Why Care? #18: Emma Codd - Everyday Experiences
“You would assume that because someone is in a virtual workplace that [non-inclusive behaviours] wouldn’t happen. Well forget it. Over 50% of the women that we spoke to said yes: in the past year they had experienced non-inclusive behaviours, and that was worse for women of colour and worse for LGBTQ+ women.”
In Episode 18 of the ‘Why Care?’ podcast, I am joined by Emma Codd, Global Inclusion Leader at Deloitte, to discuss organisational culture change policies, the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on women in the workplace, the stigma around mental health at work, and the importance of inclusive leadership.
Emma started her career as a researcher for a corporate investigation and risk consultancy. She joined Deloitte in 1997 with the intention of only staying for a few years. Nearly 25 years later she is still there, loving her contribution as their head of global DEI strategy.
To start our discussion, I ask Emma to reflect on the changes she has seen in both gender equality and the approach to it over the span of her career. She shares that she has noticed that the most important thing is the everyday culture of organisations, because ultimately a poor culture is what makes employees leave. The culture change programmes Deloitte undertake have the unique challenge of spanning over 160 countries, so the internal research and reporting on workplace culture has to be detailed and considered.
It is thanks to this detailed internal research that Deloitte could monitor the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on its workforce. Emma found the effects it had on women to be staggering, with a 35% drop in wellbeing amongst female employees compared to pre-pandemic. Emma then shares the reasons for this and how this happened during remote/hybrid working. She explains that despite the pandemic “levelling us” and many people experiencing mental health problems, a stigma towards mental health still exists in the workplace that needs to be addressed.
We close the conversation talking about Emma’s impactful Deloitte video campaigns and how the key to their success was intersectional storytelling that was presented in short, easy to understand and to digest ways.
Links:
For more from Emma Codd find her on Twitter at @emmajcodd and LinkedIn at Emma Codd
For more from Deloitte visit https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/
Deloitte Video Campaigns:
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Transcript
Emma Codd 00:00
It's like going back to inclusion and the importance of D&I in an organisation. It's one thing for someone to talk about it and say this is really important, but you will only judge it based on what you experience and that old adage, people don't leave an employer, they leave a leader. And so to me, much of this comes back to how we as leaders lead.
Nadia Nagamootoo 00:24
Hi, my name is Nadia Nagamootoo, Business psychologist, coach, speaker and founder of Avenir consulting, which creates organisational growth and success via inclusion and diversity. We've been discussing the benefits that diversity brings to company's bottom line performance for decades with more and more evidence, but there are so many questions organisations still have about how to achieve it. How do you create a culture where people feel valued for their uniqueness and the qualities they bring? I believe it's crucial to the future success and sustainability every organisation that they find the answer to this question to make sure that each employee is not only supported but also appreciated. With this podcast, I aim to get some of the key challenges to creating inclusive workplaces out in the open and start uncovering the solutions to embracing a culture that cares for everyone. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most inspiring people in different countries and across industries who are pushing the boundaries on inclusion and diversity in the workplace, from topics such as parenting in the workplace, ethnicity, age, gender, mental health, and all things inclusion. I want to create a movement to change society through sharing life experiences, and creating more empathy and connection. Why care? I believe that once we have organisations and societies that accept and value everyone for who they are, we become healthier, happier and better in our roles both inside and outside work.
Hello, and welcome to episode 18 of my Why Care Podcast. My name is Nadia Nagamootoo and I am your host. In this episode, I'm absolutely honored to speak to the incredible Emma Codd, Global Inclusion leader for professional services firm Deloitte.
Emma is leading on Deloitte global inclusion strategy, and she's led the organization's award-winning culture change programme on respect and inclusion. She has championed diversity and inclusion over many years, both within her own organisation and through external bodies such as leaders acting as change agents who lead the change board. Emma is also an advocate for workplace mental health and has helped to establish the global business collaboration on better workplace mental health, of which Deloitte is a founding partner. The number of research reports and impactful campaigns that had his name against them is too many to mention. But one thing I know is that they're all creating powerful new and much needed conversations in the world. We cover a breadth of DEI topics, including women's experiences in the workplace during the pandemic, the deteriorating state and stigma of mental health, the challenges of hybrid working millennials and inclusive leadership. Enjoy.
