There is mounting evidence that more diverse organisations achieve better performance.

In 2015, members of the business and academic community joined Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner Dr Tim Soutphommasane in developing Leading for Change: A blueprint for cultural diversity and inclusive leadership.

Recognising the considerable uncertainty about what works, the blueprint was intended to guide organisations on how they could improve cultural diversity among their leaders.

It helped to clarify the growing case for change: why and how Australia must do better.

Maria Dimopoulos, managing Director of MyriaD Consultants, has 28 years experience in diversity and inclusion within Australia and regularly talks to business leaders about attracting, retaining and supporting culturally diverse employees.

She says the need for diversity now infiltrates all sectors. There are a lot of drivers for change, including multicultural policy review at a federal level.

However many organisations are still stuck in a lens of unconscious prejudice.

“If you think of diversity as them and not us, you’ve started down the wrong path,” Ms Dimopoulos said.

“Unconscious bias is the biggest hurdle to implementing workplace diversity. Organisations need to ask themselves what assumptions they are making of people.

“These biases are prevalent in all of us, and can be contrary to our conscious beliefs.”

And according to neurologists, it takes less than three seconds to climb this ladder of inference.

Initiatives like the Victorian Government’s ‘blind recruitment’ trial, where personal details such as name, gender, age and location are removed from job applications, is hoping to overcome unconscious bias when recruiting staff.

This is a personal project for the Minister of Multicultural Affairs Robin Scott, whose wife Shaojie of Chinese background occasionally has to anglicise her name for job interviews.

Ms Dimopoulos says that implementing diversity has to be a whole of workplace approach, and that competence is needed at four levels.

Two are needed at the broader level: systematic competence such as in workplace policies and organisational competence such as appropriate resources.

Two are also needed at the individual level: professional competence such as educational and development opportunities for staff, and individual competence such as being informed and having the right attitude.

Ms Dimopoulos also says that implementing inclusion practices are just as important and diversity.

“Employees have to feel included, not just used,” she said.

Australia is the most diverse country in the world, based on linguistic, religious and ethnic diversity measures, according to a recent report by the OECD. Immigration also provides 54 per cent of Australia’s population growth.

Ms Dimopoulos says it is therefore  critical that organisations understand what is happening in the broader community, through what she calls a “diversity lens”.

Cultural diversity at work can account for differences in communication style, attitudes to conflict, and even approaches to completing tasks.

“Not everyone comes from a individualist culture, in many languages there is no word or concept for ‘I’.” Ms Dimopoulos said.

“People from collectivist cultures may struggle to show leadership in interviews, or can’t directly report their achievements.

“We all see the world through our own cultural lens, and we must be aware of this.

“To quote Anais Nin, ‘We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are’.”

Carissa Gilham
AMES Australia Staff Writer