Author: Denise Keating

Umbrella HR

Training & Development

How AI will change Learning and Development

Denise Keating - July 18, 2025

It’s impossible to miss how AI has begun to impact every part of the modern business. As organisational leaders it’s important for us to understand two things: how to use AI effectively in our day-to-day roles, and how AI is going to disrupt our industries, workforces, and operational processes.

I’ve recently completed a short AI training course that has made me rethink what I thought about both of these things. The ProfAI course (free, under an hour) is one of many that have sprung up to teach the world how best to use generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude.

But what really struck me wasn’t what the training contained, but how it did it. Because ProfAI uses AI in a way that fundamentally changes what we think we know about L&D in our organisations.

It starts by asking two questions:

  • Describe your industry/organisation
  • Describe your role and responsibilities

It then uses these responses to personalise and contextualise the course content, the review questions it asks, and feedback on answers you give. Indeed, a generic answer won’t allow you to move on – you’ll need to provide an answer that aligns with your responses to the initial questions.

Perhaps surprisingly, the mechanics of this are relatively simple – indeed, you could recreate the concept in an AI chatbot like ChatGPT using just a few sentences.


Deliver training to me based on the following:

Q1: Ask me my job and industry

Using the answer to this question, customise the below to be highly relevant:

Section 1:

Effective prompting: You should explain how to assemble effective prompts, with the formula: [Instruction or goal] + [context or background] + [desired format/output]. Provide an example derived from the response to Q1 and then break it down. Then test me on the concept, setting the task of writing a prompt for a common process. You should create the task using my response to Q1 to identify a relevant process. When I have answered by creating a prompt, you should rate the response based on the earlier formula and recommend improvements.

Copy and paste the above into an AI assistant to try it yourself.

Four Fundamental Shifts for L&D

This simple example reveals four fundamental shifts that will reshape how we approach learning and development in our organisations:

1. Conversational Learning at Scale

We’re witnessing the return of conversational learning, but without the traditional constraints. Historically, we learned from tutors who could answer questions and provide feedback, but this was limited by availability and cost. The printing press democratised knowledge through books, leading to self-directed learning that reached its peak with e-learning modules and multiple-choice assessments.

AI brings back the tutorial experience – learners can ask questions, receive immediate feedback, and engage in dialogue about complex topics. But unlike human tutors, AI is available 24/7, can handle unlimited learners simultaneously, and maintains consistent quality across all interactions.

2. Adaptive Learning Pathways

The ProfAI example shows basic personalisation, but AI’s true power lies in adaptive learning. Rather than following predetermined paths, AI can adjust content difficulty, pacing, and approach based on real-time analysis of learner responses, comprehension levels, and performance patterns.

Imagine compliance training that automatically provides additional examples when someone struggles with a concept, or leadership development that adapts scenarios based on the learner’s management style and challenges. This isn’t just personalisation – it’s intelligent responsiveness that evolves with each interaction.

3. Prompt Engineering as Core L&D Competency

This represents the most significant shift in required L&D skills. Prompt engineering – the practice of writing clear, comprehensive instructions for AI systems – is fundamentally a communication and instructional design skill.

L&D professionals are uniquely positioned for this transition. You already know how to:

  • Break down complex concepts into digestible steps
  • Anticipate learner questions and misconceptions
  • Build guardrails to keep learning on track
  • Consider how instructions might be misinterpreted

The difference is that instead of designing static content, you’re designing dynamic learning conversations. You’re not coding – you’re crafting the intelligence that will guide thousands of personalised learning experiences.

In fact, many AI failures stem from technologists with excellent coding skills but no experience managing diverse learning groups. Your expertise in guiding learners through complex topics is exactly what AI systems need to succeed.

4. From Content Creation to Learning Orchestration

With AI handling content delivery and adaptation, L&D’s role evolves from creating materials to orchestrating learning ecosystems. Your focus shifts from what content to include to what outcomes to achieve; from building courses to designing intelligent learning experiences.

This means:

  • Defining learning objectives that AI can interpret and work toward
  • Creating assessment frameworks that measure genuine understanding
  • Building feedback loops that improve both learner outcomes and AI performance
  • Integrating AI learning with human mentoring and peer collaboration

The Strategic Imperative

These shifts create both opportunity and urgency. Early adopters will gain significant competitive advantages through more effective, efficient, and engaging learning experiences. But success requires strategic action now.

For L&D leaders, the immediate priorities are:

Audit and Identify: Review your current learning portfolio to identify programmes that would benefit from conversational, adaptive delivery. Start with high-volume, standardised training that requires personalisation.

Build Capability: Invest in prompt engineering skills for your team. This isn’t a technical training need – it’s about applying your existing instructional design expertise to AI systems.

Pilot and Learn: Launch small-scale AI learning experiments. Test the technology, understand the challenges, and build organisational confidence in AI-enhanced learning.

Prepare for Scale: Develop frameworks for managing AI learning experiences, including quality assurance, learner support, and continuous improvement processes.

The organisations that master AI-enhanced learning will create more capable workforces, reduce training costs, and improve learning outcomes. Those that don’t risk being left behind with static, generic training that fails to meet modern learner expectations.

The question isn’t whether AI will transform L&D – it’s whether you’ll lead that transformation in your organisation or be forced to catch up later.

Umbrella HR

Diversity & Inclusion

From the top – Implementing Inclusive Leadership

Denise Keating - May 2, 2025

Defining the ideal leader and their qualities is a quest which has weighed upon the finest minds of management theory – as well as selling millions of books. In truth, the ideal leader is shaped by circumstances as much as their inherent traits.

For example, the characteristics of great sporting leaders very rarely translate to business leadership success (although politics, which like sports is often a popularity contest, sees a surprising amount of crossover). Indeed, when it comes to organisational management, we rarely see leaders replicate success when they switch sectors – Sharon White’s tenure at John Lewis is a rare example of public sector leaders even getting a shot in the private sector.

But whilst an organisation’s culture and circumstances will dictate the kind of leader that will excel within it, it’s also true that the leader will dictate their organisation’s culture and circumstances.

This can create a vicious circle, as poor behaviours not only become embedded within the current leadership but also set a requirement for future generations.

But at some point, we must root out the poor behaviours which infest our organisations. Frustratingly, the responsibility for this will almost certainly fall to HR under the auspices of ‘culture change’ or similar. Even more frustratingly, this task will only become a priority when the organisation’s fortunes are waning – these behaviours are claimed as a strength or a ‘secret weapon’ during the good times.

Limiting this task to HR, however, sets the whole endeavour up for failure. For culture change is a leadership task. It’s frequently suggested 80% to 90% of behaviour is influenced by what leaders say and do. Which means any change must begin and be sustained from the top.

