Whether you’re getting started on your workplace inclusion journey, need a fresh look at your company culture or wish to review established HR processes, bringing together people from across your organization offers the potential for rich insights into the different experiences of inclusion at work. Build a foundation to improve diversity in your organization with this constructive, upbeat workshop, a one-day working session suitable for 3 – 33 people.
Workplace Inclusion Is Experienced by Individuals
Inclusion in the workplace is one of life’s ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973) . Wicked problems have no single definition and no single solution. Rather people have different experiences and incomplete knowledge. Wicked problems are entangled with other problems, such as experience of the interview process (a business process) or insensitive jokes (acceptable organizational behaviour).
We facilitate a process where participants build a vision of inclusion for your workplace that incorporates your specific situation, your market-place, community, the company culture, your teams and individual stakeholders. Sustainable change requires motivation, resources, planning and a vision of the outcome. A shared vision helps ensure that ‘how’ you approach change is sufficiently adaptable to thrive.
Envisage (verb):
to contemplate or conceive a possible or desirable future. Example “the Rome Treaty envisaged free movement across frontiers”.
Change is notoriously difficult to ‘engineer’ and yet, we all daily ‘dance’ with systems, processes and people to bring about change. When people are aligned around a vision, you create the potential for energy and focus to pull in the same direction. Without people onboard change is impossible.
Workshop Outcomes Vary And Include:
- Identifying Themes Salient To Your Participants Now (not last year or some other time).
- A Deeper Understanding of Others Experience At Work
- A Clearer Articulation of The Diversity of Experiences Across Your Workplace
- A Positive Vision / Image of Inclusion Aligned To Your Organizational Context
- Action Items (sometimes with simple, specific and sensible suggestions!)Â
- Participants Uncovering Common Ground (strengthening their social capital & support network)
- Giving Your People A Voice & the Potential to Feel Heard
- A Firm Foundation for Collaborative Organizational Change
Shared Visions Are Created By Participation and Sharing.
A word of warning => Hope may be evoked. What happens next will be up to those who are formally in power, and those with social capital.
Your teams share knowledge, uncover shared experiences and locate weaknesses in a safe manner. As you all learn together you uncover and articulate the outcomes desired by your organization. More deeply, change may occur in the attitudes, behaviors and values of your organizational stakeholders. Change requires change agents and within involvement comes commitment. Co-development of your ‘vision for inclusion’ establishes a firm basis to inform and sustain your journey to inclusion grounded in the realities of your situation.
There are many routes to Rome.
Stakeholders Make Change Happen
What to Expect In During Each Workshop
Our approach brings your organizational stakeholders together and acknowledges your particular context. A framework for inclusion structures exploration in three parts:
- Envisaging Inclusion
- Pillars of Diversity & Inclusion
- Ecosystems of Inclusion
- A Safe & Brave Environment
- Expert Facilitation
[Our vision workshop produced] “Really interesting insights!!”
Team Lead,
Dublin FinTech Company, 2019
- Change Agents
- Actions for Impact
- The Change Process
Fun Techniques Proven To Encourage Collaboration
To encourage inclusive team work, the workshop uses fun and positive techniques grounded in participation and listening. The LARRA framework encourages listening in an inclusive way so different experiences are heard in a non-judgmental manner. ‘Rich pictures’ provide a constructive forward-thinking way to envisage a positive future.
Envisaging Workplace Inclusion
In messy situations with no single correct answer, rich pictures provide a visual mechanism to explore perceptions, experience and draw in (sometime unspoken) aspects of a problematic situations. Here we use rich pictures to consider the people, process and structures in the desired future situation. Prompts provide an interesting, and often fun way, to think deeply about situations.
Experienced Sensitive Facilitation
- Your workshop is led by Jane Morgan, an experienced facilitator.
- Previous clients include Dublin fintech SMEs to Cork tech startups.
- Learn more about Jane Morgan here.