Emma, it's fantastic to have you on the Why care podcast and fantastic to see you again, our paths have crossed so many times at various points in our life. So lovely to see you.
Emma Codd 03:09
And you too. Thanks for having me.
Nadia Nagamootoo 00:24
I've been overwhelmed, to be honest in talking to you, because there are so many places we can take this conversation. And when I was obviously stalking you as a result of knowing that I needed to speak to you, I thought, gosh, where do we start? And I think really, if we could just start maybe at the point of just understanding why diversity, equity, and inclusion, why did you choose that as a career path?
Emma Codd 03:35
Thanks, there is quite a lot we could cover. But that's because I think I'm a fixer and a problem solver. And actually, I never chose D&I as a career path, it was actually thanks to an amazing sponsor I had that I ended up doing this work. So, history-wise, I will not bore you endlessly with my career, but I actually graduated from university, went into work and became a researcher for a corporate investigation and risk consultancy. And that was my passion and my career. So that's what I really wanted to do, it is basically helping clients, working with them to make sure that they mitigated any risks associated with investing in new markets, or all of those sorts of things. And then I joined Deloitte in 97, with the intent of only ever staying there for three years, and that was as a senior manager, and then the rest is history. So I became a partner in early 2000s. And then in 2013, our then CEO David Sproul, I got a call from his PA saying, can you come and see David, he'd like to talk to you? I being me instantly, for some strange reason, I thought I was being fired. I have no idea why.
Nadia Nagamootoo 04:41
I thought you were gonna say that.
Emma Codd 04:43
No, I genuinely thought I was being fired. And there is no rationale for that, I was actually quite a high performer and doing really well, but the usual sort of imposter syndrome and everything else. Normally, my glass is half full, but on this particular day, it clearly was half empty. I went to see him, and he said, you know, I'd like you to join my executive team. So the executive in Deloitte is effectively like a corporate board. So at that stage, it was around 14 people who basically ran the firm. And he said, I'd like you to become my managing partner for talent. Now, I had no background in HR, no background in D&I, my only experience would have been, I'd run or I've been sponsoring partner of a women's network for about six years. Prior to that it was established by a fellow partner, Sharon Thorne, she established a load of networks when she was managing partner of talent. She's actually a real sponsor of mine as well. So, I've done that. I just liked people and my team was diverse was very engaged. So that's how I fell into it. Now the talent role is far wider than D&I. The talent role was really everything for people in our organisation, and the organisation in the UK at that stage was about 18,000 people spread across United Kingdom. And we do all the usual stuff you'd expect professional services to do. For me, one of the critical things that we needed to sort out actually was gender balance. And we had a real challenge around that. And David was well aware of that. I think that's why he put me in the role. And so that's where the passion started, that was listening to our people, it was looking at data, it was working out where our challenges were, and then effectively embarking on what became a big culture change programme, along with, tearing up a lot of the ways we had done things. I had been willing to do that with his support. So that role came to an end when David's leadership term came to an end back in 2019. I was just privileged to be given a new role, which was a Global Inclusion leader. So, I now work very closely with the global organisations’ leadership. And I'm really responsible for our D&I global strategy. So that's 160 countries around the world, 320,000 plus people with a lot to do. So where does the passion also come from? Well, because I've spent a lot of my career being in a minority. I've experienced all sorts of things as I've come up through my various workplaces, and I just wanted to do something to change that, it sounds very corny, but I don't want my children to. I have two daughters who are 12, we often talk about the experiences at work, and they're getting to that age now where they want to understand more, and I don't want them to have unnecessary, ridiculous challenges that just should not be there today. So that's where the passion comes from. I think at heart I'm a fixer, and a problem solver. And it is a problem that needs solving.
Nadia Nagamootoo 07:38
It is and it's still a process. I'm interested in this latest report that Deloitte just released earlier this year. So, the women at work report, can you tell me just how this journey seems? How the work you've been doing even 10 years ago and 15 years ago in the space of gender inclusion has evolved? And what does this latest report tell us?