At Umbrella HR we are often invited into organisations when these poor behaviours are starting to have negative effects on business metrics. Lack of trust starts to cause disengagement and low morale. Demoralised employees begin to play it safe, reducing risk taking and innovation. This in turn starts to impact external results as sales and service performance metrics start to dive. The organisation just isn’t delivering like it used to.

In these situations we look at the top of the organisation first. This usually involves training senior personnel to replace poor behaviours with inclusive ones. Becoming an inclusive leader who reverses these impacts and builds trust and belonging across the organisation requires competency in six areas. These competencies are:

  • Cognizance
  • Curiosity
  • Cultural intelligence
  • Collaboration
  • Commitment
  • Courage

I feel they can be split into two types – active and demonstrative. Cognizance, curiosity and courage are competencies which must be actively chosen – both when making decisions and how we respond in a challenging situation. These competencies are how we challenge our unconscious biases, by acknowledging how:

  • We’re adding our own perspectives to the information before us
  • Potentially ignoring other’s perspectives that don’t match ours
  • Failing to challenge others doing the same thing

But these competencies are situational – it would be paralysing to demonstrate them for every single action one performs through the day. No-one’s expected to be cognizant, curious or courageous when choosing a sandwich from Tesco.

Our inclusive leadership training

Where the active competencies are noted by others for their presence, the three demonstrative competencies are noted by their absence. Consistency is key. These are the behaviours we live by and are much harder to achieve. One can’t claim to demonstrate cultural intelligence, collaboration, or commitment only some of the time. With these competencies we notice most when people don’t display them, in the form of a faux pas, selfishness or abandonment.  

And this is the link back to culture. When we observe senior leaders doing a thing, we know that we’re supposed to do it too. And when they don’t always do it, we know we don’t have to.

And this resonates with many of the things we discover when we work with organisations on inclusive leadership. When employees report that they feel unheard, or that diverse perspectives are not considered, they often only cite one or two incidences. But one or two is enough. In fact, experiments have shown that even a single incidence of micro exclusion can lead to an immediate 25% decline in an individual’s performance on a team project.

Crucially, while the leader may not realise they’re not being inclusive, those around them will always notice.

So, for truly inclusive leaders, these demonstrative competencies become something more. They make the leader stand out, and by extension become recognised as some of the characteristics of their leadership style.

But our leaders need help. We must recognise that we’re holding them to a higher standard that allows no exception. So, the challenge is to cultivate an environment where the competencies of an inclusive leader become the cultural values of an organisation. In such a workplace we can normalise the competency of courage, demonstrated by junior employees challenging leaders when they fail to demonstrate an inclusive competency.

As always, training interventions have a limited period of effectiveness before we return to old habits. I often say that success is when a participant maintains a behaviour change beyond one night’s sleep!

Peer mentoring can be incredibly helpful at this level for maintaining accountability. With demonstrative behaviours defined by exceptions, one way we can do this is with a weekly session between peers of the same level sharing incidences where they fell short of the competencies. This is a useful reflective exercise which encourages both participants to identify triggers and replay the scenario. Crucially, it also encourages vulnerability, an undervalued leadership trait, due to the need to speak about failure rather than success.

How can I support my senior management to become inclusive leaders?

Work downwards

Inclusive leadership behaviours must be consistently delivered at the top before the next level of the hierarchy can be expected to follow suit.

Manage and reward competencies differently

Active competencies can’t be measured in the same way as demonstrative ones. Design systems that recognise both the difference in when the different types of competencies are displayed, and the amount of effort required to deliver them.

Introduce peer reflection and accountability

Peer mentoring sessions where leaders share situations where they fell short of inclusivity helps promote vulnerability, reflection, and long-term behavioural change.

Reinforce Through Organisational Culture

Embed these competencies as cultural values, not just leadership traits. Normalise inclusion at every level – e.g., junior staff feeling empowered to challenge non-inclusive behaviours.

Go Beyond Training

Training is a start, but for it to have a lasting effect, organisations should encourage ongoing practices (like peer reflection) that build accountability and continuous learning.

Start your inclusive leadership journey with Umbrella HR

Umbrella HR

Diversity & Inclusion

The Rebirth of DEI

Denise Keating - March 5, 2025

This is the second in a two-part series on the future of workplace DEI. Read part one: ‘The Death of DEI?’ here

As I sat down to start writing, the BBC pinged up on my phone to tell me that Google has become the latest major US firm to drop many of its diversity commitments. A little further digging confirms a hypothesis I put forward in the first half of this series; DEI initiatives in private sector organisations which fail to demonstrate how they contribute to increasing shareholder value are toast. And indeed, the financial results published the day before had led to over $200 billion dollars being wiped off the value of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

I’m not going to apologise for sounding like a broken record on this subject; it really is all about the numbers. HR leaders at all levels must do more to understand and demonstrate how their work fits into the organisation’s core results and purpose.

So how do we go forward?

An interesting theory has been put forward by American legal scholar Kenji Yoshino. He suggests there are two types of DEI. The first type is lifting DEI – targeted interventions focused on specific groups. The second is levelling DEI – the removal of bias in decision making.

And the simple fact is that lifting DEI, in both the US and UK, has always been legally tricky. In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 allows for positive action in decision making – a form of lifting DEI. However, as the RAF demonstrated recently, the pressure on individuals to reach lifting DEI targets can result in actions that cross the line into illegality.

Meanwhile, popular means of delivering levelling DEI are often ineffective. An example is blind recruitment. Whilst the commonly cited example of the BBC’s orchestra using some sort of The Voice style selection method certainly makes sense, blind recruitment in other industries has often failed to make a tangible difference.

And that’s because whilst something like orchestral selection can be based almost exclusively on musical skill, most modern recruiters are consciously and unconsciously evaluating hundreds of different signals; many of which are cultural or are absorbed through presence in elite environments.  

The irony is that there’s not a lot of diversity in diversity practice. The playbook is embarrassingly consistent – blame the starting situation on unconscious bias, increase diversity in the employee population, then increase diversity in leadership. But, as we’ve already established, these achievements alone aren’t tied to organisational performance. Hence something that is successful and award winning at the DEI or HR level can be completely irrelevant at the organisational level.

Most importantly, how diversity and inclusion is communicated must change. Some really interesting research has been published by More in Common, the thinktank founded in the aftermath of Jo Cox’s murder, about a group they call the Progressive Activists.

Progressive Activists are one of More in Common’s British Seven segments. Their definition is one that neatly fits with DEI practitioners:

“A passionate and vocal group for whom politics is at the core of their identity, and who seek to correct the historic marginalisation of groups based on their race, gender, sexuality, wealth, and other forms of privilege. They are politically engaged, critical, opinionated, frustrated, cosmopolitan, and environmentally conscious.”

