Last week, I was wishing you a Happy New Year, and this week, I’ll be wishing you a Happy Lunar New Year or Chinese New Year, which falls on the 10th and 11th of February 2024! We’ll be ushering in the year of the wood Dragon according to the Chinese zodiac calendar.
As a proud Malaysian-Chinese, I’ve always loved sharing about our customs, traditions, and culture. If you want to hear more about how I celebrate, read my post on LinkedIn!
I have always loved the first few months at the start of the year, everyone usually comes back full of life and joy, and we go from one major celebration to another which gives me so much joy.
So it’s only apt that this week, I focus on inclusion, and how inclusivity matters. I know it’s 2024, and we should really expect this as part of our everyday routine, but sadly, it is not.
I was lucky enough to attend a Melbourne Recruitment Meet-Up last week, and heard from a panel of amazing women. Dr Morley Muse (Co-Founder and Director of iSTEM), Natalie Flynn (Founder and CEO of Equidi) and Mary Beth-Hosking (CEO of VIC ICT For Women) came together to talk about the role of DEI in 2024 and offer their perspectives and forecasts.
As they were sharing their perspectives and stories, what some challenges they’ve experience themselves as women in the workplace (think engineering, construction, technology, and infrastructure), there were audible gasps from the male audiences and much nodding of heads from the female audiences. The audience were completely engaged and enraptured to hear more, so much so that you could almost hear a pin drop in that room.
Some key takeaways from me:
- When the highly anticipated WGEA gender pay report comes out at the end of February, there’s going to be a potential increase in tough conversations from the workforce that internal Talent and wider P&C team members are going to have to navigate.
Is your team ready? Does your organisation have a readiness plan? - When companies are starting to mandate office returns, are they truly being flexible and caring to their employees? What are the potential impacts to employees who are parents?
- As women, if you want to get ahead in your career, it’s not only critical that you have to do your job well, but equally important to seek out the right mentor, coach, and champion from the senior stakeholder team to support your career development.
So as professionals who work in the People & Talent industry, and as leaders in our business (and I don’t necessarily mean people leaders), what are we doing to influence key decision makers in our teams, departments, and organisations to support Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) matters?
I had a wonderful conversation with a senior executive leader this week, where they challenged me to present more female candidates for senior roles in their department. Wanting to challenge the why around their ‘need’ and trying to understand if they were doing it for the sake of meeting a quota or for a diversity hire, I was pleasantly surprised that it was their strong and true belief that they needed better diversity of thought, and they were tired of the decisions made from an all white, middle-aged male group (themselves being one), and thoroughly see the value in having people from different backgrounds and dynamics in their team.
That was something that I could get behind, and I’m so proud to be working with an individual like them.
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