhat reduced to their social identity. I looked at those consequences for underrepresented job seekers across sexual orientation, gender, and race. So with LGBTIQ plus professionals, women who are seeking job in stem, by which I mean science, technology, engineering, and math.

And as well as African-American students in higher education, typically college. And because I am an experimentalist by training, what I did across these five studies and these three big identity samples was to randomly assign participants to read either a business case or a fairness case for diversity.

And again, insist on randomly. So it’s not that some people who were more interested in diversity went into one condition. Instead, people were really randomly assigned a case to read. . So to give you a sense, a little bit of what they read, you can see here that they were asked to imagine that they had found an interesting opening on the company’s website.

And that as they went on and scrolled on and looked at this company’s website, they found either they found the following message. Again, either a business case or a fairness case. So the two statements were kept incredibly parallel to really increase the validity of the study, but they were changing in some key phrases according to the condition.

So the business case condition started with diversity and inclusion are part of our company’s commitment to performance versus commitment to equality. In the fairness case, then it went on to say, diversity simply does diversity simply makes good business sense or is the right thing to do. Then I went on to give classical arguments if of the two different types of discourses, and it concluded with in some, we firmly believe that diversity and inclusion can help our organization meet and exceed our business goals in the business case condition versus can help our organizations, our organization, foster respect and opportunity for all in the fairness case condition.

And so what did we find after? Participants had read those statements and completed our measures of anticipated sense of belonging, desire to join and social identity threat. while we found actually that across all these identity groups, so LGBTQ plus professionals, women in STEM and African-American students, we found that reading a business case rather than a fairness case, actually undermined their anticipated sense of belonging to the to the prospective organization.

So I’m gonna give you two examples because there was five studies, but here you can see that LGBTIQ plus professionals who are recruited at an LGBTIQ plus focus conference those who were actually randomly assigned to relay business case reported significantly lower anticipated sense of belonging to the prospective organization than those who had been assigned to read a fairness case from that prospective organization.

The same happened for STEM women, but specifically on the rejection facets of the measure of sense of belonging. So sense of belonging has very different factors and facets. And we found that unanticipated rejection, particularly women actually who had been assigned to read a business case reported anticipating greater rejection in the prospective organization than women who had read a fairness case which means a lower sense of belonging.

And you can see that for men, nothing happened. So across the five studies that we investigated, basically we found that those messages about diversity, that superficially sound positive, actually specifically undermine members of underrepresented. Going back to our other measures. We also found that across the three groups reading a business case rather than the fairness case, decreased their desire to join the prospective organization.

And all of those effects were driven by an increased sense of social identity threat, which again, is defined as their worry to be seen and judged through the lens of their identities. Then what we wondered was, okay, so we’ve seen that they’re less likely to want to join and therefore to apply, but what happens if they nonetheless decide to apply?

Could it be that the business case. Keeps pursuing them and shaping their interactions with a prospective organization even before they joined. And so for that, we decided to investigate what, how the business case would affect the performance of job candidates in a job interview. And so we recruited 318 highly trained master students at London Business School.

And we used the same manipulation as the one that I showed you, except that people were reading that manipulation at the very beginning of the interview and then put them the message to one side, and the interview went on as usual. And what we did was to collect the ratings of performance for these interviews that were given to us by the interviewers who very importantly were blind to hypothesis, which means they had no idea what we were looking for in that study.

And therefore, that is important because we knew that that lack of knowledge about what we were looking for was unlikely to bias their evaluations. And so here again, what we found was that for women who had been randomly assigned to read a business case rather than the fairness case before starting their interview while those women actually underperformed that again was not the case for men.

So men were really indifferent to the text that they had read. But the business case, again, specifically hurt women’s performance. And you can see also that in the business case condition, you find a significant gender gap in performance on that interview. But that gender gap completely disappears when you remove the threatening message of the business case and replace it with a fairness case.

Ns meaning not significant. So the differences is not statistically meaningful. Okay. So to conclude I would say what I want you to live with is. This conclusion. So how we explain our commitment to diversity actually matters probably more than we even realize. And the business case for diversity, which is so prevalent as I’ve shown you is actually a wolf in she’s clothing as I like to say, because on the surface it sounds really positive and very supportive of diversity, but it can actually undermine company’s ability to advance toward their diversity goals.