But what’s interesting is More in Common’s findings about Progressive Activists relative to other groups. Despite making up 8% of the UK population, this group is overrepresented online, in the media and in policy settings. And crucially, More in Common found that not only were Progressive Activists’ views often at odds with the other six identities (who make up 92% of the population), they also dramatically overestimated how many people shared these views by factors of two to three. The research also found this group to be more dogmatic in their views and exclusionary of those who do not fully align with their positions.

It’s worth reflecting on this, as it also factors into why so many organisations here and abroad have begun dismantling DEI efforts.

Because as a profession, we’ve become guilty of the very groupthink and affinity bias that we seek to eliminate in others. Has our response to pushback, apathy and injustice been to become more combative and militant? Possibly. And have our successes been a mirage, driven by a wider social and political drift that has suddenly been reversed by democratic mandate? The fact is that increasing numbers of people are looking to Trump, AfD, Le Pen, Reform and others for the answers to their problems; problems which haven’t been solved by mainstream political ideas – ideas that have included DEI.

Put simply, most people aren’t buying what we’ve been selling. And because of that, most of our colleagues aren’t really fussed about what we do.

There should be affirmative action, and it should be based on colour, but that colour is green. Scott Galloway

Dragon’s Den star Steven Bartlett hosted a roundtable on his Diary of a CEO podcast shortly after President Trump’s inauguration. As they discussed DEI, participant Scott Galloway, Democrat supporter, entrepreneur and business professor, raised the point that, where Ivy League DEI initiatives had increased the number of people of colour in the student population, this was almost exclusively limited to people with similar economic backgrounds to existing students. His point was that affirmative action in these universities was giving a double boost to some students, who already had high levels of wealth privilege. Poor people of colour had no more chance of benefiting from these initiatives than they did before.

The Achilles Heel for DEI in the UK has long been the fact that white working-class boys have worse economic, educational, and employment outcomes than any other group. Our language doesn’t support this huge segment of the population. Where we have delivered benefits to this group, we’ve often focused our words on the others the initiative helped.

We believe that what we’re doing is right. Which means we’re not good at reflecting on whether how we’re doing it is wrong.

That needs to change. The environment has changed. Those we thought were onboard were simply acquiescing to the prevailing narrative for an easy life. We made fundamental assumptions that were wrong.

I believe inclusion, and specifically social inclusion, is the key to the rebirth of DEI. But this must be an inclusion that talks to everyone – in-group and out-group, minority and majority, that invites, rather than imposes.

This is an opportunity for a revolution in DEI. A chance to diverge from the orthodoxy of DEI practice and try new things. What is broken down can be rebuilt stronger and better than before.

But that must start with an acknowledgement that what has come before may be right in theory, but wrong in execution. So, I urge you now to reflect rather than rage.

The new workplace inclusion will be one that delivers tangible benefits through the lenses of employer, society, and the employee. But there must be interdependence, alignment, and demonstratable cause-and-effect. Favouring any one of these three beneficiaries will cause the whole thing to collapse… again.

We must measure and communicate how our inclusion work delivers change across all three of these lenses. The past is a DEI which has been rejected by swathes of society in the US, UK, France and Germany. The future must be one where DEI listens and responds to all voices – just as we’ve always said our organisations should.

Recommendations for Practitioners

  1. Reframe DEI in business terms: Connect your initiatives directly to organisational objectives, talent acquisition/retention, and innovation metrics.
  2. Broaden your inclusion lens: Develop programs that address socioeconomic diversity alongside other dimensions of difference.
  3. Build coalition support: Engage with employees by focusing on common values rather than ideological alignment.
  4. Measure what matters: Develop robust measurement frameworks that demonstrate both the human and financial impact of DEI work.
  5. Communicate differently: Adjust messaging to resonate with different audiences rather than using specialised language that may alienate.
Umbrella HR

Diversity & Inclusion

The Death of DEI?

Denise Keating - February 4, 2025

When the US sneezes, the whole world catches a cold. As President Trump enters the White House for his second term in office, many of the world’s biggest companies are scaling back on diversity and inclusion.

These companies include Meta, Amazon, Walmart, Boeing, Ford, and McDonalds. So, let’s start by dismissing the simpleton’s response. These companies aren’t led by right wing Trump enthusiasts. They’re some of the world’s biggest multinationals. Certainly, Trump’s first term saw them increase spend on DEI. Then what’s changed?

The most cited factor is the Supreme Court decision against Harvard University which found race-based affirmative action in college admissions to be unlawful. But this does seem to be providing cover for wide reaching cuts to diversity programs and the role and influence of DEI in organisations. For example, several of those firms mentioned are winding back on supplier diversity policies, and more are publicly disavowing their commitments to external survey and benchmarking organisations.

So, whilst citing the changing legal landscape, these decisions are clearly influenced by something more.

For several organisations, customer pressure has had a major impact. Molson Coors, Harley-Davidson and John Deere all announced rollbacks to DEI in Summer 2024 (before the US election) triggered by customer action.

But these firms have weathered anti-DEI sentiments in the social and political environments before. And they may have stuck it out, had the academic environment not started raising questions too. Foremost amongst these is the challenge to what are almost considered holy texts in DEI – the McKinsey studies on diverse workforces.

Since 2015 these have been cited as THE business case for diversity and inclusion at work. There have always been issues with these; the finding that diverse teams are more likely to outperform homogenous ones has routinely been grossly misinterpreted as will outperform homogenous teams.

But a study published by two leading business professors seems to have reduced the McKinsey studies from foundational texts to what they may well have been all along – shiny marketing material for the consulting sector. Professors Green and Hand tried to replicate the results of the McKinsey studies but were unable to do so. They concluded that there was no evidence to support the argument that diverse teams can be expected on average to outperform homogenous ones.

In isolation, we might be able to condemn the consultancy industry for its largesse and continue with other arguments which make the business case. But two independently written papers[1], [2] into diversity training programs, citing more than 40 studies, both shared the conclusion that some DEI training programs end up exacerbating and entrenching divisions in the workplace.

So, these are the environmental factors that have led to a change of corporate wisdom in the US. But there’s a fundamental factor not discussed in polite circles which is the real reason that these firms are happy to take any backlash from their DEI climbdowns.

Their DEI initiatives have failed to make a positive difference to shareholder value.

So, what does this mean to us in the UK, and you as a DEI practitioner?

Well, it’s always been a question of money. In the UK particularly, we tend to see DEI as part of HR. NI increases are set to raise employment costs for larger employers and larger employers are the ones most likely to have invested in DEI initiatives. I would expect to see savings demanded from HR to counter the impact of this cost increase, and these savings to come from discretionary spending budgets, especially DEI.

DEI teams who have been reliant on studies like McKinsey’s to drive their business case are likely to be in trouble as the pendulum swings away from what some are calling ‘peak DEI’. However, those who have been matching DEI initiatives to business priorities are likely to have more success, as they will be able to evidence impact and return on investment against organisational goals.

