CIICPD 2023

everyday practices through inclusive measures. This allows the company to respect and appreciate diverse identities, experiences and talents, maximise full participation of every individual, actively and intentionally remove barriers in the involvement of groups with limited opportunities, and utilise workers’ diverse backgrounds, beliefs, identities, abilities or lifestyles. Inclusion, therefore, represents the highest level of diversity, allowing everyone to feel that they can bring their whole selves to work and not have to hide any part of their identity out of refusal or fear. Besides diversity and inclusion, progressive multinationals include equity into their strategies and goals, i.e. seek fair treatment and opportunities for everyone. Unlike equality, which includes applying the same conditions for everyone, equity takes into account disadvantages when adjusting the conditions to ensure access to the same opportunities for all. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) thus are not only becoming the core of multinational company strategies as motivational programmes for their employees, but also, and most importantly, are demanded by the highly diverse job market given the “war for talents” (Axelrod et al., 2001), aimed at attracting potential employees from underrepresented groups. There is a clear business for DEI, which numerous studies proved to be a key success factor for the development of companies. For example, diverse teams were found to increase a company’s growth potential by 45% and expansion potential by 70% (Hewlet et al., 2013). Gender diversity, i.e. increased women’s participation in various work sectors, increased GDP growth in Czechia by 7.8% (Hunt et al., 2018). Research also shows that DEI implementation leads to increased employee satisfaction up to three times and more than doubles the work-life balance factor of employees (Krentz et al., 2021). The main challenge DEI programmes face on their way to creating inclusive environments are the omnipresent unconscious cognitive biases. Automatically triggered human reactions occurring frequently in a workplace when facing deviation from the unknown or unexpected. Indeed, as instincts allow for quick assessments of situations and people, behavioural research (Agarwal, 2020) observes cognitive biases to be responsible for up to 95% of human reactions, leaving about the remaining 5% of information to be processed consciously and rationally. These instincts have indisputable advantages for human survival in critical situations, as they help reduce and simplify the complexity of the surrounding world, allow for quick reactions and help to maintain stability. Unconscious biases, however, affect the ability to make fair and objective decisions. While being extremely difficult to capture in the workplace in everyday practice, they can lead to wrong judgements and limit the potential of a diverse workplace in the long run. They are also observed to intensify with age, within homogenous groups, under pressure, or in ambiguous, volatile and uncertain, that is to say VUCA settings. In order to create a real inclusive working environment, companies need to put effort into raising awareness of their employees. They need to make them familiar with behavioural science and help them develop conscious control over the principles of instinctive behaviours occurring in their workplace.

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