In new research, I actually also have found evidence that managers who are exposed to a business case for diversity can actually show lower support for diversity when a diverse team actually fails to perform well. Diversity doesn’t deliver on its promise to increase performance. The business case can actually weaken commitment to diversity.

And this is why it’s basically important to really scientifically test the consequences of those messages. Because sometimes organizations are really well-meaning, and they want to convey a very positive message, but positive messages on their own are not necessarily enough they can backfire. And so switching to the domain of wellbeing Obviously, I’m sure you’ve all seen the business case being very prevalent in that domain as well.

So just a few, again, in the general press, you can see all of those headlines. That also from public institutions such as in the us, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, which was very, had a very prominent active role during covid. And, in in polls and in again, consulting companies reports on wellbeing.

And so the questions that I have for you that we can tackle or that you can just keep wondering about after this session are really the following. How does the business case for workplace wellbeing actually affect the different audiences that hear that? Are there any detrimental effects there?

And if so, on whom? Maybe it could be on those who most need those messages, which is the, for instance, employees who are suffering from mental health issues. Is there an alternative case for mental health? Obviously, this is an important question and I love to mention this alternative case that Jeff McDonald’s, who has been a guest of head Torch Wellbeing Hour in the past suggested when he visited L B S, he came up with what he called a love case which could go in the following way.

So we value wellbeing at work simply because we love our employees, irrespective of any benefits that we might reap by investing in wellbeing. And then also I want to ask you the question of post covid. Is there a chance for a shift in wellbeing rhetoric given, we’ve all suffered from stress and anxiety during that period.

And possibly, maybe this is no longer a time where the business cases is convincing, but maybe there’s a case for, to be made for valuing wellbeing in and of itself, irrespective of any benefits that organizations may reap. So with that, I just want to thank my co-author on those projects, an Ian who’s at London Business Call and remind you as well that we have a an article in the Harvard Business Review that kind of summarizes what I’ve been sharing with you today.

So if you want more detail into what we did, you can definitely find more information there. And thank you all and I look forward to your questions.

Amy: Thank you so much 

Orianne absolutely fascinating. And I’m whoa just so much in there. So thank you so much for sharing it so clearly. One of the things that strikes me is, cause we are often in organizations and we talk about, we do talk about the business case, we talk about the legal case, we talk about the ethical case.

Yeah. 

In, in my mind, there’s always the ethical case, which is front and foremost. The, I suppose the issue that many people who want to move this, who want to move the wellbeing agenda forward within organizations is that sometimes the people that they need to convince only want to hear the business case, right?

Oriane: Yeah. So it’s interesting because it’s the same in the domain of diversity. And there’s actually research by some colleagues that shows that people say, leaders in particular say they want the business case. But in fact there are 2, 2, 2 downsides to that. The first one is that usually they want the business case because they don’t believe in the cost baseline.

And so they want to see the numbers, but then they’re not convinced by the numbers. So it is a paradoxical ask where they’re asking you to go the extra mile and demonstrate and effect when. They’re not on board baseline. And the second thing is it typically tends to the business case tends to lower what the paper shows to be their emotions about the current status quo, which usually is very negative of diversity.

So for instance if diversity makes good business sense, it lowers their idea that the current status quo is unfair. And that translates since they see it as less unfair, it translates into lack of action in turn. And . So there’s that. And then in my own research, again, like I, I find evidence that people want business case in the business case in the short term, in the long term, it can actually undermine the cause it’s supposed to support.

For instance, by, if you make tons of promises on what an investment in diversity is gonna produce in terms of results there’s, there are chances that those results are not gonna materialize. And what happens then? And what I show is that actually what happens then is drop in commitment.

And so in the short term UI maybe. Bring people on board. And I say maybe because there’s evidence that it’s not quite sure, but in the long term, everything might unravel because the benefits are not, the ones that you promised. And in the, I don’t know, for wellbeing, but in diversity research, there’s strong evidence that actually there’s no correlation really between diversity and performance overall.

So the case isn’t even scientifically sound . So making promises based on, yeah, it’s like empty promises. It’s down to backfire as well. 