Regular readers won’t find this approach to be a surprise. In 2023 I showed you how to build an EDI strategy which is integrated with the organisational strategy and demonstrably tackles commercial challenges, not just social. In November 24 I wrote about adopting a model of constant delivery in DEI, which is much harder to remove and defund than sporadic celebrations.  

As we leave ‘peak DEI’, we can certainly expect to see salaries in the profession fall from their peak. But there will be increased opportunities for commercially savvy practitioners who are able to connect DEI through customer, workforce, and organisational strategy.

With employers seeing cost pressures increase in 2025, doing more with less will be crucial to maintaining momentum in DEI. Mobilising internal resources is key to this and will help practitioners gain better understanding of opportunities for DEI to answer specific organisational challenges.

What do you need to do?

Review your business case

The business case for DEI in your organisation must be centred on your organisation. If you can’t make a business case based on your organisation’s unique challenges and strengths, it may as well not exist. Read Creating an EDI Strategy and Plan to learn how to align DEI with commercial needs.

Assemble your team

Bring DEI advocates together from across the organisation to help deliver your strategy. DEI should be a spider web connecting people and ideas across the organisation, not a dictatorial spur of the HR function.

Talk to decision makers

Ask senior leaders what bothers them. This will reveal the problems they need someone to solve. Any initiative (DEI or otherwise) that doesn’t work towards those problems is at risk of being shut down. Anything that can solve them is likely to be of critical importance to the organisation. Taking the scenario I use in Creating an EDI Strategy and Plan, most senior leaders in your organisation don’t give a damn about how many women are in leadership positions, but they give a great many damns about losing female customers to competitor X.

This is the first piece in a two-part series on the future of workplace DEI. Continue reading with part two: ‘The Rebirth of DEI’ here

[1] https://aristotlefoundation.org/press-releases/press-release-february-13-2024-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-dei-training-what-does-the-research-tell-us/

[2] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Instructing-Animosity_11.13.24.pdf

Umbrella HR

Diversity & Inclusion

Stop building your diversity strategy around notable dates

Denise Keating - November 1, 2024

Black History Month, LGBT History Month, Neurodiversity Celebration Week.

Awareness events have become a go-to for any good NGO wanting to raise the profile of its cause. They’ll flood their selected date with compelling research, newspaper column inches and a bumper fundraising campaign.

But I think that we, as HR and diversity leaders, have been swept up by the (admittedly, very good) PR around these events.

We’re put under pressure to deliver ‘our own’ events on these dates. Which puts us under even more pressure to decide which events to mark, and which ones not to. And even when your schedule and calendar is lovingly crafted to celebrate every single date, when International Women’s Day rolls around, someone will promptly remark,

“When’s International Men’s Day then?”

To which you respond,

“It was November 19; you replied to our email calling it ‘woke’.”

I believe we’ve got lazy. We’ve let outside organisations set the internal agenda for our organisation.

We’ve stopped thinking about what our organisation needs and started following the crowd.

And that’s a big problem, because visibility feeds perception. If an organisational focus on ethnicity (specifically Black ethnicity) is only visible for one month of the year, the perception is that the organisation doesn’t care about ethnicity for the other eleven months.

Meanwhile, you’ve celebrated both LGBT History Month and Trans Awareness Week. That’s five weeks total of LGBT activity and visibility; the perception is that LGBT is a higher priority.

It’s this kind of thing that causes real damage to DEI efforts. It confirms that the aim is diversity-washing rather than contributing to the bottom line. It demonstrates that the approach is generic, not bespoke to the organisation’s needs. And worst of all, it means employees can ignore DEI until their ‘thing’ comes around.

So, my advice is to start your calendar again. Begin with solid HR principles; which events will affect the operations of the organisation? These are dates where you can expect a higher-than-normal amount of leave requests or absences.

This is also where the groundwork you’ve done with diversity monitoring comes into play. If Muslim employees make up a large proportion of workers in a specific business unit, there may be a need for additional resourcing during and at the end of Ramadan. Equally, a sunny Bank Holiday may result in an increased absence rate on Tuesday morning. Or a Pride celebration could cause an increase in leave requests. Whilst very different situations, all are foreseeable and, using data, the potential effect is predictable.

Once you’ve identified business impacts, it’s time to identify dates. But what to do on these dates?

Scheduling activity around them is, for the reasons described above, lazy and counterproductive. Furthermore, activity should be delivered constantly, not annually.

We make a similar mistake with training; we know the theory about repetition embedding learning, but instead deliver once a year refresher on health and safety, which are disregarded within a month.

Regular, low effort activity embeds change far better than annual showcases. However, we’re drawn towards flashy Hollywood deliverables because of what they can do for us and our performance reviews.

Regular, low effort activity is also the perfect deliverable for employee resource groups. This reduces the workload on you, and helps you manage the output of your ERGs. Some organisations struggle with this. ERGs, especially those helmed by particularly powerful individuals (and this can be in a formal or informal hierarchy), can run away with themselves, becoming a lobby group somewhat detached from other organisational structures. Having a clear and agreed set of deliverables focuses the ERG and its leadership and sets expectations.

So once again, what of the notable dates?

Well, I see them as opportunities to celebrate, not to do. The problem of course with regular, low effort activity, is that incremental effects are less visible, and thus create the perception that little has changed. A notable date is a great opportunity to measure the current position against twelve months ago, report and celebrate progress, and set goals for the next twelve months.

Tying a reflection point to a notable date establishes a target, making your DEI initiatives timebound and SMART. It also forces you to change outputs from delivering events to sharing progress.

I’ve no doubt that this is a challenging proposal, and that many of you will tell me that this can’t work in your organisation. There are several challenges inherent with this approach:

  • Constant reporting cycle

Instead of an end of year report containing all progress on all streams, this approach requires each stream to be reported on individually. Progress on ethnicity may be reported in October, LGBT issues in February, neurodiversity in March. This approach demands results; one can’t obfuscate and hide lack of progress behind strong achievements in other areas

  • Employee attachment

It’s obvious, but people are emotionally attached to things that are important to them. Additionally, we often grow engagement by making our events fun. This results in chasing vanity metrics like attendance or participation. But fun events for an ingroup aren’t a DEI strategy on their own. We can overcome this issue by tying celebrations of a notable date with celebrations of results and progress.

  • Resourcing

Keeping many low intensity programmes running all year round is a more challenging proposition than the project-based approach one can adopt with a date-centric agenda.

This is good.

If you’re reading this, you likely describe yourself as an HR or DEI leader. Leaders, by definition, require followers. People who believe in your destination and trust you to be able to keep them safe on the journey.

The DEI agenda generates more passion, goodwill, and offers of support, than any other workplace initiative I’ve ever been involved in. These are your people to lead. Whether they take the form of ERGs, working groups or champions, they believe in what you’re doing and will happily contribute. Use them.

