If you've struggled to get your employees engaged in inclusiveness and diversity, this White Paper is for you. Our research shows that increasing inclusiveness directly improves individual wellbeing.
What’s in it for me?
Plenty apparently. Data from over 1,000 people on a Do Something Different international programme in 45 countries showed that inclusiveness and diversity is strongly linked to individual wellbeing. In short, if you can shift people’s inclusive behaviours they will benefit from uplifts in their wellbeing, including physical health, coping, decision-making and happiness.
Why is this finding so important?
Many companies understand that inclusion and diversity are important to improve performance, opportunity and engagement. However, many also struggle to get employees to understand the need to engage.
One of the reasons for this is that bias is usually unconscious; few people realise that their habitual behaviours may be excluding others. Many fail to see why they need inclusiveness training. “I think it’s good that the firm is running inclusiveness training, but I don’t need it,” is a common attitude.
Now there is a strong case for promoting inclusiveness and diversity training as a way to boost personal wellbeing. Organisations that care about their people’s wellbeing can make the workplace more inclusive and also give every employee, even the most unconsciously biased, a personal reason to take part.
Is there a relationship between inclusion and wellbeing?
Every digital Do Something Different programme starts with a personal benchmarking exercise. This measures indices relevant to the topic of the programme (in this case inclusion), and indices related to wellbeing, derived from the Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale.
From the benchmarking scores of over 1,000 participants (1,153), just one of the findings in our analysis shows a clear link between those whose data revealed them to be more inclusive, and their self-reported level of wellbeing (see table below).
This shows us that:
- Someone with a high diversity and inclusiveness score was about four times more likely to have high wellbeing, compared to someone with low inclusiveness.
- Someone with a medium diversity and inclusiveness score was twice as likely to have high wellbeing, compared to someone with low inclusiveness.
- Someone with a high diversity and inclusiveness score was very unlikely (only 3% chance) to have low wellbeing.
If we can increase inclusive behaviours, do we increase wellbeing?
So the big question is, if you get people to become more inclusive, will their personal wellbeing also increase?
Unlike traditional training where the emphasis is on learning and knowledge, Do Something Different programmes specifically target behaviour change. The focus of this 6-week programme was to help people to apply more inclusive behaviours in their daily working lives.
At the end of each digital programme, participants can choose to come back and repeat the benchmarking exercise to see what has changed. In this programme, nearly a quarter of participants (261) in total, came back.
The results do indeed show that an increase in inclusive behaviours does deliver an increase in wellbeing.
What’s more, there is what statisticians call a ‘dose relationship’, so that the more you increase inclusive behaviours, the more wellbeing is likely to improve:
- Of the people reporting an increase of inclusive behaviours of between 5 and 10 percentage points, their wellbeing scores increased by 8%
- People reporting an increase in inclusive behaviours of between 10 and 15 percentage points, showed wellbeing scores up by over 10%
- The average increase in inclusiveness for the whole sample was 5.6%
Openness to change: an additional benefit
A further goal of this programme was to encourage openness to change, measured by how much employees considered themselves ‘open-minded’, ‘enjoying change’, ‘enjoying change at work’ and ‘finding new ways of doing things’.
Once again, the data show a positive relationship between greater inclusiveness and increased openness to change. The important message from this is that getting people to adopt more inclusive behaviours makes them more likely to engage with change at work, and in their lives more generally.
What are the most important inclusive behaviours for wellbeing?
Of the inclusive working practices we considered, proactively building new relationships plays a particularly important role in wellbeing. On the other side, finding it easy to talk to others is the aspect of wellbeing that is most impacted by an increase in inclusive behaviour.
Find out more about our Diversity and Inclusion programmes
VIEW THE WEBINAR RECORDING WITH PROFESSOR KAREN PINE: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF UNCONSCIOUS BIAS