Amy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So within, you’re working with in the academic field, what people within academia who have a different standpoint to you, how have you answered to them?

Oriane: You mean a different point of view on what the best rhetoric may be? Yeah. Very again, very often. Those were people whom there’s a very actually interesting article by Alice Iri, who’s a big name in our field. She’s retired now, but she was talking about the role of the scientist and where does the boundary lie in terms of scientists and advocates?

And a lot of scientists were hoping that their research on diversity would help push the diversity agenda. And were willing to again, sell diversity on, based on those terms. It will be great for the company, your creativity, your decision making, your everything’s gonna blossom. And research has.

Since shown that overall, the effect is not there. It might be there in one domain but not in another. And so it cancels out in the end. And so to people who are still making the business case in academia, I’m like, just let’s keep up to date and let’s look at the meta analysis and irrespective of whether the business case is true or not.

Anyway, let’s look at what it does when you actually broadcast that case and people hear it, and you can see that even if it were true, it’s having the detrimental consequences and prevents the advancement of diversity because it makes underrepresented job seekers less willing to join even if they apply less willing to perform well.

And so maybe we need to consider alternatives to that rhetoric. A respective of the truth, value of that statement. 

Amy: Absolutely. Great. I’d love to open the floor now to, to anybody who either has a response to that initial question that Orian posed us. Which I’ll just bring back up onto the screen for you or indeed any of the questions, the other questions that you asked us there at the end of the, of your presentation.

And also just any other in general if you’ve got any other questions that you ha, that you’d like to put out there, it’d be great to hear from you. , I think Nick’s gonna put that question into the chat as well. 

Nick P: No, I wasn’t, but I can talk . Oh no, sorry. I I was talking abouts the other 

Amy: Nick

Oh 

Nick P: no, Nick. Ok. 

Amy: But yeah do Nick, you, yeah, just 

Nick P: yeah just want to say 

Amy: which, sorry. Nick, do you want to say which organization you work with and then give us your point or your question? Yeah, 

Nick P: sure. I work for City Facilities Management Company looks after all the facilities for as Asda and MNS and the like.

So lots of fridges and aircon units. Very exciting. Yeah, so just interesting thing. I’m interested in really broad diversity, so neurodiversity and, as somebody left-handed or right-handed, if somebody colourblind and not, we developed software. I look after the it department of the company.

And I think having that broad diversity just brings all kinds of different thinking to that creative process. I was working with Microsoft last year and their department that was in as it said, it was they’d based on outcomes, so they could prove that if there were a lack of diversity, brought the wrong outcomes.

Then they had model projects where with the government that had actually gone wrong because they’d had non-diverse teams that subconsciously attested data from a single perspective. . But if you brought in diversity, you brought in multiple perspectives and you got a completely neatly different outcome.

It was photo recognition for passports. So it was actually rejecting a particular race and gender more frequently than it should. Yeah. So I just think it’s interesting whether that’s an absolute, so it’s an almost proven outcomes based effect, and it won’t work everywhere and it won’t work in every walk of life.

But that’s, I think, another angle on how you can sell it to the business that the value is you’re gonna get a more diverse outcome in the solutions and creative things that you. 

Oriane: Yeah. Wow. No, it’s an important point. And as I said diversity has been shown, for instance, to have positive effects when it comes to better decision making, as you were mentioning creativity, innovation and things like that.

It’s just that diversity also can have detrimental outcomes. So typically there seems to be more conflict, at least in the beginning among diverse teams than in homogeneous teams. And sometimes the team moral can be a bit lower because of that, or, and Overall on performance as a whole, like for, and in particular for the organizational performance, because there are effects that kind of cancel out.

There is a no effect in the end, but in particular domains like creativity or decision making that can work. So it’s just, you can’t sell diversity as a net positive for the organization because diversity has many effects. And what the research has shown is that overall it doesn’t, it doesn’t amount too much, which does not mean that in some spaces like group decision making for instance it cannot have positive effects.

It can it, but again, there may be also negative effects to consider in the balance. Now this is about the question of the veracity of the business case. Again there has been tons of research on this and it’s not really my, almost my field. What I consider is more like the effects of that rhetoric, and I try to stay agnostic to the truth, value of the business case.