Emma Codd 08:00
Yeah, and that's a really good question. I have a personal view on gender balance and lack of progress. I am a fan of gender pay gap reporting. I think that was a good idea. It's a blunt instrument, and it will take a long time to fix some of the challenges we have. I think, from my perspective of where I always came from on this, when I started as Managing Partner, the talent role was that really, it was about everyday culture. This was about what we experience there and it was also about the way we make decisions as an organisation, it was on that whole thing about why do we need promotional panels? Why do we need to put somebody in front of a panel of however many people that don't know them, that may not be particularly diverse? Why do we need to do that? So, there were processes that we needed to challenge and look at, things that we just always done because they seemed like the right thing to do, that may not be the best thing to do from a D&I perspective. But to me, the fundamental thing was our everyday experiences. You can have an organization that says one thing, it can have all the best policies in the world, but whether people avail themselves of that, and it was like when we tackled what we call agile working, but flexible working, back in 2014, that was a massive issue for us. There were two primary reasons that women were leaving our organisation. The first one was work-life balance.
The second one was culture. And the reality was, it was all culture, because we had policies, we had the same policies everyone else would have. The reality was people didn't feel that they could avail themselves of those policies, because they thought they'd be judged. And they thought that they'd have to do the walk of shame five o'clock in the evening, and that people would look upon them, in not necessarily such a positive way. There'd be those throwaway comments, or you've come in today, those sorts of things that meant that people just thought, Well, why would I do this, I'd might as well just go somewhere else where maybe I will be more accepted or dropped out of the workplace completely. And that whole every day, culture became this real thing for David, and for David and I, we sort of rebadged this as respect and inclusion. We made it all about respect for others. Now, translating that on into my current role and the report, one of the things that we really wanted to do in this report, actually, we first started talking about it before the pandemic, we wanted to do a piece of research, we wanted to try and show that the things that were really challenging to underrepresented minorities are actually the everyday cultural aspects.
So, I think lots of people have gone down the road of training and unconscious bias, all sorts of things. But actually, we all know that that's not necessarily as impactful as we would like it to be. So, the whole purpose of this report was really to ask women because it's about women, and to do it through an intersectional lens. So, we looked at an experience for women of colour and LGBT+ women as well. We wanted to have a global look, so we looked at 10 countries around the world, and we asked 5000 women who were in the workplace today. Well, actually, some of them probably aren't given some of the responses, but we wanted to ask them about their everyday experience. And so that included questions around support you felt you had with judgments that you felt you'd been given if you wanted to work in a particular way, and this included non-inclusive behaviours, so typically, microaggressions. This was during the pandemic, so we wanted to do this whole research study, it was less around policies, because most employers have these policies, we wanted to know if you take them up. If not, why not? What's the everyday experience you have from your leader? What about those around you? Then the pandemic happens, so we pause that piece of research for a bit, we did a poll survey, in the meantime, where we spoke to around 500 women, actually, the whole survey results are very similar to these results, and they're depressing. And what we did from this Women at Work research was that we basically decided to knit in questions that we could compare before the pandemic and during the pandemic.
The findings are actually not surprising because, look, I am lucky, I am a leader of a really supportive workplace, I would not be anywhere else, it’s just everything about my organisation, I have huge respect for everything that we do. But even I struggled. I always used to say that it was just about making it all work before the pandemic and then I went to basically what felt like barely hanging on by a thread, and that was due to circumstances in my life at home. So this research and some of the findings are so shocking. So, you have the perfect storm of women having more responsibility, like me in the home. My entire support network pretty much fell away on day one of the pandemic, and at the same time, the workload has massively increased as well. One of the impacts of that is that women's optimism has dramatically decreased, worryingly around a quarter of the women that we spoke to said that they were thinking of dropping out of the workforce entirely and then 50% said, I'm probably going to change career in the next two years. So, these are all these amazing women that we've invested in that because of what they've gone through basically just saying, look, I can't do this, and why can't they do it? Well, because the impact on their mental health has been catastrophic.
