DIVERSITY
Putting support in place Drilling down to how that plays out in practice, Ms Cochran said, “From a relocation perspective, policies that we need to look at would be those addressing things like single parents with child- custody requirements, dual-career families, same-gender partners, and employees with eldercare requirements. “We need to equip employees’ families with cultural, language
and daily-living support. So those would be examples of the kinds of thing we need to keep in mind when we’re doing assignment preparation. “When we look, for example, at assignees in a same-gender
partnership, we need to make sure that we’re abiding by local immigration laws in the destination location regarding sexual orientation, and we need to provide cultural and security briefings.” Immigration isn’t where it stops, however. “We need to provide
diversity and inclusion training to the host location manager where, perhaps, they might be less experienced with diversity,” said Tricia Cochran. “We need to include wording on forms to raise awareness of support for any non-visible diversity issues for employees. “And then we need to make sure that we are supportive of those
diversity – you can see it at all levels, and there are diverse teams working together that are making a true difference to how effective and agile the company is. “At the other end of the spectrum, you get organisations that are
still quite male-dominated, where we still don’t see the presence of women at board level. And it’s important to recognise those, given that more than half the students in business schools are women, and that engineering is coming way up in terms of female graduates. “It’s vital that those talents are recognised, and that we’re not
putting that glass ceiling in place where we think that this person can’t go on an assignment because she has children or that person may not work as hard because she’s got to get home and look after the kids. Measures have to be put in place so that we’re not putting up those invisible barriers that prevent high-performance teams from really reaching their level of excellence.” This, said Tricia Cochran, must be reflected in mobility policy,
with benefits that enable everyone to be considered for assignment, not just a narrow slice of an organisation’s workforce representing the most ‘convenient’ talent.
assignees, that they have networks to work within, and that we keep them connected in terms of webinars and Skype and those kinds of things.” Ms Cochran said that firms needed better data, both on women
who had been sent out on assignment and on those who had rejected moves because they weren’t properly accommodated. Giving an example of where a non-inclusive outlook might shut
down options as to who could go on assignment, she pointed out that there was often an assumption that younger employees were unready, but that, as Millennials now constituted half the talent pool, this view must be challenged. Diversity and inclusion are in a very different place from where
they were a few years ago, but, while Canada is by nature quite a liberal society, Tricia Cochran believes there’s room for growth. “Canada tends to be quite an inclusive culture to begin with, but
there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done from a corporate perspective in terms of truly valuing employees for what their contribution is going to be,” she told me.
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