As organisations strive towards greater diversity and inclusion, there will always be some workers who are reluctant to do the same
The vast majority of organisations have been ramping up their diversity and inclusion initiatives for a number of years but no matter how fair and progressive employers are, there will always be some workers who are reluctant to follow suit.
Vicki Caisley is the chief people and strategy officer at Southern Cross Health Society – she says HR professionals shouldn’t overlook staff just because they aren’t on the same wavelength.
“When you’re going through a process like this, you do need to be mindful that while it’s opening doors for some people, others are going to feel like its closing doors,” she tells HRD.
“You need to be mindful of those people because they may need to go on a little bit of a different journey around tolerance and acceptance of others.”
Caisley recently guided Southern Cross through the Rainbow Tick accreditation process, which recognises workplaces which are truly welcoming towards the LGBTQ+ community – she says there wasn’t a massive amount of resistance within the organisation but some individuals did have to be addressed from time to time.
“There have been one or two people who have felt a little bit uncomfortable with it and I think it’s responsible for us as an organisation to help them work through that in their own way,” she says.
“You need to spend some time with those people to understand what it is that’s causing that resistance because they’ll have their own personal set of beliefs,” she continues.
Caisley says that, during conversations with resistant employees, she doesn’t try to change their own values but says it’s more important to coach them on tolerance and acceptance.
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“The way I’ve talked to people and communicated within the organisation here is that those set of beliefs are theirs and they’re entitled to hold onto those if they serve them well but what they can’t do is take those beliefs and push them onto others,” she says.
“You may not approve of or agree with somebody’s lifestyle but when we’re here together as one team, we tolerate and we accept and we don’t judge,” she continues.
“It’s about learning tolerance of one another and learning to be accepting without judgement and that’s the conversation we’ve had – when you start talking like that, that actually makes sense to people, they get that.”
However, Caisley does say leaders have to be vigilant in the workplace if they want to ensure that intolerant attitudes aren’t impacting other employees.
“We have had some comments made which don’t align with the culture or environment we’re trying to create but our leaders have been able to jump on those pretty quickly and say; ‘That’s not okay, that’s not who we are and you need to rethink that,’” she says.