How to Become More Inclusive at Work: Stop Talking About It and Start Doing It

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Three months ago, I watched a perfectly competent manager stumble through a diversity and inclusion presentation that would've made a first-year uni student cringe. Not because he didn't care. Because he'd been thrown into the deep end with a PowerPoint deck someone downloaded from the internet and told to "make it engaging."

That's when it hit me—we're doing inclusion all wrong in Australian workplaces.

After fifteen years consulting across industries from mining to finance, I've seen enough "inclusion initiatives" to fill Suncorp Stadium. Most fail spectacularly. Not because people don't want inclusive workplaces, but because we're treating symptoms instead of causes.

The Real Problem Nobody Wants to Admit

Here's my controversial take: most inclusion programs are performative theatre designed to tick compliance boxes rather than create genuine change. Harsh? Maybe. True? Absolutely.

I've sat through countless workshops where well-meaning HR departments wheel out the same tired statistics about diverse teams being 35% more profitable (a McKinsey study that's been quoted so often it's lost all meaning). Then everyone nods sagely, eats some morning tea, and goes back to their desks to continue exactly as before.

Real inclusion starts with understanding what actually makes people feel excluded. And it's rarely the obvious stuff.

What Inclusion Actually Looks Like

Last year, I worked with a construction company in Perth where the site foreman—a bloke who'd probably never heard the word "intersectionality" in his life—had the most inclusive team I'd ever seen. His secret? He remembered everyone's names. All of them. The Pakistani engineer, the Aboriginal apprentice, the female safety officer who'd transferred from Darwin.

That's it. Names.

When someone new joined, he'd write their name on his hard hat until he'd memorised it. When they achieved something, he'd use their name when praising them in front of others. When they messed up, he'd use their name when teaching them privately how to do it better.

Simple? Yes. Effective? Incredibly.

This same principle applies to emotional intelligence training—understanding people starts with seeing them as individuals, not categories.

Stop Measuring the Wrong Things

Most companies measure inclusion by counting demographics in their annual reports. Percentage of women in leadership. Number of Indigenous employees. Ratio of cultural backgrounds.

Wrong approach.

You want to measure inclusion? Ask these questions instead:

• Do people speak up in meetings without fear?
• Are ideas judged on merit regardless of who suggests them?
• Do employees from different backgrounds socialise together?
• When someone makes a mistake, is the response supportive or punitive?

I worked with a law firm in Sydney that was incredibly proud of their 50/50 gender split among partners. Looked fantastic on paper. Reality? The female partners barely spoke to each other and definitely didn't mentor junior women. They'd climbed the ladder by adopting masculine behaviours and saw other women as competition.

That's not inclusion. That's statistical manipulation.

The Communication Factor Everyone Ignores

Here's something that'll ruffle feathers: accent bias is alive and well in Australian workplaces. I've seen brilliant Indian IT professionals passed over for client-facing roles because someone in management was "concerned about communication."

Yet the same person who makes this decision probably can't understand half of what the tradie from Ipswich says when he's explaining the air conditioning problem.

The solution isn't accent neutralisation classes (yes, these exist, and yes, they're as problematic as they sound). It's teaching everyone—regardless of background—effective communication skills that focus on clarity, empathy, and active listening.

Most communication problems in diverse workplaces aren't about accents or language barriers. They're about people not bothering to listen properly in the first place.

Why "Cultural Fit" Is Killing Your Progress

"Cultural fit" has become the polite way to exclude people without saying why. I hear it constantly:

"They're qualified, but I'm not sure they'd fit our culture." "Great candidate, but something about them doesn't feel right." "Technically competent, but would they get along with the team?"

Translation: they're different, and that makes me uncomfortable.

Here's a radical idea—maybe your culture needs disrupting. Maybe the reason your team thinks the same way, makes the same mistakes, and produces the same results year after year is because you keep hiring people who "fit."

The best teams I've worked with were combinations of personalities that shouldn't have worked on paper. The introverted analyst paired with the extroverted salesperson. The detail-oriented accountant working alongside the big-picture strategist. The recent graduate challenging the industry veteran.

Friction creates diamonds. Comfort creates mediocrity.