I look at the consequences of using the business case. And so yes, you can use it to try to sell diversity. Even sell diversity is an interesting phrase. But again, the consequences of that rhetoric for convincing people are not so good and they’re also not good for the people who hear it the diverse people because they also feel instrumentalized and that they’re welcome provided they bring something in the workplace, which is not a very inclusive discourse to start with.

Amy: Okay. Thank you. Thank you Arian. Lucy. Lucy Butters, do you want to just unmute yourself and tell us where you work and then give us. You answer your question, your point of view. . 

a voice: Thank you. Amy. I’m not sure I have I, I know that I’ve got questions. I’m not sure that I’ve properly formulated them, but I wanted to say thank you so much for that.

Really concise and very quick. You put so much across really quickly. 

Amy: So wait, you work Lucy? Sorry, just I’m a master. I 

a voice: work for myself. I’m a master facilitator in the field of cultural intelligence, which is typically around supporting either international effective and or inclusion. So I’ve been doing all of work with various organizations across the public sector and commercial in the uk and I found it really fascinating there that you’re talking about the impact of the business case.

Cuz I always share exactly as you have that actually there isn’t research. Supporting the case for diversity. There’s either or, but for example, the McKinsey report, if you go into that, what they’re seeing is inclusion. So it’s a positive relationship with inclusion and Business outcomes if you like, or innovation or productivity or whatever these bits are.

But just as you said, diversity in itself can make or break teams is what all the suggestions seem to say. And with cultural intelligence, it can support inclusion. And I guess when Nick’s example there, which was fantastic, it’s not the diversity, did people have the voice to be able to say, have you thought about a left-handed person?

Or have you thought about, being colourblind? I’m colourblind I’m not seeing what you are seeing. And so there’s that bit about do people have a voice? But for me, I think some of my questions, which I can’t quite bring together is I think it’s very hard to have inclusion if there’s not wellbeing.

Amy: Okay. Can I just cut in there for you, Lucy. A great point. What’s your thought on that? 

a voice: Maria that’s what I wanted to, what’s coming? Sorry. That’s 

Amy: fine. I’m ticking. 

Oriane: No. It’s a great point about the importance of inclusion and as you’ve seen like over the years, like initially we started talking about diversity and now we talk about at some point we talked about D N I so diversity and inclusion, and now it’s becoming d e I like diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And , the acronym keeps getting longer. And that points to actual research that shows that although diversity doesn’t have an effect on its own, on performance, it does matter what the. Is in which the diversity operates. So if people, are more supportive of diversity, that can unlock more benefits than if people are actually pushing back, et cetera.

So the context matters. That being said, again, like even with inclusion it’s not clear at this point that there is a business case to be made. But my question here, again, like if we move a little bit away from, but it’s true, and the McKinsey report, I don’t, I won’t go into this today because that would be technical, but it is actually flawed in a lot of ways.

So I know it, it has a lot of exposure and I don’t I wish there was more rigorous research out there, but again, moving away from whether it’s true or not, and again the debate is still ongoing to some extent. Why does there need to be a case? That for diversity, a business case for diversity in a sense, like why does diversity have to pay your buck to be considered important?

And that’s really the core, the question that I want to leave you with, because in a sense, if we do believe in inclusion and equity and all these things, these are non-negotiable values, you would think. And so if we actually care for employees, of course we will want to advance inclusion and equity. And why then make your commitment to that conditional on that.

Those things. Inclusion, equity, diversity, produc. Tangible performance or bottom line effects. That’s the big puzzle. And given the prevalence given we swim in a notion of business case instrumentality, it becomes sometimes really hard to take a step back and be like, wait, let’s pause for a second.

Why are we even talking about, so social causes that in a sense, our sacred diversity, sustainability, wellbeing of employees at work. Why are we talking about the social causes in monitor terms at the end of the day? Yeah. And so that’s why I’m trying to question in my research and what I invite you to, Think of better even beyond the session.

Amy: Thanks. Thanks, Orianne. So Rebecca Ison, you’ve added something into the chat here. Just a quick response to this one, Orianne. She is wondering, can this finding be applied to organizations in the public service, political parties, and even parliaments? Is there any research in that area? 

