Case study
Title of the case study: Realizing greater gender, age, cultural identity, personality, and skills diversity (companies-young people relationship for enabling diversity in society and workplace)
(Source: https://embracedifference.ert.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/ERT_embracing_difference_V26-1.pdf)

Description of the case study: Everyone has a talent. Inclusion & Diversity are about creating the right environment and conditions for ALL young people to reach their full potential. We must weave Inclusion & Diversity (I&D) fully into the fabric of our future. As digital advancements accelerate and sustainability climbs the agenda, our communities will need to access the full range of young talents from across the entire spectrum of society. A strong cooperation between companies (employers) and young people will further contribute to a social cohesion.
Case Study:
‘’Inclusion & Diversity (I&D) are key contributors to our corporate success. In 2005, Deutsche Telekom was the first international company based in Germany to have a group-wide diversity policy covering all six core dimensions: gender, age, origin/culture, religion, sexual orientation, and disability.
‘’We want to go further in 2020 with a renewed strategy and management commitment for bringing more gender, age, cultural identity, personality, and skills diversity into our leadership teams.‘’
We implemented various formats to fight Unconscious Bias (including online workshops and e-learning) and hosted the 10th German Diverse City conference in our Bonn Headquarters. We also created opportunities for increasing women in our leadership (a 30% commitment) and in general (30% in our talent programme, 40% in our trainee ‘’programme’’).
Developing guidelines on making presentations inclusive for people with special needs, increasing the number of video transmissions with sign language and providing barrier-free workplaces are a few examples of how we support our colleagues with disabilities. We have learned that key factors for success include strong top leadership commitment, legal and structural changes and a holistic approach that encompasses the whole employee lifecycle.
Widespread communication and marketing campaigning, strategic industry partnerships and membership of relevant advocacy groups have all proved essential for increasing I&D. Last but not least, the growing interest and investment of our young people to drive diversity further via networks and communities have been critical to our success. In addition to collectively meeting our global inclusion and diversity (I&D) aspirations and to effectively cascade and build awareness about I&D and inclusive leadership capabilities, we wanted to truly embrace the cultural diversity.
We decided to build and work with a global community of more than 80 local I&D ambassadors, who embrace their ambassador role by working with their leadership teams and help them understand and respond to local I&D opportunities and requirements. The I&D ambassadors also help drive I&D action plans in their local markets.
We built a strong I&D ambassador community through an internal hiring process. We put out a call-to-action for volunteers to apply and, after an interview process, they were selected based on their skills, competences, and overall potential. We then designed common processes for all I&D ambassadors across all our operating companies. We built an I&D toolkit specifically for our ambassadors to use with their leadership teams to assess and address I&D opportunities and requirements in their countries.
We have built, trained, and are now working very closely with a global community of more than 80 local I&D ambassadors. The I&D ambassadors have worked with their leadership teams and helped them to create, in addition to our global I&D aspirations, local I&D action plans to respond to local I&D opportunities and requirements. At year-end 2019, the local I&D ambassadors had generated more than 170 I&D projects…..’’
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