Small Changes, Big Impact

You don't need a million-dollar inclusion consultant to make meaningful change. Start with these:

Meeting Dynamics: Rotate who speaks first. Set a rule that everyone contributes before anyone speaks twice. Watch how quickly the loud voices learn to listen and the quiet voices learn to speak up.

Project Allocation: Stop giving the interesting assignments to the same people. Deliberately pair senior employees with junior ones from different backgrounds. Make it clear that mentoring across difference is part of their performance review.

Social Events: If every workplace social event revolves around alcohol, you're excluding people for religious, health, or personal reasons. Mix it up. Morning coffee walks. Lunch-and-learns. Team volunteering. Food trucks. Options.

Language Choices: "Guys" isn't gender-neutral, no matter how much you argue it is. "Team," "everyone," "folks"—plenty of alternatives exist. Small word changes signal big mindset shifts.

Feedback Culture: Create structured ways for people to give upward feedback anonymously. Half the inclusion problems I see stem from managers who have no idea their behaviour is exclusionary.

The Leadership Reality Check

I'll be blunt—if your leadership team looks like they all shop at the same David Jones store and holiday in the same Noosa resorts, your inclusion efforts are doomed. You cannot create what you cannot imagine, and you cannot imagine what you've never experienced.

This doesn't mean quotas or tokenism. It means deliberately expanding your leadership pipeline to include people who don't naturally gravitate toward the C-suite because the C-suite has never looked like them.

Getting Past the Guilt and Defensiveness

Here's where I lose some people. True inclusion requires acknowledging that some groups have had advantages others haven't. This makes people defensive, especially when they've worked hard for their success.

But acknowledging systemic advantages doesn't diminish individual effort. It just means recognising that your marathon had some downhill sections while others ran uphill into headwinds.

Once you get past the defensiveness, you can start having real conversations about levelling the playing field. Not by handicapping anyone, but by removing unnecessary obstacles for others.

The Business Case (Since You Asked)

Fine, you want numbers? Companies with inclusive cultures have 2.3 times higher cash flow per employee. Their teams are 87% better at making decisions. Employee turnover drops by 40%.

But here's the thing—if you're only pursuing inclusion for profit margins, you're missing the point entirely. The business benefits are a byproduct, not the goal.

The goal is creating workplaces where everyone can do their best work without having to code-switch, mask their identity, or navigate unnecessary barriers that have nothing to do with job performance.

What Actually Works

After years of trial and error, here's what I've seen succeed:

Reverse Mentoring: Pair senior executives with junior employees from different backgrounds. Not for career advice—for perspective. Let the 23-year-old Afghan-Australian graduate explain TikTok marketing to the 55-year-old Anglo-Saxon director. Both learn.

Inclusive Decision-Making: Before making significant decisions, ask: "Who's not in this room who should be?" Then get them there, literally or figuratively.

Story Sharing: Create safe spaces for people to share their experiences without having to educate or justify. Amazing what happens when the guy from rural Queensland realises he has more in common with the woman from refugee background than he thought.

Competency-Based Everything: Strip identifying information from resumes during initial screening. Focus on skills, results, and potential rather than schools, suburbs, or surnames.

The Hard Truth About Change

Inclusion isn't a destination you arrive at after a quarterly training session. It's an ongoing practice that requires constant attention, like fitness or relationship maintenance.

Some days you'll get it right. Some days you'll step in it spectacularly. The difference between inclusive organisations and performative ones is what happens after the mistake. Do you learn and adjust, or do you defensive and deflect?

Moving Forward

Stop waiting for the perfect inclusion strategy to fall from the sky. Start with what you can control—your own behaviour, your team's dynamics, your department's practices.

Pay attention to who speaks in meetings and who doesn't. Notice whose ideas get credited and whose get forgotten. Watch who gets invited to informal conversations and who gets left out.

Then do something about it.

Because at the end of the day, inclusion isn't about being nice or politically correct. It's about creating environments where everyone can contribute their best work without having to overcome unnecessary barriers.

And in a competitive market where talent is scarce and customer bases are increasingly diverse, that's not just the right thing to do.

It's the smart thing to do.

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