So mental health and well-being were one of the largest drops we saw pre and during pandemic. So, 35 percentage point drop in those women that said, their health and well-being was good, or very good, and then it nosedived. And then the knock-on effect on that is motivation. You've got women saying, Look, I feel overwhelmed, I feel judged on presenteeism, about the number of hours I'm online, and that my employer hasn't supported me enough. And then finally, you've got those non-inclusive behaviours. You would assume that because someone was in a virtual workplace, that wouldn't happen. Well, forget it, because over 50% of the women that we spoke to, said in the last year, yes, they had experienced non-inclusive behaviors, and that was worse for women of colour and for LGBT plus women. So you're sort of battling with this world, that this stuff that's going on, you've got increased workload, you've got increased responsibilities, and then you've got people making comments or doing things that basically undermine and have adverse impact.
Nadia Nagamootoo 14:13
Have you got any examples of that? Because I'm trying to understand through a virtual setting, is it that they're not invited to meetings?
Emma Codd 14:21
It's that, it's exclusion, it's demeaning comments, it's those throwaway comments. So, to give you an example, these experiences range from being addressed in an unprofessional disrespectful way to being belittled by senior comments, and those throwaway comments are intended often. Often microaggressions are unintentional, due to a lack of education or lack of awareness, but it's those throwaway comments that just make you feel rubbish and they typically are in front of other people. These are typically unwanted comments or jokes of a sexual nature and disparaging belittling comments about gender, and then for some who are physically present, there was unwanted physical contact. The really worrying thing is that most of the women that we spoke to, so over two-thirds did not report those behaviours. And then when we asked them why they didn't report them, the top reason was well, why would I, because it will adversely impact my career. The second reason was around it doesn't feel big or serious enough, or it won't be taken seriously, which to me speaks to culture. So, there was hope from this report. The report did find a small number of companies, 4% of the women we spoke to worked for companies that we've called Gender Equality leaders, they were really amazing businesses. And each of those women that work for those gender equality leaders, they are all more committed, more engaged and they all believe their career is where it should be. They're very happy, they feel developed, and they feel invested in. And interestingly, when we looked at what do those companies have in common based on what the women told us, it's a mix of deeply embedded characteristics but then one of the most significant ones is an inclusive culture, where people actually walk the talk. So it isn't just someone senior saying, Yes, this is important but actually, the environment, and the culture all makes people believe, yes, this is important. So, the report was somewhat depressing, it told us a very stark picture. And you've obviously got the great resignation that's going on at the moment.
Nadia Nagamootoo 16:19
I'm interested in that, because one of the things that I was reading around the great resignation is that people who may have been subjected to microaggressions, or subtle acts of exclusion in the workplace, physically, are not wanting necessarily to go back to the office, to go back to that environment, and that they felt safer in the virtual context. So, they felt safer working from home. So actually, when organizations have said right now, we're all back to the office, actually, a lot of people are going, that's not a space I want to be in because I wasn't in a good place before the pandemic, I'm in a better place now. So, I'm interested because actually, what you found then, is that microaggression, things like exclusion have been present, virtually. Another reason for the great resignation is that actually, people are just saying, No, I can't take this at all, virtually in the office, neither this isn't for me, I need to step away from the workforce completely entirely. That's really worrying.
Emma Codd 17:12
It is and I think, look, I'm not a psychologist, I do a lot of work around mental health. But we've all gone through 18 months that hopefully we will never go through again. Many people have lost loved ones and the tragedy, the stress and the anxiety. I mean, I remember early stage of pandemic, I couldn't watch the news, I was so worried. So, my husband was my news filter, he was totally fine and happy to watch it he was data obsessed, so he was looking at it, but I couldn't watch it because I was so scared and frightened. And I am not a scared and frightened person, so, I think it changed all of us. And then I think it causes you to re-evaluate. If I was at an earlier stage in my career, if I didn't really love what I do and if I didn't really love the people I worked with, and the culture that I worked within, I would probably be one of those women that would be sitting there thinking, do you know what, I just don't want to do this. And I think it's things like the long hours culture, it's wellbeing, and it's the whole issue around mental health. At the moment, it is actually depressing, because we've talked about mental health consistently for 18 months, lots of people CEOs have been talking about it, that stigma still exists. And so, there are people making decisions, basically thinking, well, I can't share how I feel, I don't feel I can, I think I'll be judged if I do. So, therefore, actually, I'm going to think about a different life. You have women dropping out of the workforce entirely and you have women who are retraining, I think it's been a trigger. And then I think you've got the challenge of what we're going back into hybrid working, and hybrid working I always say it's potentially the most exciting thing. I mean, I battled for years to change the culture around agile working.