Oriane: Yes it’s surprisingly, you would think, okay, the Fortune 500 making the business case, it’s not really surprising they’re for-profits, but there is actually research showing that public institutions are making the business case as well in a different way.

Maybe they don’t talk about performance or the bottom line, but for instance, public universities in the us there’s research that has shown that they promote diversity based on benefits for students learning to better prepare them to a diverse world. And, Yeah, but even if there were no benefits, maybe we should still try to integrate and increase the proportion of students who are from marginalized groups maybe.

The same thing happens with the Supreme Court that actually has justified some just some justice decisions around the integration of students from underrepresented groups based on those benefits. So you see, The Supreme Court. So the law basically using instrumental business language public universities and so on.

And so that rhetoric is really very pervasive and we need to, given its detrimental consequences, we need to really interrogate our use of that logic 

Amy: of that language. Great. Thank you. And back to your question, what is your one word why for wellbeing in the workplace? From Caroline Noble, we’ve got caring support from Amanda way and engagement from mi.

So let us hear some of your top tips Orian. Yes. And shall just share the screen for us here. So if you’d just like to take. Swiftly through these, your first bullet, ask yourself why wellbeing matters to you. Keep in mind it does not have to pay off. 

Oriane: Yes, exactly. So I hope, my hope is to really leave you with this question in your head.

If we think that whatever social cause that we’re interested in for head torch, that may be wellbeing. In my work, it’s diversity. Others, it’s sustainability. If we believe these things have value why do we have to argue in favour of them on the base that they will pay off if we invest in them?

So really trying to think about being more conscious about how we talk about those sacred values and what the consequences are when we start to monetize them in order to buy the commitment of organizations on those topics. 

Amy: Great. Remember that the motivations behind our wellbeing program may well shape its outcomes.

Oriane: Exactly. So I put wellbeing between brackets because again, like that, my researchers that for diversity, but I suspect and hope to investigate in the future those dynamics in the wellbeing space. As you can see, if you are investing in in a diversity program, for instance, based on instrumental motives, you are valuing diversity because of the benefits it will yield.

While that will shape the outcomes and potentially backfire in a way that wouldn’t, if you had valued the thing in and of itself, like for instance, the fairness case does by saying diversity is simply the right thing to do. So whether you’re investing for the thing in and of itself, or for the benefit that you hope to reap in the end, shapes the outcome.

Amy: Absolutely. Even a seemingly positive corporate message can be threatening. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your audience. 

Oriane: Yeah. As I’ve shown you in, in, in the research presentation the very people that organizations sought to attract by saying that they were committed to diversity were actually threatened on an identity level by that message.

And so you can imagine in the wellbeing space, for instance, when an organization talks about wellbeing as being important because let’s say happier employees actually are more productive. What does it do to the people who are suffering, for instance, from mental health issues and how do they feel about the fact that being unwell right now, they may be less productive?

And so being seen as of lesser value and how does that impact their willingness to maybe open up about their condition? Whereas if you. Value wellbeing in and of itself, and there’s no talk about performance in the picture, then maybe people would feel safer seeking the support that they need because they know they wouldn’t be seen through that prism of performance.

Amy: Absolutely. Yeah. So it’s about showing empathy within the message before, supposedly learn is learning empathy. It’s actually being empath empathetic from right from the get-go. Exactly. Lovely support for wellbeing programs is fragile. Don’t make yours contingent on return on investment.

Oriane: Yeah, again this, we touched upon this with this other research that I didn’t detail today, but that shows that when you expose managers to arguments that diversity will pay off they expect that return on investment and when it fails to materialize, they suddenly withdraw from diversity efforts.

And so again, I can only speculate about what happens for wellbeing, but we can imagine some of the same trends happening where you’re as an advocate in your company, you’re like, yes, I’ve won the support by selling the multiple benefits of, for instance, wellbeing and then. When the performance remains, either the same or declines for whatever reason, there are many parameters in an organization that can influence the pro performance.

Then people are like, okay, so this investment wasn’t worth it, and you lose the buy-in that you initially gained. So don’t make your commitment dependent on return on investment if you want to build stable and strong commitment. 