Our Calendar is the perfect tool for shaping your DEI agenda for the year. It’ll help you see which dates are important to your teammates, when your organisation’s operations are likely to be affected, and when ‘things’ should ‘happen’.

But it is just that – a tool. A blunt instrument. How you use it will determine what form your agenda takes and how successful your ideas are.

You have only twelve months.

Don’t waste them.

Get our Diversity Calendar

Umbrella HR

Training & Development

The Learning Loop – What is reciprocal mentoring?

Denise Keating - September 24, 2024

Reciprocal mentoring is gaining in popularity, with employers across the spectrum regaling incredulous business reporters with stories of ‘breaking down barriers’ and ‘bridging the generational skills divide’. But is this just another buzzword, or could it be the answer to the perennial problem of workplace diversity programmes that rapidly lose traction?

Mentoring is a concept that should take little introduction. The idea of experienced seniors teaching a favoured youngster the secrets of their trade goes back into antiquity. The modern workplace retains many aspects of this ancient tradition, especially the outsized influence of familial connections and the emergence of self-replication bias by those hoping to train their own legacy.

But the demands and structure of the modern workplace have also reduced opportunities for mentorship and air gapped the most senior leaders from the most junior employees.

These hierarchical structures can have unexpected consequences. The ‘father of modern management’, Peter Drucker, found that many senior leaders believed the success or failure of an organisation was primarily influenced by their making of important decisions which are then implemented downwards.

However, Drucker discovered something quite different. In most cases, leaders were being asked to choose winners between a small number of similar ideas or plans. Those initiatives had often started out as very different beasts, many layers down, but were homogenised as they progressed through decision making structures, with any radical concepts gradually eroded by the successive reviews of increasingly conformist management layers.

This idea was built upon by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, where the author demonstrated how today’s market leaders almost always miss tomorrow’s market breakthroughs due to completely logical managerial decisions based on an innovation’s incompatibility with current operational processes and customer demands.

What is Reciprocal Mentoring?

Reciprocal Mentoring is a two-way mentoring relationship. Both parties, regardless of their position, learn from each other, fostering mutual respect, understanding, and growth.

This shouldn’t be confused with reverse mentoring, where junior employees mentor senior leaders. These will often either be shorter term, ending when the senior mentee decides they have extracted as much value from the relationship as they need or want; or will naturally develop into a reciprocal arrangement.

It’s for this reason HR leaders should be careful with reverse mentoring schemes, which by design are exploitative one-way value transfers from the weak to the strong.

In a reciprocal mentoring arrangement value should flow both ways:

The senior party shares knowledge of organisational cheat codes to circumvent bureaucracy, provides an amount of patronage, and delivers support with overcoming career and life challenges.

The junior partner shares perspectives that the senior party is simply unlikely to encounter in their social bubble, discloses information on how the organisation actually works, revealing informal cultures and behaviours, and delivers the unfiltered and unrefined ideas that truly innovative organisations require to succeed.

What are the challenges with reciprocal mentoring

Reciprocal mentoring, unlike conventional mentoring arrangements, is designed to be challenging. Where conventional mentoring deliberately matches mentors and mentees with similar interests and experiences, reciprocal mentoring works best when both parties discover their common ground through the sharing of differences.

This requires a level of vulnerability and openness that many, especially those on the more senior side of the relationship, may struggle to reach.

It can also be challenging for those on the junior side of the relationship to bring their whole selves to the relationship, in the same way that organisational cultures convince them not to bring their whole selves to work.

Building the trust required to really establish the reciprocal mentoring relationship is, therefore, the biggest challenge to any reciprocal mentoring scheme. And in truth, the reciprocal relationship is not without real and perceived risks for participants.

The junior party will be constantly wary of the power held by the senior. A comment or revelation shared could impact senior colleague’s perceptions of them for years or decades to come. The Executioners Axe is ever present should an invisible and unknown cultural line be crossed.

Likewise for the senior party, the Sword of Damocles hangs over every interaction. For people whose careers are often built on diplomacy, influence, and the control of information, being vulnerable with someone who has very little to lose by being loose lipped can destroy a life’s work.

Changing behavioural expectations are another hazard. Isolated in a social bubble, senior parties will be wary of committing a faux pas or causing offence. Fear of an omnipresent, all-powerful ‘diversity police’ will often cause those who would most benefit (and have most value to give) from reciprocal mentoring to avoid it, or simply fail to fully participate.

Establishing a Reciprocal Mentoring Scheme

Reciprocal mentoring is an excellent opportunity for participants to learn from each other and build coaching and communication skills. It also helps develop the relationships that underpin wider organisational initiatives such as allyship and employee networks.

Defining purpose is crucial before embarking on any mentoring scheme. Why does your organisation need a scheme like this and what problem will it specifically solve?

As described earlier, engaging senior leaders with the programme is the difference between success and failure. This is particularly the case at the pilot stage, where impacts and results are unproven. Starting with a limited scope will help you to select the right participants to test the concept.

With every organisational culture being different, the challenges that emerge will likewise be unique. It’s entirely probable that unrelated policies and procedures will act as barriers to the relationship forming, and this testing phase helps to identify and resolve these issues before rolling out to a wider audience.

Given the innate power imbalance between participants, establishing a confidential ‘get out’ mechanism is highly advisable. Even the best matches on paper can fail in real life, and mentoring is no different. Ensuring both participants feel confident to share honest feedback on the relationship keeps you, as the scheme coordinator, in the loop, and able to step in as and when required.

Work with Umbrella HR to ensure the success of your mentoring programmes

Umbrella HR

Policies & Procedures

Work from home – tribunal or opportunity?

Denise Keating - July 1, 2024

Manchester United are the latest employer to mandate a return to the office. But a serious issue may be brewing for employers – the risk of being taken to tribunal.

A recent tribunal between Wilson and the FCA, where Wilson was a senior manager, found that the FCA was justified in turning down Wilson’s request to work from home permanently.

Some of the more breathless reports see this decision as the nail in the coffin of remote working, and a signal for wholesale return to office mandates.

However, beyond the headlines, a closer look sees that the court found that Wilson sought to never attend in person, and that this was incompatible with her senior position. Indeed, the judge was explicit that this was not a blanket requirement and pointed to Commotion Ltd v Rutty, the case which established that blanket refusal of flexible working is unlikely to be justifiable.

Absolutism is often frowned upon by judges, and just as Wilson’s refusal to deviate from 100% home working was a main cause of her tribunal loss, I suspect any employer attempting to enforce 100% in-office working would suffer a similar fate.

Regardless of whether your organisation intends to order staff back to the office, getting to grips with policies around where and how people work should be a top priority for HR teams.

This is especially true if remote working policies were rushed through to cover working from home during lockdowns. A lot of your policies will reflect the attitude of senior leadership. Those resistant to remote work are more likely to see policy as a means of controlling remote workers; those enthusiastic about it more concerned with enabling them. Establishing a balance between the needs of the business and the needs of workers is key – the most successful remote-first organisations still have mandatory meetups. But policies without justification – ‘because we said so’ – are less likely to be supported.

