This is my first blog post on Medium. I would like to use the first part of this blog to outline my purpose, my mission in the field of diversity and inclusion (D&I), and why you should read my blogs and write your own blogs.
Why am I blogging? I ‘matriculated’ last month (August) at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge — officially kick-started my MSt journey. How exciting! 🤓 Studying/researching part-time, working full-time (and as a freelancer), and volunteering in the community is not easy (Disclaimer[!]: I sleep 6–8 hours per day.). Writing blogs help me to reflect on my strategies, tactics, and leadership styles (Rettberg, 2009), a useful tool for me to document and share my lessons learned digitally.
What is my mission? My mission is to cultivate a culture of inclusion in my workplace. Culture = common knowledge in an organisation (Key,1999).
What is in it for you? It is my honor to invite you to join me on this journey, to challenge, support, and inspire each other to drive meaningful change.
I have been leading and driving multiple cross-functional initiatives with a focus on Corporate Social Responsibly (CSR), Learning and Development (L&D), and D&I in multiple organisations, and of course, in the community where I live — London, the UK in the last couple of years, primarily in programme and events management functions. In this blog, I would like to write about the ‘Inclusion Matters’ initiative that I started to get involved in pre-COVID times.
What is ‘Inclusion Matters’? It is a company-wide global initiative that focuses on enhancing the effectiveness of inclusivity, particularly in the services function. The sub-working group that I am actively involving in is focusing on finding ways to cultivate a culture of inclusion.
What is the one thing we started with? As a team, we reflected on the achievements of the committee to date (September 2020) i.e. formed multiple working groups this year. We also discussed the importance of identifying Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that are aligned with the CSR OKRs (Diversity Best Practices, n.d.), as we noticed we have no OKR and have a very limited understanding of the current maturity level of our culture of inclusion.
What is our plan of action? We agreed to form an OKR team in September 2020 (I am a team member of that team), to assess our maturity level by using ISO guidelines, such as ISO/DIS 30415, or other models/frameworks, then we can define our OKRs, where 1 OKR = ‘Objective — The What + N x Key Results — The Hows’ (Doerr, 2018; Krzysztofi, 2019).
In my future blogs, I will share the OKR team progress and potentially, lessons learned.
References:
Diversity Best Practices (n.d.). Corporate Social Responsibility and D&I: A Critical Partnership. Available at: https://www.diversitybestpractices.com/sites/diversitybestpractices.com/files/attachments/2019/03/dbp_csr_paper_final_-_corporate_social_responsibility_and_di-_a_critical_partnership.pdf (Accessed: 30 September 2020).
Doerr, J. (2018). Measure what matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation rock the world with OKRs. Penguin.
Key, S. (1999). Organizational ethical culture: Real or imagined?. Journal of Business Ethics, 20(3), 217–225.
Krzysztofik, A. (2019). ‘Ex-Googler’s Tips on How to Write OKRs (+ Easy-to-Use OKR Templates)’, The Piktochart Blog, 19 November. Available at: https://piktochart.com/blog/how-to-write-okrs/ (Accessed: 30 September 2020).
Rettberg, J.W. (2009). Blogging as a Tool for Reflection and Learning. Available at:http://www.virclass.net/eped/ep_tmp/files/17842056574abc85cdf304e.pdf (Accessed: 30 September 2020).
#DiversityAndInclusion #Sustainability #InclusionMatters
