How We Do It: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion with Michael Nsiah

I guess the best place to start is with quite a broad question - what exactly is DE&I and what does it mean in the context of hiring?I think DE&I means different things to different people. I personally think at the moment it’s very surface level - it looks at aesthetic traits, right? So skin colour, gender, sexual preference, etc. I'm not saying it shouldn't be focused on that but DE&I is so much more.

For me, DE&I is more than just looking at aesthetics. It's about people that struggle to get the opportunities that others get.

How do we get them there? And that might not be determined by the gender or the race.

That might just be by social circumstance, their home life that they've come from, or the area that they live in. So for me, DE&I is more than surface level.

DE&I for me is about making sure everyone’s access to opportunities isn't limited because of their aesthetic presentation, or because of where they live, or because of their background.

What do think of the current state of DE&I and what challenges do you think remain for companies?I think the current state is that everyone is trying to, or wants to do the right thing, but they're not set up to achieve it.

Within my network and what I've seen, organisations are trying to do the right thing. They have dedicated professionals within the DE&I space, but they haven't really invested beyond that.

I think people have the best intentions, but they just don't have the full buy-in to get it done. I also think that not everyone sees DE&I same way.

That's a key problem, because if you're a person I'm trying to influence from a DE&I perspective and you're like ‘I've got these five things and DE&I is at the bottom of them’, how are you going to achieve your role of making sure a company is very diverse and equitable and inclusive? I think it means different things to different people, but the reality is, it's a topic that needs to be talked about.

But it needs more than just talking about, it needs action. That action can't just be one rule for everyone and everyone follows suit.

Is anyone really being held accountable? I don't think so.

When should a company start thinking about diverse hiring?

From the moment the organisation is set up, to be honest with you. I know it's easy for you to say when you're not sitting in the CEO's position, having to deal with all the various different business initiatives that they're trying to address as a leader.

And obviously, when you're a leader of 15 people, it's different to when you're a leader of 1000 people, or 70,000 people. I think an organisation should be thinking I know I want to be attractive to everyone, not just the people that might have gone to Oxford or Cambridge, or might have a particular skin colour, or a particular gender association.

Now, I know I’m making this sound easy. The problem is it's not that easy because if you've employed 70,000 people, how do you address that problem?

So I think organisations should be thinking about DE&I from the moment the organisation is an organisation. But equally, if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it.

I just think there has to be a conscious effort.

When it comes to talent attraction, this is where I believe workforce planning is critical. A good workforce plan will look at how long will it take to get someone in the seat, then look at the whole organisation and what other skill sets are transferable to this function.

If you have a really good tool and a really good system in place, then before managers even go out to market, they have that in mind. Without it, you might take the approach of ‘we need someone quick’, which means you've literally just wiped out all potential DE&I candidates because the likelihood is they're going to be under qualified to some extent, or they're going to be very expensive because they sit in a group of skills where they know their value, and you're probably not the first person that's called them.

So I think a good workforce plan and hiring strategy, and internal mobility is the way to do it.

What is the main benefit of diversity hiring for companies?

There's enough data out there that shows that companies that have diverse workforce outperform their competitors that don't from a commercial and a retention perspective, and just general workforce happiness. If that isn't important for you as a leader, then I don't know what anyone's going to do to convince you.

I think leaders have to want to be inclusive, be diverse, be equitable. They have to want to.

They have to want to hire everyone. I agree that smaller companies probably have the bigger challenge, as they just don't have the internal talent pool and they're at a size where they're trying to scale and grow.

If you're a leader and someone said to you ‘I can give you five non-diverse talent right now and your business would be a 100 times bigger in a year's time’, or ‘I can give you three diverse talent and two non-diverse talent and it will take you three years to get to where you want to get to, because you need to upskill the non-diverse talent’. I'm just assuming the diverse talent could be more skilled than non diverse talent, but in a world where you've probably borrowed money to start your business, you're not going to say I'll take three years because your lenders may not give you that much time.

Your savings may not allow you that freedom to wait three years, so I think there's got to be an acknowledgement of that. There is a diversity problem within certain spaces like tech, but the other side is to just be more strategic about how you hire, like advanced workforce planning.

There's so many companies who do it really well, and are literally saving organisations thousands of pounds because they are getting them to think ahead of just ‘I need that role filled’ - they’re thinking about the whole organisation structure.

Do you think companies are aware of their diversity issues?I'm going to say something really bold here, which is to say a company claiming it’s not aware of its diversity problems is rubbish in my opinion.

I'll give you an example, I live in Liverpool, and Liverpool's got his own social challenges. If you have an office in Liverpool in the north of the city, diversity might not be a thing that you care about too much because your demographic of people within your reachable limit are going to be non-diverse people, as in let's say, mainly white people.

For companies to turn and say ‘I didn't realise I had a problem because everyone in my demographic is white’, I don't buy into it. That's my personal view.

I've worked in a lot of organisations across the world, and especially when I was in Asia, where challenges around diverse talent were talked about so much. These are places where there were so many people with the right skills available within our reach, but they didn't have a certain thing that the expat community would have brought to that role.

