A Learning Journey
by Wendy Schlett & Bryanna Lee
As a learning-focused company with a culture of curiosity and human flourishing, Foresight Management has historically sought to build teams with diverse skillsets. The office halls are lined with information about each employee, ranging from their top 5 Clifton-Strengths and Enneagram numbers to their worst fears and favorite condiments. Foresight clearly focuses on celebrating our differences and providing varied support and opportunities for each person’s unique skillsets.
Foresight defined its values and culture early on in its existence. Our mission statement highlights and defines individual vitality as follows:
The individual well-being of our team members directly impacts our ability to achieve greatness. Each member of our team will be treated with respect, dignity, and will be empowered to make an impact on our company. Our team members will be given opportunities for self-improvement, learning, and will become increasingly self-aware and aware of others. Our teammates will have real autonomy over various aspects of their work and be given the freedom to create and innovate in their own ways. Our environment will enable team members to pursue greatness at their individual role as we collectively pursue excellence, celebrate success, and foster healthy accountability.
Guided by this core principle, an internal volunteer team was formed in February of 2021 to expand our knowledge of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). After conducting research and exploring conversations around DEI, the team began by listening to each volunteer’s reasons for joining the effort, identifying our “why,” and collecting resources to ensure that Foresight was fostering inclusive spaces and welcoming a truly diverse workforce.
Diversity Defined
Unpacking and understanding common concepts and language was a vital first step. For each part of the acronym, the team defined five important terms that would become a consistent foundation to build upon:
Diversity: Traits or characteristics of an individual. The presence of "difference" in your organization.
Equity: Involves offering consistent and fair opportunities across all dimensions of employment. Diverse workforces require ensuring demographics aren't treated differently regarding opportunities, compensation, or representation.
Inclusion: Behaviors that ensure the team feels welcomed. It's about embracing diversity at work. The numerous benefits of a diverse workforce can only actualize if all employee demographics are treated fairly and given the chance to show up as their authentic selves, differences and all.
Justice: Every team member deserves equal economic and social opportunities irrespective of race, gender, political beliefs, or religion.
Belonging: The feeling of security and support when there is a sense of acceptance, inclusion, and identity for a member of a certain group.
Defining these five key concepts highlighted the need to not only commit to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also to intentionally incorporate justice and belonging into our work. Thus, the small team of dedicated individuals became the JEDI&B team.
Diversity Dimensions
With our core principle of individual vitality and our definitions of JEDI&B outlined, we sought to explore best practices by benchmarking organizations’ initiatives and successes. This research helped us define Measurable Dimensions of Diversity, which will be used to create meaningful measures of progress and guide our future directions.
MEASURABLE DIMENSIONS OF DIVERSITY
These measures helped inform a three part survey that we conducted in the Fall of 2021 to better understand Foresight’s current baseline on JEDI&B. The results of the three surveys are currently being processed by the voluntary JEDI&B team and will be shared with Leadership and the entire Foresight team in the second quarter of 2022.
Our Future
We are doing our best to create and maintain safe spaces as we learn and grow with our teammates. The experience of sharing our initial status and the emphasis on safe spaces for all conversations has encouraged more of our Foresight Team members to join the discussion. Each JEDI&B volunteer brings an impactful perspective to the table and plays a valuable role in creating and accomplishing meaningful goals. One main future goal for JEDI&B is to develop a system, process, and approach to how we engage in this work internally. Eventually, we hope to share this process and approach with our clients so that others can benefit from our learning journey.
We look forward to working with this amazing team of big-hearted professionals who are willing to take action on Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging. This is the first expression of our work, and it’s only the beginning. We hope to continue developing and sharing our experiences, opportunities, processes, approaches, and solutions to doing Good… Better!