Gartner study found that top performers, women and millennials are least willing to comply with return to office mandates. This should be a concern to any HR team with an eye on diversity metrics, but also to any employer looking to attract the best candidates and retain their best workers.

In 2022 I wrote about Ian Goodfellow, who resigned from Apple when ordered back into the office and immediately walked into a role at Google. Ian was Apple’s head of machine learning, and Apple, normally a product pioneer, has been notably behind the rest of the tech industry in launching its own AI services.

It’s a reminder that top performers always have options. That’s not to say that RTO is a guarantee of only retaining mediocrity. Premium employers will always be able to attract quality.

However, for employers who don’t have that star power (which is most of us), we must accept that we may have more to lose from filling our office space than we gain. Quoting Victoria Short, CEO of Randstad UK: “Organisations digging in and refusing to budge on remote working could face a great deal of pain as a result. They need to keep that in mind, when trying to attract and retain talent.”

Policy exists to protect both employer and employee. It establishes the boundaries for behaviour. Recent examples of employees being terminated for the use of mouse jigglers (I’m reliably informed that an open Excel spreadsheet and some VBA code is a far more discrete option) demonstrate how in some cases the trust between worker and employer has completely broken down. Employers have exceeded what many people would describe as a reasonable degree of privacy for workers, and in response employees have responded with deceit and quiet quitting.

This behaviour is chalked up as a failure of remote working; it’s not. It’s a failure of recruitment (the hiring manager has made a poor decision) and a failure of line management (the line manager hasn’t managed workload and outputs, instead relying on IT to tell them if someone is working or not). It’s no different to seat-filler employees in many offices, who do just enough not to get fired. It’s simply the tools which identify poor performers that have changed.

For me, it’s quite simple. If you’re having to monitor employees to ensure they’re working, you’ve hired the wrong people and given them the wrong work. Furthermore, many of those basing their return to office mandates on ideas of culture and team spirit seem to forget that their office culture actively penalises people leaving their desk and having the type of ‘coffee cooler conversations’ that they’re so eager to restore.  The best employers are those who are focused on opportunities for people to socialise, be creative and innovative – all areas that suffer when people are remote.  So, if you want people to come into the office, look at systems such as DUOME to ensure they can find the best time to be there.

Therefore, it’s your job, as a HR leader, to ensure that policy and procedures are right for your organisation and its needs. Whilst heroic leader types (at all levels) tend to deliver decrees, you have a responsibility to the whole organisation. Putting in place the policies to ensure that flexible working requests (the legal avenue to remote working) are properly considered and actioned, ensuring exemptions for reasonable adjustments, and ensuring monitoring is done in a way that is compliant with an organisation’s ambition to employ the best, not the neediest, are all ways to help steer your workplaces through the change we’re all seeing as technology changes the way we work.

Stay compliant – book a policy review

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Health, Safety & Wellbeing

Burnout and Workplace Wellbeing

Denise Keating - June 4, 2024

How are you coping with mental load? Are you, like so many others in the profession, starting to experience burnout?

The International Classification of Diseases is clear that burnout is not a medical condition:

“Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:

  • feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
  • increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
  • reduced professional efficacy.

Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”

Clearly this is intrinsically linked not only to an individual’s wellbeing, but the whole organisation. Burnout is contagious and can easily travel through teams and social networks.

That’s demonstrated by the numbers. 70% of UK employees report experiencing the symptoms of burnout in the last 12 months. More than half of sickness is due to stress, anxiety and depression; whilst burnout itself isn’t a medical condition, it is a contributory factor to mental health conditions.

The same research discovered that fewer than 20% of employees would discuss their burnout with their line manager, and only 7% with HR.

On the face of it, this may seem surprising, but it shouldn’t. Burnout is a response to a functionally abusive workplace; should we expect someone to discuss the fact that they’re being pushed to breaking point with the entity responsible?

Importance of Workplace Wellbeing

Organisations are bad at understanding sentiment. And people are even worse at sharing it. Workplace surveys are a case in point. Ever bundled ‘Agree’ and ‘Strongly Agree’ responses together for convenience?

It’s a common interpretation mistake. It’s why the Net Promoter Score market research metric only includes responses in the top two deciles as positive, and anything in the bottom six deciles as negative – people are culturally conditioned to be ‘nice’ and ‘positive’ unless they’re absolutely bloody livid. We also miss another market research staple – stated versus revealed preferences. “Yes, I am satisfied with my role”, your employees say, whilst simultaneously applying for anything else they can.

There’s also a danger with acting on direct feedback. Henry Ford probably never said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”, but the quote’s point remains: employees only know their problem and are looking to you to provide the solution.

This means that employees are likely to attribute burnout to the wrong causes, will underreport worsening workplace conditions, and the only way you’ll know if you’re solving the issue is by employees voting (or not) with their feet.

However, there are foundational aspects to burnout that we can start by addressing. These include:

  • Work-life balance
  • Workload
  • Control

Work life balance has proven hard to maintain in the UK. Legislation like France’s right to disconnect – copied by other European nations – is unlikely to be implemented in the UK, especially due to the risks of requesting it. In the UK union membership is concentrated in certain industries and over 60% of union members work in the public sector, whereas in France collective bargaining covers 98% of all workers.

Protestations about how ‘our organisation supports work life balance’ are so often lip service. An individual’s work-life balance is dependent on both who their line-manager is, and the relationship between them.

Our Health & Wellbeing Guidance

For employees already suffering burnout, workload is likely to be a leading cause. Unfortunately, a framing bias is more likely to decide this is a case of requiring performance improvement (the holder is not able to do the job) rather than assessing whether any employee would be able to do the job. It’s not until a position needs replacing that the role is reassessed as part of the recruitment process.

Job insecurity and low autonomy are major risk factors for burnout, especially with sensationalist stories of AI replacing swathes of the workforce. Feeling out of control is likely to exacerbate any feelings of worry, causing anxiety and depression. And quite simply, organisational leaders can’t answer the questions employees have. 99% of organisations aren’t technology companies; they will follow the winds of change as and when pioneers introduce new innovations and contemporaries adopt them.

Indeed, the idea that one lacks control of their own life is not nearly so scary as knowing that the people we trust to have the answers are as clueless as everyone else.

Strategies for Promoting Wellbeing

We know that unscrupulous line managers are quite happy to use burnout as a tool. This is particularly dangerous if the manager in question has reached the level of relative incompetence (a Peter Drucker concept which posits that an individual’s final promotion will always be one step beyond their capabilities, at which point both they and the organisation are stuck).