Nadia Nagamootoo 18:56
A lot of us, as so many organisations, in fact, the pandemic gave this opportunity, hasn't it, to say, well, it can work. All of this time we've been facing this brick wall going, No, no, I can't do that, we can't do it remotely, and then all of a sudden, it's forced organisations to shift and adapt.
Emma Codd 19:14
I agree. So now we're all going back into the new normal. I mean, I at the moment because my childcare fell away, I've just managed to find somebody that can come back in. So, I'm now working out how many days will I go in? So, I'm going to go in a couple of days. I'm actually going into the office tomorrow and I'm very excited about it. And that's going to work for me, but I think there's a lot of people that are concerned when should I go in? When's the right time? What about those water cooler moments? What about how I will be judged? So I think this is the time that we need such strong people leadership, we need to lead in a different way where we were all the same, so where we are all remote, it's almost like a bass setter. So, we're all there. We all have chaos going on behind us. We all have the dogs barking, the Amazon deliveries, all of that stuff. So that was the great leveler. Now we are going into a period where we could inadvertently end up with a layer of exclusion where you have people that don't feel comfortable. So, to your point, people that are scared, they don't want to come in because their life has changed, they have caring responsibilities. And I think in businesses, it's just one to really be careful about and manage. And then you've got the inclusive behaviours, your point around, the non-inclusive behaviours. The sad thing is they're happening, whether you're in person, or you're not in person, as we've seen, and people can still feel excluded, even if there is not a word or an action, but based on the fact that everyone else in the team is in and they're at home.
Nadia Nagamootoo 20:40
This is a fascinating conversation, because it's so current, it feels that leaders have had to work really hard. It's been a very steep learning curve over the last two years, right. So, they were leading in a certain way. And then all of a sudden, they had to lead a completely remote team and dispersed team. Now we're asking leaders to adapt again, to know how to lead effectively, a team that is half present half not and continually shifting around and moving. And how do we support leaders with this new challenge I suppose they're facing?
Emma Codd 21:16
That's, again, a really good question. And it's so difficult because we do a lot of leadership development at Deloitte, it's a big thing for us, and we have the amazing Deloitte University where you get to go and it's incredible. So a huge investment in that, I think it's getting back to a human form of leadership where we've had this level. And then if you think about it from a mental health perspective for example, it's how do you spot the signs when someone is struggling? And how do you do that sort of, are you okay? How to ask that? Well, it's through knowing somebody, it is through taking the time to understand their concerns, and from them trusting you to be able to open up that way. I'm not sure that's ever changed, that's the way I've always led. So, I've always wanted to know people that work in my team, I've always wanted to understand as much as they ever want to share with me where their concerns are, any challenges they have, and actually reach an understanding of how we're going to work. And that's what's really needed now, so it's leading with empathy and leading with authenticity. I am very open and I will share with my team when I've had a challenge, because I'm human and we all have them. And then I'll hopefully be able to share the solution. This is what worked for me, so everybody realizes well, if she's saying that, then it's actually okay for me to say that.
Now, there are also hints and tips, we did a lot of this at the start of the pandemic around virtual working, and we produced really useful sort of one pagers about this, and it now needs to be the same for when we virtually work. I think there are people that come up with great ideas that then go horribly wrong. So, I have a colleague that decided that for a particular meeting, where some were going to be virtual and some in person, those in person would be on their laptops, but then what you don't realise is that you can't do that when you're all in the same room, there's a real problem with the sound. I think much of it is down to when we were all in a room together, the quietest person in the room, it's making sure that they are given an opportunity, making sure everyone is included, and making sure there's an agenda. When you're having a meeting, make sure somebody knows what the meetings about, so they feel able if they want to prepare. So, I think it's just brought that need out more, but I do worry from a mental health perspective, where we are because we know many people have come out to this pandemic, having never experienced mental health before, and are now experiencing it.
