83: The building blocks of an inclusive organisation with Sushma Uthappa-Schwerdt

The Elephant in the Room

Shownotes:

Racism/casteism comes in various forms across the world, sometimes it is overt and sometimes it is coded. In either form it negatively impacts the life and life chances of millions of people who move to a different country to seek a better or more stable future. Sometimes it can break people and other times it makes them more resilient and more determined.

Did you know that Sweden is a country where every fourth resident(24.9) has a foreign background and every third (32.3) has at least one parent born abroad. But, does this diversity translate into a more inclusive country or workforce? Sweden’s recent election results are telling.

For Sushma, the experience of looking for employment at the start of her stay in Sweden was deeply disheartening. In her own words, “Recruitment bias (unconscious) has worked against me in 99 out of 100 job applications. That gives me 1 interview opportunity in 100+ submitted applications; where I check 100% (more or less) of the job requirements on the ad.”

Unfortunately, this is not unique to Sweden, or any one country. My own experiences in the UK, a couple of years back were similar if not worse. I survived but I am still smarting from the experience.

In addition to being the Head of Talent Acquisition, Northern Europe at Transcom, Sushma has also been involved in the local parliament in Lund since five years. She is determined to move the needle and contribute to building a fairer society.

In this episode we spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

👉🏾 Her experiences growing up in different parts of India and the world. The absence of a sense of belonging or affinity to any one culture

👉🏾 Her move to Sweden, and challenges she faced seeking work in the country

👉🏾 Diversity washing

👉🏾 The building blocks of an inclusive organisation

👉🏾 The need to dismantle decades old work practices

👉🏾 Bias free recruitment and the myth of average human being around which workplaces are designed

“But then when I was trying to look for a job again, just recently maybe about a year ago it was the same challenges. This time it was a hundred-odd positions that I'd applied to I only had three companies that reached out. And you're sitting there and you're thinking, is it better to be rejected, interviewed and rejected? Or is it better to not be seen at all? What is the lesser of the two evils, right? And I feel like I'd rather that companies met me and then if they didn't like me, did not continue with me in the process. But I don't get the opportunity to present myself, I wish we could do more. And I usually apply for roles where I know I could at least fit 80 to a 100 percent of what's written on the job ad” Sushma Uthappa-Schwerdt

Memorable passages from the podcast:

👉🏾 Thank you Sudha, I'm really glad to be a part of this and thanks for reaching out. I'm calling in from Sweden today, this is where I'm based, currently. A little background about myself, I was born in India, lived a little bit all over India. Everything from Chennai to Kashmir, Assam, Delhi, Mumbai. So we've travelled around a lot and also lived abroad quite a lot in my childhood in countries like Kenya and Sri Lanka, I've also lived in the US. The last 10 years I've been in Sweden.

👉🏾 So when it comes to my background and culture, that's a hard question, I would say, because, I am a mixture of all these people and all these places that I've been and lived in. So I don't have an association with a single culture or even belonging in that sense. The good and the bad. So yeah, that's a little bit about my background. Very short.

👉🏾 It's been about five months since I joined Transcom. I head up the talent acquisition space here, basically taking care of all things talent attraction and recruitment for the Northern European cluster. I've spent a good portion of my career, it's been about 18 years within talent acquisition. It's an area that I've stuck to for a long, long time because of my passion with recruiting and attracting people, changing people's careers and lives and also changing the shapes of organisations with diversity and diverse recruitment.

👉🏾 That's a good question. Diverse workforce, yes, we do have a diverse workforce. What I have found lacking is diverse workforce at all levels of the organisation, in all sectors of the society. I see that there's a huge work that needs to be done. So we're lacking the diversity at senior levels of management, mid-levels to senior levels of management, for example.

👉🏾 Yeah. I can imagine, it's not unique to Sweden. It's probably in most places, in most companies. But there's a lot of talk about it, so I hope we can start.

👉🏾 I think a lot of times companies they think that they can hire, a head of diversity, you know, ED&I head and then there's a lot of BIPOC marketing campaigns. This is not enough to secure diverse workforce and inclusive workforce I would say. I think organisations really need to sit and work, hands-on, on making sure that there is diversity in all levels of the organisation.

👉🏾 And the focus has been, I would say, a lot on gender. If I look at Sweden, it has been gender equality and gender diversity in that sense, but we need to go beyond that. Look at people of colour, ethnicity, race, we need to look at diverse abilities, LGBTQ+ communities, that we don't have in all levels, and when we don't have diverse workforce in all levels, we don't have diverse solutions. So a lot of the organisations don't have systems and infrastructure in place to cater to diverse workforce, because solutions have not been built by diverse workforce. So there's a gap that needs to be filled.

