"Inclusion and diversity are at risk in the crisis - but are critical for business recovery, resilience, and reimagination." (McKinsey)
Focus on the essentials. That’s the mantra for businesses during turbulent times. It means cutting back on or even getting rid of many nice-to-have initiatives. Unfortunately, it is not always clear what is essential and what is nice to have. Case in point: inclusion and diversity.
For many businesses, inclusion and diversity are, at best, an integral part of the employer branding strategy, and, at worst, just lip service, something to check off a list of things to put on the Career section of their corporate websites, along with CSR.
And when a crisis of such magnitude as Coronavirus strikes, paying attention to inclusion and diversity appears to be a luxury many can no longer afford given they were never serious about it in the first place.
It’s a crying shame as inclusion and diversity can and should become one of the business essentials during a crisis. I believe that a more connected, diverse, and virtual workforce is the "better normal" post COVID-19. I still will continue to call this Business As UnUsual (#BAUU) as there’s nothing normal about it.
At TRG, we have always had remote working consultants from all corners of the world for years, in fact, we first introduced it when the financial crisis of the last century hit us. Admittedly, for a business whose client base spans more than 80 countries, this evolved as a necessity. But as I already mentioned in the last CEO letter, we have embraced the pandemic’s business-as-unusual as an opportunity to further drive our inclusion and diversity initiatives forward.
Today, we have transformed the once "in-office internships" to an even more global and virtual program. We are very fortunate to welcome interns from practically every region in the world. To date, they are knowledge and experience hungry students studying: Marketing, Event Management, Finance and Accounting, Human Resources Management, Computer Science, English Literature, Environmental Engineering, Management, Psychology, Economics, and much more. Surprisingly they are not only undergraduates, but more than a third are also at Masters level. And in the last few months, there’s been a slew of mature applicants wanting to reskill and switch career path, all kudos to them for taking that leap.
Though this pivot has only taken place since March 2020, we have witnessed many remarkable impacts that have fuelled my resolve to completely transform the organisation digitally, culturally and individually, step by step, person by person and process by process.
Most noticeably, we have been able to scale our intern intake to the point where the major challenge now is to make sure our processes of onboarding, allocating tasks, supervising, and providing feedback can keep up with the sheer number of applicants admitted to our internship program. 10x here we come!
On the flip side, their fresh and highly diverse perspectives have allowed us to fine-tune and even replace those processes, making them more standardised, interactive, scalable and inclusive. This resonates heavily with our Kaizen core value which is both continuous improvement and lifelong learning.
Helping to drive our diversity and inclusion are our weekly intern cultural exchanges anchored by Vietnamese Cultural Ambassadors and 3-4 others ideally from the Middle East / Africa, Europe / Americas and Asia / ANZ. It’s persistently shattering the unconscious stereotyping individuals may have acquired as a result of media messaging in their countries as they discover, encounter and face reality, and what do they find? Reflective glimmers of themselves, people with similar desires, aspirations, insecurities and challenges all seeking to overcome the impact of the pandemic on their education and career prospects.
Of course, it does not hurt to have your employer branding boosted thanks to all the positive feedback and testimonials from our interns and our intern partners.
One thing we must pay attention to is having a proper communication platform and protocol to stay in touch with our global interns and keep them motivated. For that reason, we have made Microsoft Teams the primary communication and collaboration platform for all employees and interns across the company. Microsoft Teams is an invaluable addition to a host of other cloud-based solutions that have long been indispensable to our daily operations.
For instance, our Marketing team uses HubSpot to manage, consolidate and automate all our marketing activities which for more than a decade have been all about inbound. A fun fact is that we were one of the first users of HubSpot in Vietnam back in the day and the first partner. As part of our #BAUU, another pivot was to relaunch our Digital Marketing Advisory services, why not when we’re creating literally dozens of certified HubSpot Marketers each month. Our teams use Infor Expense Management to submit and get approval for travelling and entertainment expenses, though of course the travel bit is pretty much underused whilst we remain mostly #WFH. Our Human Resources team relies on online psychometric assessments to screen and qualify candidates for best fit to help anyone we take on be as successful as we can make them. This also helps us build diverse teams as we deliberately select people with diverse behavioural traits.
I can’t stress enough the immense benefits organisations can reap from having a diverse workforce especially during business as unusual, after all, business models are collapsing so we need diversity to uncover perspectives we may never otherwise see. Various studies have covered this topic with much more persuasive information than I. I’m more than happy to discuss this topic further and if you have some questions please just ask.
The key challenge ahead for many of us remains unchanged, how to create a solid foundation to attract, recruit, and retain pools of diverse and virtual employees, and unlock their full potential. We’ll touch on this in future letters as we discover how to do business as unusual.