Nadia Nagamootoo 23:45
And shocking, actually, I speak to many people that have said, how the pandemic has affected them from a mental health perspective, and their whole family. So has young people been so affected? I'm interested, actually, because you wrote an article about a year ago now about millennials and Gen Z being the number one priority from a mental health perspective, and to really focus particularly on those younger generations coming into the workplace. One year later, what's your latest thinking with regard specifically to this younger generation with mental health?
Emma Codd 24:19
It's really interesting because we have updated data on that. So that was from our millennial survey in 2020 in which we just published some updated data from this year's manual survey. And it's so interesting. I think generationally, it's impacted everyone. I am by no means a millennial, and I still have struggles, having never struggled before, I have struggled in the last year and a half. I was worried that people think oh, she's saying it's only millennials and Gen Z. No, it isn't, it's all of us and we've all gone through this.
Nadia Nagamootoo 24:49
But I think what's really interesting about your research, it's that intersectionality, isn't it? It's all well and a good thing. Yes, everyone will have suffered some form of mental health potentially and have some form of mental health issues, but for different reasons. So, you and I, for example, we’re both mothers, and we have certain caring responsibilities but even that's not going to mean that we have some common ground in terms of why we suffer different types of mental health. It is very similar. So, I like the fact that Deloitte has sort of just dug a little bit deeper into this particular group of people.
Emma Codd 25:20
And yes, we do this amazing big Millennials report and research every year with tens of thousands of millennials and generations Z’s or Gen Z's around the world. So last year was the first time we put mental health questions in there, we put them in before the pandemic, because mental health became a global priority for us from an inclusion perspective. So, it was just fortuitous that we had added them in. And the findings were, I think, as many people know, a staggeringly high number of millennials and generations Zed say they feel stressed or anxious all the time. Many don't report when they do feel that, when they take time off, they don't give the real reason and are not sharing with colleagues. All of those things causes stress, lots of different stresses, including work-life balance, and including inability to be one's true self in the workplace, as well as family welfare and health and all those things climate. Now this year, sadly, is not much different. Apart from the fact you've got more people who say that the pandemic has caused them to suffer from stress and anxiety, it's around the same numbers, around half of the many thousands we spoke to who said I feel stressed and anxious almost of the time. Around half said I feel increased stress because of the pandemic, top stresses were again, family welfare, health, job security. With what we've gone through, and really depressingly, again, despite all the talk of mental health, and last year and a half, you've got a large number, saying that when they have taken time off work for mental health reasons, they have given a totally different reason. You've got those that are feeling more stressed and anxious and they're typically not disclosing that to their employer. And then you've also got people that have never taken time off for stress anxiety, when we asked them, would you give the real reason around half said no, I wouldn't give the real reason. So you've got this challenge and that people are feeling more of this. We've had more talk about mental health than we probably ever had and yet people are still experiencing stigma or perceiving there to be stigma within the workplace. I have no doubt this is down to stigma. This is down to how you feel you'll be judged if you say, Look, I'm really struggling and I need help. It basically means people won't get signposted to the help they need and it means businesses don't understand the cost to them and the impact. You've got presenteeism, which in this context, is people turning up to work where they shouldn't be at work.
Emma Codd 27:47
I'm trying to understand then how is it that we're talking more about mental health and yet, because you would have thought that being more open about it and organizations having greater support from a mental health perspective would suggest that actually, this is an organization where it is okay for you to tell us and in fact, we encourage you and want to support you. Why is it then that we're still getting this issue with people covering with regard to their mental health issues? I think there are two ways, I think societal stigma is very ingrained and very hard. I think the workplace can change but I do think that's a challenge. And then honestly, Nadia, I think a big part of it is that you can have a leader saying all sorts of things but if what you experience from your leader is totally different. So that classic thing that I'll always often refer to, which is you get invited to an online yoga session or meditation session, which everyone joins in, and then you log off afterwards, you go into your email, and you've got an email from your leader saying, I need this by then. No please, thank you, there is no thought about what else you've got on, and that, to me is the issue. It's like going back to inclusion and the importance of D&I in an organisation, it's one thing for someone to talk about it and say this is really important, but you will only judge it based on what you experience.