👉🏾 Yeah, for sure. I moved to Sweden about 10 years ago and I started my journey in applications, job applications. And I think I was a little naive to think that an MBA in India and a background with companies like Yahoo and Citibank would land me a job easily in Sweden. So there was a lot of naiveness in that, but very soon I learned that it does not matter what your background is. There's so many systematic biases in the recruitment process, which hindered me in getting a job. So 200 odd applications and zero interviews and this was about, 10 years ago.

👉🏾 It really broke me, the experience and it broke my confidence and I decided that I needed to move out of the country and move somewhere else. But as a last resort, I got an opportunity to intern with a bank, in Sweden and I had a three month internship opportunity. It was this foot in, that actually led me in getting a job at the bank and continuing my journey there and moving within the bank and the whole Ingka group family that's where I worked with. So that was great, so I was able to get that foot in.

👉🏾 But then when I was trying to look for a job again, just recently maybe about a year ago it was the same challenges. This time it was a hundred-odd positions that I'd applied to I only had three companies that reached out. And you're sitting there and you're thinking, is it better to be rejected, interviewed and rejected? Or is it better to not be seen at all? What is the lesser of the two evils, right? And I feel like I'd rather that companies met me and then if they didn't like me, did not continue with me in the process. But I don't get the opportunity to present myself, I wish we could do more. And I usually apply for roles where I know I could at least fit 80 to a 100 percent of what's written on the job ad

👉🏾 I think this is happening to me because of couple of reasons, so first of all, I'm in a non-niche segment, which means that you get hundreds of applications in these roles. Secondly, I'm trying to look of course for leadership-level positions, so I can head up the space or at least leadership level, manage teams.

👉🏾 Thirdly, I think most recruitment systems are biased and when I apply, my name is not a common name, people have a hard time associating, where does Sushma come from? You know, you don't click on it. So recruitment systems are designed in such a way that on the backend, when a recruiter receives an application, so that you apply for ahead of talent acquisition, the recruiter receives the application, the recruiter has to click on your name to open your application. So here you have the first unconscious bias sitting in, right? So when you have well-known names or easily recognised names versus Sushma, which you don't recognise, you have a tendency to be filtered away unconsciously, I don't think it's a very conscious bias.

👉🏾 So I don't think anybody's looking at my application at the first stage itself. So, I think this is where we need to start with change. Our recruitment systems need to be more inclusive. People in organisations, heads of recruitments, need to see how can we change recruitment systems to not have this as the first, click for the recruiters to look into

👉🏾 There is a lot on that. But I would think that the majority of the recruitment systems today do not have that option. So a lot of times, due to certain reasons and regulations recruitment systems the name is always a mandatory field or a required field. If you apply directly to a hiring manager, maybe at that point of time you could hide, but not from a recruitment system perspective, a lot of recruitment systems that I've used and, and seen in the market, the name is the primary factor there, that you click into.

👉🏾: Quite a few, I would say, but I would start with structural changes in the systems and infrastructure within the organisation. Everything from how we have our recruitment systems built, for example or how we work with diverse workforce you know, inclusion starts first. You need to try to think about what are the different people out there? What are their needs? I don't think today workforces are built for that. I think workforces look at what is the average human being and systems are designed based on that infrastructure, work is designed based on the average human being, but the average human being does not exist.

👉🏾 And then I think it's very crucial with continuous learning. So people in the organisation are aware of this. And aware that we need diverse workforce at all levels to create diverse solutions. We need recruiters and recruitment leaders and recruitment teams, partnering with hiring managers, influencing hiring managers in the decision to recruit diverse workforce. Recruiters are the gatekeepers of the organisation, right? They also need the education and unconscious bias, and they need the education on recruitment bias. We cannot eliminate bias, we cannot eliminate recruitment bias, but we need more education and learning in this space. Constant learning and real-life experiences. And a lot of times you don't get this, If you don't have a diverse workforce and you don't see the diverse challenges in a diverse workforce, you don't see it then you're doing as is. And then you have a few diverse, elements in your organisation, which you tend to portray up in your marketing campaigns, but we need to go beyond that.

👉🏾 Exactly. And that's because inclusion plays such a huge role here, right? That you really truly understand the diverse needs of different people. Just as an example, if you take a person of colour or a person with Indian origin, right? We have a tendency to take care of our elderly parents very differently from how the Swedish society would probably take care of the elderly parents. Here you have the government, the society that takes care of it. Whereas if you come from India for example, it's usually down to the children to take care of your ageing parents as an example. If organisations understood this that if you have an Indian and you have a Swede, an Indian would probably have a more higher need to probably be back home in India now and then when you have ageing parents to take care of them versus a Swede who lives here doesn't have that.

👉🏾 It's the same thing with systems, right? If you have deaf candidates that you employ or if you have, blind candidates, do we have systems and infrastructure to support them to do the work, that is coming from, you know, a central fund and not something that is, you know, okay, this hiring manager has made this recruitment, so it's this hiring manager's responsibility to fulfil that need.

