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Turning to One Another

Margaret J Wheatley

©2002 - 2009
Access to Excellence Co Ltd.
Upload Version ATE107
November 2008

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The Application of Excellence Principles to Equal Opportunities and Diversity

The focus of Access to Excellence on the principles of excellence, not simply the tools, allows us the flexibility to apply this capability to a assist in all areas of business performance and improvement.

As an illustration of this capability, the following outlines how we have applied the principles of excellence to work with a major client on the development of their approach to Equal Opportunities and Diversity. This work has been recognised with one client gaining FEED Bronze accreditation and another becoming the first winner in Europe of the FEED Silver accreditation.

Work in partnership with these clients has helped develop an overall continuous improvement approach supported by specific tools designed to meet the specific needs and aims of the organisation.

Equal Opportunities and Diversity - for Business Advantage.

In recent years there has been a growing demand from society in many countries for equality of opportunity and treatment for a growing number of different groups. This

By 2009 20% of all families are headed by a lone parent, most of these are women, with the resultant impact on work life balance needs.

has led many governments to introduce legislation that provides redress under the law for unfair treatment on grounds for example of sex, age, ethnic background, religion and disability.

Organisations are being driven to review and amend their attitudes, policies and procedures to ensure that they remain within the law.

The approach of many organisations is led by this requirement for compliance and their aim is to ensure that they continue to operate legally.

BY 2011 there will be 1.7 million new jobs, 1.4 million of them taken by women UK National Institute for Social and Economic Research

For a growing number of advanced organisations the approach to equal opportunities and diversity, as with many other areas of business operation, has moved from simple compliance to the creation of business differentiation.

These advanced organisations have recognised the signs of demographic change that will radically transform the working populations on which they rely, within the current decade. They understand that the skills and capabilities of the people they need to recruit and retain will be drawn from a dramatically different ‘pool’ to that they have

By 2010 only 20% of the labour market will be  white non-disabled man aged under 45. UK Institute for Employment Studies

grown used to. Unless they dramatically change their approach they will neither attract or retain the people with the key capabilities they require for business success.

They equally recognise that if they are able to proactively prepare their organisation for these changes, to change their behaviours and work environments and appropriately care for people they will create a major business advantage over other organisations in the competition for the best available

By 2009 an increase of 310,000 in UK ethnic minority labour force, compared with an increase of 220,000 in the white labour force

people. Their attractiveness to prospective employees will ensure that they have more of the cream of the available resources and retain more of the investment they make in these people.

Business Approach

The overall approach to transforming the organisation to a proactive approach to equal opportunities and diversity follows the continuous improvement process.  Comprising an iterative four step process (plan, do, check, act), it lies at the root of Business Excellence thinking and its structure is described in some detail in the Business Excellence pages of this web site.

The focus of the plan step is a Visioning Workshop. In the plan step we have worked with the organisation to understand the existing perceptions of equal opportunities and diversity, for example to understand whether and how the topic is understood by the workforce.

In addition to this perception data, the business aims of the organisation and data on the future challenges created by external influences such as demographic change are fed into the Visioning Workshop.

This Visioning Workshop is held with senior managers from across the organisation. It collects and shares their inputs and helps them create a description of the Equal Opportunities and Diversity Vision for the organisation as well as a description of the organisation’s current position.

From these the key elements required for achievement of the vision are identified; the areas in which the organisation will focus its improvement effort to maximise impact on achievement of the vision.

The Visioning Workshop thus creates a shared vision of the organisation’s overall equal opportunities and diversity aims and identifies the key measurements by which success would be measured and the key areas in which actions would be applied.

The next step was to provide a tool for use in the do step that would allow areas within the organisation to measure their current performance with regard to equal opportunities and diversity, identify improvement opportunities and measure the impact of changes.

The tool needs to be simple to apply and capable of assessing current performance. It also needs to be able to identify the strengths and opportunities for improvement to allow teams using it to identify straightforward actions. These can then be incorporated into the organisation’s business planning process to create further improvement contributing towards the organisation’s vision.

The tool developed was an assessment matrix that describes a range of levels of maturity of an organisation in both the application and achievement of equal opportunities and diversity.

The assessment matrix follows the general structure of the Business Excellence model looking at the actions (Enablers) and achievement (Results) but specifically causes the organisation to direct the focus of its attention at the topic of equal opportunities and diversity.

It for example

Thus the assessment matrix allows the organisation as a whole, or individual teams or departments, to measure current performance, identify and prioritise improvement opportunities and, through repeated  annual application, identify progress they have made.

The operation of the assessment matrix thus itself forms a continuous improvement cycle within the overall improvement cycle of the business. Thus the outputs from team improvement cycles will contribute to the achievement by the organisation of its overall vision and aims.

Having supported the organisation to create a vision and develop the means to generate improvement opportunities, the next area of support is in helping the identified actions to be integrated within the organisation’s plans.

The check step applies appropriate measures of the effectiveness of this integration. It provides measures of key parameters that will reveal how well the organisation is implementing the planned actions and, for example, how well the assessment matrix is being applied.

The act step is where the organisation analyses the overall impact of its actions on improving equal opportunities and diversity performance in a business context. This may typically include impact on recruitment and retention. Additionally it may include, for example, measures of creativity, teamworking, customer relationships or other characteristics identified as critical to business performance and success. The results of this analysis are fed back into the planning process to refine the business aims and direct the refocussing of improvement actions.

Thus this example illustrates how the principles of excellence are used to create a specific business focus for the organisation to create a competitive advantage, in this case by exploiting the development of equal opportunity and diversity.

Similar application of this thinking allows other key elements of the organisation’s business plan to receive a similarly focussed improvement effort. It for example can be tailored to provide a focus on Customer Satisfaction, Risk Management or Process Management.