There is that old adage, people don't leave an employer, they leave a leader. And so, to me, much of this comes back to how we as leaders lead and most senior people can say all they want but if you don't enable leaders to have a conversation... When we've just introduced this, or recently, a few months ago, we introduced a global baseline on mental health in every country where we operate, it's over 160 countries and it's just recognizing that actually many of us haven't talked about this before. So, let's educate, let's not just say right, you must go out and talk about it, let's educate so people understand. We have storytelling campaigns where so many of our people will share their stories, we have resources and we have these ‘how-to’ guides that we've prepared which are out there globally for everyone to see and they're amazing. One of them is how to talk about mental health because often you’re scared to even open that conversation, so we've decided that we need to educate our leaders, we need to communicate and then we need to measure. So, there are a number of things that we're doing consistently and our leaders are embracing this. We have so many people saying, I wanted to know more about this but I didn't know where to look, I didn't know there is so much out there. And so, we've sort of condensed into, right, here's what you need to know, here's what you need to understand, here's some stories and this is real but this is what we can all do, and it's been embraced. And so, I think a lot of this is taking the time to educate and to talk to people and to enable them to ask that question. Are you okay? And then to be able to respond accordingly, when someone says, actually, no, I'm not okay.
Nadia Nagamootoo 30:47
Yeah. What you just said there, it seems to me and just in summary of your role, and what it does, it feels like it's very much around the education piece, but also getting people's stories out there and allowing people to hear different perspectives of how other people live their lives, or what impacts them. I say this just because of the amazing campaign that you led earlier this year, so, there was the Can You See Me campaign, which really blew me away. To be honest, I was watching these short but beautifully put-together impactful stories of different people with such an intersectional lens. You've spoken about intersectionality quite a bit today, tell me a little bit more about that campaign, and why it was important for you to share these stories?
Emma Codd 31:34
So, the stories are an amalgam, the characters are played by actors with lived experience. So, Jackie is played by a trans woman and that was really important to us. They are an amalgam of a number of stories, and there were so many of these stories that we had gathered. And to me, it comes back to education and respect. Inclusion is a big global priority for us, it's the foundation of everything we're doing from a D&I perspective. And we actually created the films for ourselves to have something that our people could watch, and then have a conversation around and they could engage with. We know a lot of our clients are using them now as well, and we release them externally because actually, we got so many of our people who mentioned that these are so incredible and we should be releasing them. The purpose of them from my perspective, is that I wanted people to understand the impact that our words and actions have on others. You'll notice that all the way through the stories. It's all about the individuals experiences, with Alejandro and where he talks about, I can't tell you how many times I'm asked this, and it's each of those stories, it is so important. We wanted people just to sit back and think just for two or three minutes, and to walk in somebody else's shoes, and then to go back and watch them again and think about what could have happened differently. What could have been done differently that would have changed things?
It may just would have been positive. We then at the same time, created ways for people to have group conversations about this in a space where they feel they want to share. We're so proud of them. It's part of an ongoing campaign. So, we have Can You See Me, Do You Hear Me, which was our pride campaign in June. Again, storytelling, for me has always been a big thing. I engage with stories, I love stories, I listened to stories, we all do. We don't in my view listen to this training but we do engage on something like this, where we can see somebody else's life, we can understand their experiences, and understand what could have been different and what could have changed. So that will continue. So, watch this space, we've got plans for more of these. And then the final point for me is intersectionality, I wanted these films to show things through an intersectional lens. As you said earlier, you and I are both women, it's that sort of chart, you see where you've got what you see above the surface, the visible element. And then what you see below is so much more that makes us who we are, and just because we may both identify in one way, it doesn't mean we're the same and there may be common challenges we both have because of that. And so that was really important to us as well, it was that we brought out all these stories out through an intersectional lens as well.
Nadia Nagamootoo 30:47
One of them was Caterina story, I watched it a couple of times actually because that had the intersectional lens, which isn't always touched upon, which is a socio-economic background. So social mobility, and just that feeling of coming into an organisation, whether it's corporate, it's male-dominated, and feeling like justified or legitimate in being there because no one in your family has ever had a job like this before. And there was a microaggression or satellites of exclusion that was played out there where you only got this because if you tick those boxes, you're female, you're an ethnic minority, , I don't know what grated me when I heard that because I thought that this is tokenism. And I'm curious, how do we overcome that when we're trying to create diversity and create an inclusive organisation but to avoid the backlash of people feeling that it is just someone there because they tick those boxes?
