#ChooseToChallenge: Are we becoming less inclusive as a result of working from home?

As part of our International Women's Day #ChooseToChallenge series, Corporate and Business Services Executive, Matthew Grieveson, shares his insight on whether we have become less inclusive as a result of working from home for the last year.

International Women’s Day may mean different things to everyone. For me as a male, it is a day to celebrate the great women in my life. I have always valued my close relationship with my mum and my three sisters, and I therefore wanted to take this opportunity to get involved as a way of celebrating them. I believe that we all have a responsibility to use our voices to be part of making a difference in the world.

Have we become less inclusive since we have been working from home?

Whilst working from home over the past 12 months I have been very aware of the struggles that we have all faced - both socially and in a working context. Working from home, we can go weeks where we only speak to other members of our close teams and the conversations that we are having might seem to be 100% work related. 

However, whilst we have been working from home, we have been able to bring our whole selves to work. We share our homes and families with our colleagues in a way that we have not ever done before and this incursion of our personal spaces should bring us closer, but the pressure of performance or the added complexities of working from home means that we blur our backgrounds or cut conversations short. 

Having had a large intake of staff over the past year, we have really seen the importance of making the time and effort to talk about topics other than work and build relationships. I have valued our weekly catch ups which normally start with a general chat about how everyone’s weekends have been. This general small talk would normally make our mornings in the office quite pleasant, but with working from home we have somewhat lost the ability to do that with the wider team and office. 

We decided to trial a teams call for the CBS team in Plymouth which had no agenda. We would simply leave our group video call open as we continued to work and we even changed our teams status to appear available so that we could still answer work calls and other staff members weren’t deterred from calling us. The teams call was a drop in drop out styled conversation and gave us all the company of team without the pressure. It honestly felt like we were back sat at our desks in the office.

Why don’t you give it a try with your team? – I’d love to hear how it goes.

Here are some tips for being more inclusive:

1. Become more self-aware
   
   Understanding that sometimes we can intimidate or lose the interest of the people that we are speaking to by talking about things that may not interest your audience or may be unrealistic to them. 
   
   Whilst this probably seems a strange place to start, I believe that becoming aware of your own privileges, strengths and personality traits can really make a difference when trying to become more inclusive. The awareness of yourself will encourage an awareness of others and their circumstances. I have completed the insights personality wheel and it has touched upon some areas of myself that I’ve always known about, but never really appreciated how they are perceived by other people.
   
   Having this awareness makes it easier to communicate with a wider variety of people and I find myself trying to adapt my tone depending on who I’m talking to. I’ve attached my insights wheel at the bottom of the blog, in case anyone would like to take a look. 
    
2. Ask questions – but ask them correctly
   
   Asking questions might seem quite self-explanatory when talking about inclusion but when asking questions are you using the correct language and space to allow everyone to participate? Does your body language really give everyone chance to feel safe and engage in the conversation?
   
   Think about what answers you want, if you want your audience to be engaged in conversation then asking a question to a group will not be as effective as asking individuals.
    
3. Listen more and talk openly and honestly
   
   Listening is such an important part of being more inclusive. Rudely interrupting or talking over someone could tarnish any future comfort that someone might have with you and will make that person feel excluded or de-valued. Respect the time of the speaker and in turn they will respect your time.
   
   Challenge your own assumptions by admitting when you don’t understand, and then show desire to understand by asking questions. When you’re talking, demonstrate empathy, this will create a safe space for employees to feel reassured.
    
4. Celebrate employees and create a safe space for feedback
   
   Celebrate employees work and acknowledge how their work adds value to the team and this will create a space where employees are more open to feedback (both positive and negative). 
   
   Create opportunities for people to attend meetings to drive diversity. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – that’s insanity. 

But the most important thing – is to be kind.