👉🏾 No, we should talk more about it, whether it's cultures, or if you take the LGBT community. Like I was talking to a friend the other day, and she was talking about how the challenges when she's moving as an expat, the challenges of moving her pets with her, she and her wife have a tough time getting approval to move the pets. But whereas if you are a heterosexual couple and you are moving with your children, nobody's questioning you if you're having two children or ten children and you will get the support, you will get help with their schools. We need to hear these stories, so we are empathetic and we understand different needs and we accommodate all that and with that you build an inclusive culture with diverse workforce. So it's both of them, it can clash sometimes we want to try to create diverse workforce by recruiting diverse, but if you don't have an inclusive culture, and if you don't see these needs, we're not going to be able to tackle it. Another last example I want to give is like, for example, you know, there are people who are nocturnal, you know, we know that creative people work better in the evenings and in the nights. We are genetically built like that, right.

👉🏾 But we don't have organisations that have catered to that, right? We are still going by the industrial revolution, you know, eight to five has come from those times. And we're still sticking to that, right? And, you know, creative workforces, you will get the better of them if they're working in the nights. We need to give that space, we need to understand these different ideas and that people are different and accommodate it. And this is what I mean by infrastructure and systems in place within organisations that accommodate not the average human being but everyone.

👉🏾 I think its stemming from frustration after you go through hundreds of job applications and not getting an opportunity to get a foot in. To do what you have done for 18 years, I have experience within this field and I cannot get an opportunity. And I would say when I apply a majority of the companies I look at. I look at, you know, what if they work in sustainability, what if they work on the ED&I spectrum? And they're fantastic you know, on the websites, but in reality, you don't even look at an application with a name like Sushma.

👉🏾 It boils down for me to think that it's a lot about marketing, you know, we cannot have ED&I leaders that are marketers, fantastic marketers. No, we need to make true change and we need real empathy in this area and we need to collectively move this forward. So I really want to, push that out there. Organisations reflect, look at each level of your organisation and see are you truly making change? Are you adopting to all the different needs that are there in the human workforce. So that is why I talk about, we need to be mindful about how much we talk about diversity.

👉🏾 First of all, I think that bias free recruitment does not exist. I mean, we are human beings and we are biased, it's been a source of survival for us. So it does not exist. But what we can do is we can be aware of our biases and we can start talking about it. We can openly talk about it. I know it becomes sometimes a taboo to say that, Oh, I thought like this when I talked to this person, you know? But we need to talk about our biases openly, and recruitment in that sense, can act as a catalyst for building inclusive cultures.

👉🏾 But the thing is, we need to work with them in both ways right. You know, just to check some diversity KPIs. We cannot bring people of, colour or people of diverse abilities of people from the LGBT community just to tick this, because when you bring them in and then you don't have an organisation that is built to take care of these different needs, then they will leave. So we need to work with them simultaneously, so inclusive cultures have to be worked simultaneously and a lot of this has to be done with continuous learning, being open, honest, looking into the internal biases, have forums to talk about this, to talk about experiences of different people.

👉🏾 Forums, where people of colour, people of disabilities, LGBT communities can come and share their experiences because that way we can try to create more awareness and learning on this topic and together work with changing this.

👉🏾 Yeah, I mean that's a very interesting question. I mean, this is a really tricky question for me to answer because I have been struggling with belonging, of course. And I've been trying to go down to the roots of it. And I have as a person lived in different parts of the world at different times, and I don't have a sense of belonging to any place or any culture in that sense inherently. And also, I see that in organisations as well. And I'm not sure if this is for me because of my background and maybe other people have different experiences. But I've had a hard to have a sense of belonging, I've been questioning that quite a lot, you know, I don't feel a sense of belonging in India, for example, right? Even though I have Indian heritage and I've lived there. I have so many, differences there. I don't have a sense of belonging in Sweden, and that's the same thing in the workforce, right? It's different, it's extremely important, I feel for, for getting the most of the individual out that everybody's seen, everybody's heard and everybody's included, even if your needs are maybe weird.

👉🏾 And then you approach it in an empathetic manner. A little bit, like I said, like sleep patterns, if we can meet a person who says, I can't manage this eight to five, because I'm not, I can't wake up in the mornings and be creative. I'm most creative at 11 in the night. How can we as managers and leaders accept that, Okay, there are certain meetings maybe you need to take during the daytime because there are stakeholders that you need to meet, but your creative work can happen after work hours. We're not gonna question when you do work and where you do it from. So we meet even things that you think are weird that need to be included, like, you know what I mean?

👉🏾 Yeah and to be your best self, you need to be yourself and then I think we can unleash so much potential out there that is kind of, boxed into these frameworks that we have set, which are not really inclusive for the many people.

👉🏾 You mean more from