Emma Codd 35:11
It's a massive challenge and I've had comments made to me, and there were so many people that had had comments like that. But for me a part of this, again, it comes back to culture, it comes back to basic equality and everybody being in an environment and having the processes in place where everyone can succeed. I think there will always be some people that will not change their views, and my view is that where you can't change them, you sort of want them frankly, anywhere within the organisation, but there will always be people like that. But equally, there will be people that really get this, that do see this as important and educating them. Someone once said to me, you've got the sort of people that just get it instinctively. You've got people that can be persuaded, and then you've got a smaller layer of people that can't and it's those people that can be persuaded, and it's bringing it back to a common-sense approach. And then I also think it's allyship, I think we have had a real focus on allyship.
Nadia Nagamootoo 36:09
Yes. Because you've had the other campaign, didn't you?
Emma Codd 36:12
‘Own up speak up’. Yes, that was really important to me. And that was, again, there's a line in there, which I love. Well, if there's poison in the water, there's poison in the water and that's what we need people to understand is that this is about everybody. This is not about box ticking and this is not about tokenism, this is about a level playing field for all, it's about a culture where everyone can thrive and it's about allyship. It's about people realizing that this is the right thing to do for various reasons. And it's down to all of us to take a stand where we see behaviour that's not keeping with our values, we need to call it out, where we see a process that we think is disadvantaging others, we need to call it out, we need to do something about it. And I think if you can get everybody to see that it is their responsibility, it's our responsibility as an organization, I think there will be progress. I think where it isn't tackled, is making it a CEO priority. I mean, it is in my organization, it's very clearly a CEO priority, global CEO priority and member firm's CEO priorities. It gets measured, what gets measured gets done, it gets reported on and I think that if it gets woven in, rather than, Oh, it's a programme here, a programme there, or let's push some people into roles because we need to fill some numbers, that’s so far from what it should be. So, I think there's a series of things, clear leadership is needed.
Nadia Nagamootoo 37:37
My goodness, MSO, clearly a massive systemic role that you have, where you've managed to weave all of this in and create globally, some incredible campaigns of mental health baseline, all of these wonderful videos that impact globally. I know now why you absolutely love your job. I could carry on speaking to you about so many other things, and maybe there'll be a part two of the Why Care with Emma Codd in the future but for now, if anyone's interested in getting hold of you on social media.
Emma Codd 38:11
Yeah, I'm on Twitter and I am also on my LinkedIn feed, I publish a lot of stuff, a lot of the links to the films, everything we do, basically, that we push out goes out for my LinkedIn as well.
Nadia Nagamootoo 38:25
Brilliant. Well, everything that Emma and I have spoken about today is going to be available on the show notes page, we will make sure that all of those websites and all the campaigns are going to be on there. So, it's Avenirconsultingservices.com under podcasts. Emma, I don't know what to say apart from huge thank you for your time, for sharing all of the amazing work and everything that we're putting out there in the public domain because it's helped every single organisation every single DEI practitioner. I for one can say how much I use the work that Deloitte puts out there and in everything that I do with the organisations and the clients that I have, so I am incredibly grateful and loved speaking to you. Thank you.
Emma Codd 39:00
It's a pleasure. Thanks, Nadia. That concludes episode 18 of The Why Care Podcast. I was so struck by the figures Emma quoted from her research around women dropping out of the workplace and the stigma associated with mental health. If you haven't had the opportunity to watch the videos related to her campaign, Stand Up Speak Up, and Can You See Me, the links are in the show notes together with the research reports referred to, do let me know and I know what you thought of today's show. You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram with the handle at Nadia Nagamootoo and Avenir consulting services. As always, I really appreciate your support of this podcast through leaving a review on whatever platform you're listening and spreading the word by sharing it with your friends and family. Huge thanks to Mauro Kenji for editing this podcast and Jon Rice for supporting with the show notes and getting it out there on social media.