Amy: Lovely. And finally, ask not what your employees can do to improve their own mental health.

Ask what you can structurally change to improve their wellbeing at work. love that one. . 

Oriane: Yeah. And so this actually is less based on my research right now than what I have noticed in many conferences that I attended on wellbeing, because I have a very keen interest in that topic, even though my research ha hasn’t gone there yet.

But I’m hoping to do this. Sonia, you are interested in, in, in testing things in the field in the domain of wellbeing. I welcome that with open arms. But what I’ve noticed in those conferences is that very often there was a tendency to say we’ve sponsored a yoga program or a gym program or Like a space where people can actually talk and nothing changes structurally there, but you are basically outsourcing the responsibility of wellbeing to your employees being like, if only you went to the gym, if only you did your yoga and your meditation and you manage your stress thanks to your coach, et cetera.

So basically it’s all about the individuals and companies can feel really good about doing this because they feel we’ve invested, we’ve done, we’ve ticked all the boxes. And now if it’s, if you’re not feeling better, it’s your fault. And that is a really dangerous trap that organizations can fall into.

It’s blaming the individuals when they themselves actually have not done the deep work of really figuring out what is causing the stress in the first place in the organization. And it can be just the individuals and their personality. Sure, these things matter. But structurally, if your employees, the morale is low for all of them, there’s something really deep structurally that you need to rethink.

And that’s the sense of ask, not what they can do for their own health but ask what you can change fundamentally and not just cosmetically through gym membership and things like that. 

Amy: Absolutely. It’s not about putting plasters on, is it? We’re yeah, very much at the same thinking. You have to get underneath the root cause cuz otherwise all you’re doing is plastering.

Exactly. You’re, you need to be willing to do the hard work of restructuring things rather than plastering. 

Yeah. Great. So I have a few quick fire questions. So quick question, quick answer. Here we go. Arian, what does vulnerability mean to you? 

Oriane: Vulnerability is the willingness to abandon the perfect facade and actually reveal your weaknesses to people who might need that information.

In particular people who are below you and look up to you. That’s my fire answer. 

Amy: That’s a fabulous answer. Thank you. What do you think is gonna revolutionize workplace mental health? 

Oriane: The actual willingness to restructure work itself and processes in the workplace as opposed to multiplying the nice sexy wellbeing programs that don’t get at the root cause.

Amy: Lovely. Yeah. What message would you give your 

younger self

Oriane: Don’t worry so damn much

Amy: Yeah. Don’t worry so damn much. Absolutely. And what do you think every person, each person could do to best support their colleagues? 

Oriane: I think being willing to listen, making it a little bit, sometimes it can be like, okay, I am, the clock is ticking. I have a lot to do. I don’t have time to To, to chat.

But actually seeing that also as part of your job, especially as a manager and making time, building time to actually check in with people, for instance, at the beginning of meetings and seeing people under you, not necessarily as, a cog in the will, but as full human beings whose circumstances matter, not only at work but outside, even if again they don’t necessarily will impact the team performance or it doesn’t matter their whole people.

And, their value does not stop at the door of the organization. So making time to listen to them and really empathize I think is key. And seeing people for what they are, people who have value in and oven cells, not just in the context of the organization as employees. 

Amy: Yeah. Wonderful.

Arian, thank you so much. I’m gonna pass over now to Angus. Who will Sum up. Thank you. Thank 

Oriane: you, 

Angus: Orianne. Thank you very much. That was really enlightening in many ways. We, since we started Head Torch, we have talked about getting to the causes of stress. Anything else is only window dressing was the way that we put it.

And to hear you say, you have to structurally improve wellbeing, you have to get to those causes. Yeah. Don’t just do the cosmetic work. Change it fundamentally is music to our ears. Yeah. It’s so many organizations I know are doing good work, but to get to the structural causes, that’s got to be.

The ultimate goal. I love the words that you use, the business cases of wolf and the sheep’s clothing. Yeah. And that fairness creates a much bigger sense of belonging. But you then go on to say, why are we even having a business case? These are non nego, these are non-negotiable values.