But even when this isn’t the case, most of the go-to interventions fail to deal with the foundational issues that are driving the prevalence of burnout. What’s the point in mental health days or assistance programmes when the employee is still subjected to excess workload, lack of work-life balance and job insecurity? These initiatives simply end up being costly sticking plasters which treat the impact of burnout, rather than addressing its causes.

Instead, we need to confront the culture that causes burnout. Senior employees not using flexible working policies discourages others from taking advantage of it, hampering its uptake and effectiveness across the organisation.

Part of that culture is the concept of burnout itself. It’s not a special workplace diagnosis, it’s common or garden variety stress and anxiety being normalised. Indeed, in many workplace cultures the ability to still deliver under unhealthy levels of stress is lionised. Only by challenging this culture (and it’s interesting to see the generational differences identified in the research above) can we ever hope to start addressing wellbeing as a priority, not merely as a way to keep players in the game for longer before they collapse completely.

Our Mental Health & Wellbeing e-learning

There are proven tactics that will help prioritise wellbeing in your organisation. An important first step is gathering evidence. Being able to demonstrate the financial impact of sickness, recruitment, and the lost productivity caused by poor wellbeing is an excellent way to focus the minds of leaders. Coupling this with personal stories from employees adds further impact.

When handled and used well, employee networks can improve the quantity and quality of honest feedback you receive. People are more likely to agree with or support a view than to put it forward themselves, and networks give people the freedom and safety to do this.

Training line managers helps them not only recognise burnout amongst their subordinates, but also to recognise their own role in causing burnout. This is particularly important for leaders several steps up the pyramid, who are unlikely to receive direct feedback on how their actions and demands ripple down through the workforce.

However, the most powerful intervention of all may be to build an environment of psychological safety. Where employees feel able to speak openly, share concerns and have those concerns legitimately addressed without fear of reprisal or backlash, workplaces can begin to identify and resolve the root causes of burnout. This requires organisations to move beyond mere lip-service and actively demonstrate their commitment to employee wellbeing through actions, not just words.

Only by empowering individuals at all levels to raise issues, question unhealthy practices, and feel heard can the insidious culture that normalises and even valorises burnout truly start to shift. Stamping out the systemic factors enabling this toxic culture may be a long process, but it is one that organisations must undertake if they hope to cultivate sustainable, mentally healthy workforces who thrive, rather than merely survive.

Umbrella HR

Training & Development

Navigating the Future

Denise Keating - April 30, 2024

Crafting an Agile Training Strategy in the Age of AI and Technological Innovation

In today’s rapidly transforming work ecosystem, marked by the swift emergence of AI and digital innovations, the role of HR is more pivotal than ever.

 As HR leaders, it’s time to re-evaluate our training strategies, ensuring they’re not just robust but also inherently adaptive to the ever-evolving demands of our times. This article  guides you in this journey, helping shape a framework that’s not just reactive but anticipatory of technological advancements.

We need to empower our greatest asset – our workforce – to excel in an environment that’s as dynamic as the technology shaping it.

Assessing Capability Gaps

The starting point for an agile training strategy is to ask ourselves ‘why do we need one?’

Secondary benefits to great L&D opportunities are employee satisfaction, increased efficiency, and appeal to potential employees. The number one reason for any L&D strategy is to ensure the organisation and its employees have the skills they need to deliver its capabilities.

Organisations with a comprehensive capability model has a central point of truth from which to work.

It’s impossible for HR and senior leaders to understand all the skills needed to deliver business area capabilities. Most of the work is delivered by specialists who may be unique in the organisation.

HR must understand which capabilities are vulnerable, where there is low redundancy and poor continuity planning. This involves asking senior leaders to identify where chokepoints or skills monopolies exist in their teams.

Your actions:

  • Conduct skills audits to identify gaps
  • Anticipate future skills needed for new tech
  • Align training to strategic business goals

Measuring Training Effectiveness

Learning and development is in constant conflict with work. Managers, running with the bare minimum hours to complete the job, see it as a threat to delivery. Learners often see mandated training as an irrelevance which puts them behind with their work, whilst experiencing exasperation that genuinely helpful training has been blocked by bureaucracy and budgets.

This is a communications problem where  L&D is seen as a disabler for the business, rather than an enabler.

How would I change this?

We need to start communicating the metrics of success both downwards and  upwards. Managers need to know 99% of employees completed health and safety training; employees want to hear that the training has reduced workplace accidents and injuries by 50%.  We need to better measure the effectiveness and impact of training and share it in a way that helps people recognise the value created.

Measuring outcomes is crucial when managing budgets.

Take for example, the ‘lock-in’ approach to training. the ‘we’ll put you through this training, but you have to stay or pay’. It’s natural to fear that an employee may take the training and move to a new employer, but it’s worth remembering that if an employee is forced into doing learning in their own time, they’re doing it for their next employer, not for you. If you end up forcing an employee to do their own development, they’ve already quit.

This is tied to the phenomena of unrewarded loyalty. Studies identified it’s more financially beneficial for employees to regularly job hop than stay with a single employer. The main reason for this is that, unless you’re working in some sort of super-scaling start-up environment, people evolve faster than their employers do.

Therefore, we need to move away from  ‘turnover’ and leavers and focus on metrics like length of service. In 99.9% of organisations, even middle performers are going to get a better offer if they go looking. HR needs to ask how can we increase the average service length to reduce recruitment and retraining costs? If someone leaves before 75% of the average service length, we should investigate. At an organisational scale, we must identify how much (if at all) improving personal learning opportunities affects that number?

Rethinking training

Dragging dispersed teams of workers into a room for training is inefficient and for remote teams, a massive and unnecessary cost. This is about ticking boxes (they attended;  they are trained) rather than creating valuable and lasting learning experiences.

Of course, when done well, it can be powerful. I’ve previously spoken about Atlassian’s approach, where the remote-first organisation has built dedicated teams to support the delivery of memorable in-person experiences for employees. This approach makes the office a place where people want to go, rather than must go

The training room approach fails to deliver personalised and relevant training that meets worker or business needs. As mentioned work is specialised which requires unique skill sets and specialities.

There are many different workforce L&D  requirements, but they can all be put into two groups, universal, and exceptional.

Universal training, for all employees, tailored for different groups, functions, and seniority levels, generally has the same objectives and outcomes for everyone.

Exceptional training is more niche. It may be for thousands of people, or just for one, but has a specific purpose which involves improving an employee’s performance or skills.

E-learning is an effective way of delivering both these types of training.

Universal training through e-learning is simple. A course is added, completion is tracked, with a goal of 100%. However, exceptional training requires more specific and niche courses. Many of these are commercially available; for example, Umbrella HR has produced an e-learning course for line managers to upskill in performance management. But when we look deeper, we run into issues. Employee’s bespoke training needs are often blocked by managers (especially where not directly related to current job role) or delivered informally by a colleague who may or may not be trained. As a result,, capability gaps are not identified, and employees are forced to upskill outside of work just to do their job, breeding resentment.

