DIVERSITY
Diversity and inclusion in Canada’s mobility landscape
Following her insightful presentation at the Canadian Employee Relocation Council’s autumn conference, Mark E Johnson caught up with Tricia Cochran, Crown World Mobility’s director of client services for North America, to discuss diversity in Canada’s global mobility sector.
D
iversity and inclusion are no longer tickboxes on a list of corporate social responsibility requirements. For many of today’s businesses, they’re key drivers of success, and
a strong diversity policy is a means of accessing the right talent for the job. Following her presentation at last autumn’s Canadian Employee
Relocation Council (CERC) conference, I asked Crown World Mobility’s director of client services for North America, Tricia Cochran, for her perspective on diversity and inclusion in Canada’s mobility sector. While diversity and inclusion are not new issues in the workplace,
they are gaining traction, and what that means on a corporate level is changing. “Diversity and inclusion have always been there,” said Ms
Cochran. “In the past, it used almost to be about assimilation. We didn’t want to embrace differences, we wanted everybody to be the same. Over the years, having highly diverse teams has become more critical. It’s important for us to include all of the skillsets from the various different levels of the organisation, and to make
sure that we’re not excluding talent by making assumptions based on any kind of diversity issue, whether it be visible or non-visible.” Identifying non-visible diversity issues is an important part
of the process. “There are a couple of different ways of looking at diversity,” said Tricia Cochran. “We have the visible definition, which is generation, gender, race, geography and disability. Then we have the non-visible definition, which is sexual orientation, religion, culture, what their various different levels of experience are, or people in non-traditional roles.” As a non-traditional role, she gave the example of a female CEO of
a mining company. “We would still, to this day, think ‘oh, a woman’.” Ms Cochran characterised clients’ policies in the field as occupying
a wide spectrum. “There’s a band going from the left side – where we base our decisions on skills regardless of differences, where we really don’t acknowledge the fact that there may be concerns surrounding diversity and inclusion – right to the opposite end of the spectrum, where diversity’s embraced, vetted and measured within an organisation. “So you get organisations like Deloitte, where they fully embrace
28 | Re:locate | Canada Spring 2016
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