Yeah. These should be a given. Absolutely. A hundred percent. I completely agree with you, but if you look back in the health and safety world, you would’ve thought people going home safe was an absolute given and an absolute value that everybody should have expected. Yet it wasn’t, 20, 30, 40 years ago, a lot of people died of work.

And what we’re doing now, I feel, is that we’re catching up with where the health and safety world is. So thank you. That was enlightening. It was fascinating, and it’s just wonderful to have you on the wellbeing. Thank you very much. Thank you. So next month on the wellbeing hour we have Jackie Vaz, and this is we thought this would be a good one for January, seeing everybody’s thinking maybe about New Year’s resolutions and possibly finances after Christmas.

So Jackie is a financial wellbeing specialist and independent financial advisor. So she’s looking at financial wellbeing, the elephant in the workplace, and I think that will be a very topical wellbeing error in January. We also have coming up after that so in February we have Luke for Ali Luke for is a Singapore advisor in diversity, inclusion and transformation with the C I P D.

So again, it looks like that would be a really good one. Tim Duggan, I met Tim purely by chance at having dinner. One of those restaurants you go to where you share a table. And it turns out that Tim is winner of for the best Leadership Book of the year award in 2022, winner of the best entrepreneurship book in 2021 at the Australian Book Awards.

So I think Tim is going to give us another different outlook on the wellbeing error. So please stay in touch with us, follow us in LinkedIn. It does make a difference. We also run the occasional free event there, so you will see them there. If you’d like to find more about what we do we do, as Amy said, work with senior leaders, people, managers, frontline people.

They’re my contact details on the screen there. So please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you. I’d love to hear what you are doing. So if there’s no Other questions. 

Amy: I did see another one in the chat, so 

Angus: I think there is another question. Yeah. Okay. So let’s have that other question. 

Oriane: So we had a question by Mik.

Yeah. Around what it means to restructure things structurally to actually address wellbeing issues. And I was trying to provide a quick answer in the chat in case we didn’t have to time to address that issue. Of course it will depend on different organizations, different teams, different industries and things like that.

But things that will, that can apply broadly, for instance, can be patterns of communication. So for instance, whether you have time off or you are supposed to be on call 24 7, so emailing late at night, what’s the delay that you’re expected to take before responding? For instance, it can be norms around time management.

How are deadlines with clients actually scheduled, and what are the considerations that are taken when setting those deadlines? It can be, norms around psychological safety how are people. Do people actually feel safe voicing concerns that they have in a group, or do they feel they don’t have license and can just nod and approve?

It can be things like that really get at how we’re working together and what the, how the workload gets assigned. What’s the responsiveness that it’s expected and really how we evaluate people’s performance. For instance, it could be do they have to show up in the office every day presentism or is it okay sometimes to have more flexibility?

It’s really getting at the structure of work, the pr, the work processes that I’m talking about that can make a huge difference in terms of wellbeing in the workplace as opposed to, having tight deadlines having to respond at any hour of the day or night. Not feeling safe in voicing concerns, but having a gym membership, , how do you think this is gonna pan out?

Is that gonna make a real difference as opposed to making work processes a little bit more conducive to people feeling good at work. So that’s the kind of things that I’m saying. And again, like wellbeing is not my expertise but these are the kind of things that we need to think about when we think about structures.

Amy: Absolutely. We, like when we work with organizations, we’d like to pose that question right at the get-go of how would you rate the mental health of the people? In your organization and it’s quite an open, quite a wide question, right? So people can go anywhere with that and we’ll hear all sorts of things from people are taking lots, a lot more time off than they used to, or there’s more illness, or we’re getting people leaving more often.

So you get a you’re picking up on all those different aspects that are impacting on people’s wellbeing to really that, that’s the sort of start really of digging into how an organization can explore where they are on that journey to create a mental and mentally healthy culture.

Oriane: Exactly. And it’s these are symptoms and you need to. D knows what’s going on beneath the surface beneath, so we need to interrogate that. 

Amy: Yeah. Lovely. Arian, thank you so much. Thank you very much everybody for coming along. 

Angus: Thank you. Coming along everybody. 

Amy: Thank you folks. 

Angus: Thank you. Bye.

Amy: Great questions.