So therefore, we have to try and find a balance, because the locals are getting angry, and we did that by being strategic, so we promoted from within. So we improved and promoted people, and they were all promoted because they were very credible for what they achieved in their roles.

What that meant was we could then create the funnel at the bottom of the hierarchy, where we could bring in people and train them up. This is something that I talked about in my current role quite a lot, which is about growing your own.

That's how you fix diversity, because trying to tap into a talent pool that's already matured where everyone's doing the same thing drives your cost base up, and it creates an inequitable platform. In tech, I believe the current average tenure is three years.

I personally think it's a misinformed interpretation that you don't invest in training them because they’re just going to go somewhere else. My argument is what happens if you did that every year?

You'd slowly increase the numbers. I use football as an analogy, I'm a West Ham fan.

We've been a selling club for years. They get them up to a standard and then they sell them on and make money.

I know in the corporate world it's different because you don't charge someone to hire your staff, but if you bring them in and nurture them, eventually word starts getting out - ‘that's a really good place to go and learn, or I really enjoy working there, I'm actually going to stay there. I just think if you start very small, you can scale it, but if you're already scaled, it's very difficult to try and implement this because then you have to get over so many hurdles.

How do you think companies can ensure they retain and progress their diverse hires?I don't know if this is just about diversity, I think it's about all employees really.

I think for diverse talent, some people have the mindset, and rightly so, that they are limited in their job because of the diverse characteristics, right? I have literally refused to believe it up until three years ago, when I saw people going into jobs that I had equally applied for.

I was pretty confident I was one of the strongest people, and I knew the hiring manager quite well. They gave me strong feedback, but then a female got the job.

I will naturally go and think, is it because I'm a black male? Is it because one of our senior stakeholders has a problem with engaging with a black person?

I think to address that, it's just about really good L&D and education. I attended a seminar about inclusive language and working with your colleagues to make them feel included.

I used to hang around in all communities when I was younger, and it was really strange because a lot of my trans and gay friends spoke the most derogatory about their own community, but not in a malicious perspective - it was just banter. You see overweight people do it quite a lot sometimes where they make references to their weight as a joke.

I find that sometimes it's just a coping mechanism, but I’ve also hung around people that didn’t face any type of trauma like that. They were comfortable in themselves because they're around people that respected and loved them for who they were, they had family support, et cetera.

And in those situations, I think the one consistent thing was learning education.

If we apply that to the workplace, we need to make everyone feel welcome. We need to make everyone feel that by speaking up or standing up for someone, they're not going to get punished for it.

How can you tell that someone's a bigot, or a racist, or a homophobe in the interview process? You can't, can you?

So when you do get them, you need to make them realise that they're going into an organisation where they don't have the luxury of space to be that bigot, that homophobe, that sexist, whatever it is. It starts from leadership, and it’s down to learning and having the right people in positions of power.

What metrics or indicators should companies be using to measure the success of their DE&I policies?

In my existing organisation we report on final interview metrics, and we have an organisational objective to have one underrepresented individual at the final stage of interview. Do I think that's the best, or the only metric?

No, but it does work for what we're trying to achieve. I personally think you should measure diversity throughout the whole process.

So you look at how many diverse talents you’re attracting. If you have a hundred applications for every role you advertise and you only get five diverse talent, and I'm talking about gender, race, all of them, how are you going to show a willingness to be diverse?

Whereas if you show that actually in 2021, we used to advertise and we found that we were getting a lot of males from job board one, so we moved to job board two and saw that increase to 60/40 male/female. And within that, we also saw an increase of 0 to 10% diverse talent.

That's a more credible stat to report than we've hired 20 diverse talent this year, but in our organisational makeup, they only make up 5% of the headcount. What does that mean?

What are you telling me? You're telling me that you've hired some diverse talent, but how are you addressing the general equality across the whole organisation?

I think you should measure it from the front end, because if you're not attracting diverse talent to apply to your jobs, then how are you going to say you're trying to be diverse?

Any final words of advice for companies that are focused on their DE&I hiring and policies?I think just be honest about what you're trying to fix.

You can't fix everything in DE&I in one go - it's too big a space. For example, we had a women in tech event in our London office last year in March, and I got talking to a few of the attendees, including a black female who has been in tech for the last few years.

She'd been training herself, and had been struggling for so long to get a job. She was talking about how age discrimination is so prevalent because she was in the 50+ group.

She asked me what we were doing about it and I said we're not, we haven't even talked about it yet. I just think within inclusivity, there's a long list of stuff that you can do to be inclusive, and you have to sometimes pick and choose what you're trying to address, but not make everyone else feel left out.

That means we might make a big effort to target female hiring within technology, for example, but it doesn't mean that we're not taking attraction of black people seriously.

What it might mean is that we say, right within technology, the data tells us that there's more males than females. We know the problem is gender balance, so we're going to target gender for this year, but next year we're going to look at getting the older population into work because we see the value in their skillset.

So I think really be clear about what you're trying to address, because otherwise you're just going to go to a hiring manager and they're just going to be thinking there’s too much here, I'll put this down and pick it up in a few years time. Whereas if you look at it and think here's how we fix that specific area it’s a much better conversation starter.