Your actions:

  • Curate self-service e-learning platforms
  • Facilitate peer coaching and collaboration
  • Track learning outcomes across locations

The Road Ahead

For too many, ‘learning’ ends at school or university and this is embedded by poor support for learning in organisations. But employers can change this. It’s common to have a volunteering days allowance; so, give employees a personal development allowance and measure the impact of this on organisational capabilities.

It’s crucial to support employees through change. We’re living through a period of unprecedented disruption on the global, local, societal, and working levels. Supporting employees with the skills and knowledge they need demonstrates an investment and appreciation likely to be rewarded with improved retention.

The two specific learning areas crucial for organisations to deliver effectively into the future are  skills and knowledge The organisational ‘lore’ is an often-overlooked part of learning, but codifying what has and hasn’t worked in the past embeds organisational learning and prevents wasteful mistakes being made twice.

Organisational knowledge is a key opportunity which data driven organisations are using AI to exploit. Moving information from employee’s heads into formal repositories via intranets and knowledge banks is a crucial part of the bigger picture behind L&D. Practitioners who take an active role in AI development, will be able to effectively control this learning delivery method.

Finally, we often fail to take note of skills and training delivered before an employee joins. Unless a certification or skillset is a job requirement upon appointment, we rarely understand the other skills or competencies that people bring to a role, which results in poorly constructed job descriptions, or worse, we underuse an employee who then believes themselves to have been slighted. Properly recording and, rewarding the full capacity of our employees is an increasing challenge as skill shortages sharpen.

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Diversity & Inclusion

Promoting neurodiversity; reducing conflict

Denise Keating - March 22, 2024

As I was pondering this piece, the ‘first rule of systems engineering’ popped into my head. This is popularly written as:

“Everything interacts with everything else.”

The point of this rule is to remind the systems engineer that any changes made will have knock-on effects. Optimising one piece of a system in isolation does not mean an optimisation to the system’s performance as a whole – in fact, it can often bring about the opposite effect.

And of course, our workplaces are systems. Every department, team, individual, is a component of the larger system. The individual contribution of each of these pieces means very little; it’s the cumulative impact across disciplines, projects, and departments that delivers organisational results. Most organisations abhor the ‘rockstar’ employee for this very reason – they’re an unpredictable and outsized component that can potentially cause similarly outsized damage.

Whilst this is a very dispassionate and dehumanising take, it speaks to the underlying nature of the modern workplace. Everybody is intentionally replaceable, else the whole system grinds to a halt.

But this take stands in contrast to how we speak about diversity and inclusion. After all, one of the key benefits of EDI is improved creativity and innovation; utilising the unique experiences and skills of all employees to unlock new opportunities.

The truth is that innovation and stability have always stood in conflict with each other. The workplace system exists in a state of balance, where risk lines are determined by whether something pushes that balance past a tipping point.

Which brings me, in a tortured and roundabout way, to neurodiversity.

Because, of all the aspects of diversity we talk about in the workplace, neurodiversity (and neurodiverse individuals) are those most likely to upset that balance.

Why do I think that? Why neurodiversity, more so than race, or age, or gender?

Because neurodiversity is fundamentally an issue of behaviour. Neurodiverse individuals, almost by definition, demonstrate behaviour that doesn’t fit societal or organisational norms. And we do a disservice by trying to ignore this. Indeed, the CIPD’s Neuroinclusion at work guidance mentions behaviour in the context of the neurodiverse individual only once across thousands of words.

And ‘different’ behaviour is, historically, classed as socially bad behaviour. The system, in all forms, penalises different. It contradicts the social contract and undermines cohesion. And some of the behaviour of neurodiverse individuals can often be a violation of societal expectations.

Coming back to the workplace as a system, we see that neurodiverse behaviours can be incorporated up until the point that they push past the unwritten balance point. But this balance point is different in different parts of the system. Having a neurodiverse team member has a greater impact on a team than the organisation as a whole.

This is where the theory and real world collide. Almost every line manager wants a hassle-free life. Removing stress factors is important to their mental health. Minimising team conflict is a key part of that. So their ideal is to build a team with diverse complementary skills and homogenous behavioural expectations. 

In practice, this has meant that success for underrepresented groups derives from adapting and adopting the behaviours and cultural norms of the dominant workplace culture. That’s not the point of EDI initiatives, of course, but it means the numbers improve, which is the real metric that leaders want to see.

But this fake inclusion is revealed as a sham by the experiences of neurodiverse individuals, where bringing their ‘whole self’ to work is penalised.

And I think that’s because we spend so much time thinking about the what of EDI, we’ve completely neglected to think about the how. EDI so often forms a bolt-on to an existing process or operation in the workplace system. Recruitment: now with added EDI considerations. Progression: the same, but allegedly different. Innovation: but not too much.

With all these things, we’re ensuring we don’t break the system. By just changing things a little bit, we achieve progress, whilst not disrupting the balance.

But, actually, the balance does need to be disrupted. When EDI is seen as an ‘add on’, it’s easy to also be seen as a potential ‘take off’. Something we’re seeing across the world.

Instead, we should be looking at EDI as an environmental factor. Are we building environments in our workplaces where inclusion is truly practiced, or just seen as part of the recruitment process? This doesn’t just apply for neurodiversity – outcomes across many underrepresented characteristics are lower because EDI in recruitment and the other areas HR controls brings diversity into an organisation, but the working environment and organisational culture rewards and forces employees into conformity.

To truly promote neurodiversity and reduce conflict in the workplace, organisations must go beyond just recruitment and look at the whole system. As I shared at the beginning, focusing on improving a single part can lead to lower performance across the whole.

Five ways to improve outcomes for neurodiverse employees

1. Educating the workforce: Provide comprehensive training to all employees, especially leaders and managers, on neurodiversity and the benefits of an inclusive workplace. This will help dispel myths, build empathy, and equip them with the skills to manage and support neurodiverse team members effectively.

2. Adapting the work environment: Assess and modify the physical workspace, communication methods, and processes to accommodate the needs of neurodiverse individuals. This could involve providing quiet spaces, offering alternative communication channels, and allowing flexible work arrangements.

3. Encouraging open dialogue: Create safe spaces where neurodiverse employees feel comfortable sharing their experiences, challenges, and suggestions for improvement. This open dialogue can help identify areas for growth and foster a culture of understanding and acceptance.

4. Reviewing policies and practices: Scrutinise existing policies and practices, such as performance criteria, to ensure they are fair and inclusive for neurodiverse individuals. Involving neurodiverse employees in this process will help you gain valuable insights and perspectives.

5. Celebrating neurodiversity: Actively promote and celebrate neurodiversity as a source of strength and competitive advantage for the organisation. Highlighting the accomplishments and contributions of neurodiverse employees will help position neurodiversity as a key aspect of the company’s diversity and inclusion efforts.

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