Australia has traditionally perceived itself to be a country of egalitarianism – the land where everyone has a “fair go” at least insofar as socioeconomic status is concerned. If this were literally true there would be little difficulty for anyone to move (up or down) into a different socio-economic bracket, regardless of where one was …
In many organisations when Symmetra is engaged to move the needle on the D & I agenda, we find it is taken for granted that the business case for diversity and inclusion is well established and serves as an elementary guiding principle for their business leaders. The focus we are told is “let’s get on …
Australia (as well as other countries in the Asia- Pacific region) could potentially reap massive economic benefits by 2025 if it takes accelerated steps towards gender parity. This is the conclusion drawn from the just- released report by McKinsey Global Institute—ThePower of Parity: Advancing Women’s Equality in Asia Pacific The report calculates that the region …
In its recently published report ‘Global Recruiting Trends 2018’, LinkedIn identified the four top trends shaping the future of recruiting and hiring. First and foremost in the list of these trends is diversity – ‘the biggest game-changer’. The diversity paradigm, according to the Report, no longer encompasses only diversity and inclusion but has been expanded …
For years Symmetra has been advancing the proposition that diversity and inclusion benefits businesses with regard to employee engagement; enhancing the generation of ideas; innovation and ultimately profitability. This stance, supported by data and research relating to returns on investment, share price movements and metrics on innovative capability has become widely accepted. Now with a …
A Case of Inclusion Illiteracy As much as diversity is incomplete without a culture of inclusiveness, so inclusion is incomplete without encompassing employees as well as customers of an organisation. Customers desire to be inclusively treated by organisations as much as employees do. And like employees they will be extremely sensitive as to how inclusive …
Ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? It is named after a study carried out by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger who in 1999 had undergraduates at Cornell University undergo tests regarding humour, logic and grammar and then estimate how they fared relative to all other participants. And how did participants rate themselves? The …
Harvard Business Review has just published an article which highlights that those leaders who are not inclusive tend to overrate their inclusive capability and those who are inclusive tend to underrate themselves. Whilst this disconnect is not surprising, it poses huge risks to the realisation of an organisation’s D & I strategy because the very …
How do you convince judges – who pride themselves on their ability to make unbiased decisions – that they too have unconscious biases that may affect their behaviour in (and out) of the courtroom? Symmetra has been gratified by the success of its first unconscious bias workshop for judicial officers of the South Australia Magistrates …
At a recent Women of the Future event, foreign minister Julie Bishop described her experiences as a single female minister together with nineteen men in the cabinet of Tony Abbot. “It was pretty lonely. I would be sitting in a cabinet with 19 men and me.” Ms Bishop then related what seems to have been …