Charlotte Wilkinson has been a friend of The Culture Ministry for a while now. In fact she helped name this very podcast!
We are thrilled to have Charlotten on the podcast this week. She is a leader in the field of Diversity and Inclusion in Singapore.
With her global cultural insights and a strong grasp of data and metrics, Charlotte brings a fresh perspective to D&I noting that different factors drive inclusion for different people. These factors include recognition, access to senior talent, benefits offered, and flexibility.
Join us for an engaging conversation that expands the boundaries of traditional D&I thinking.
The Culture Ministry exists to create inclusive, accessible environments so that people and businesses can thrive.
Combining a big picture, balanced approach with real-world experience, we help organisations understand their diversity and inclusion shortcomings – and identify practical, measurable actions to move them forward.
Go to https://www.thecultureministry.com/ to learn more
If you enjoyed this episode and maybe learnt something please share with your friends on social media, give a 5 star rating on Apple podcasts and leave a comment. This makes it easier for others to find A Dog Called Diversity.
A Dog Called Diversity is proud to be featured on Feedspot's 20 Best Diversity And Inclusion Podcasts
Thanks for listening. Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.
Charlotte Wilkinson has been a friend of The Culture Ministry for a while now. In fact she helped name this very podcast!
We are thrilled to have Charlotten on the podcast this week. She is a leader in the field of Diversity and Inclusion in Singapore.
With her global cultural insights and a strong grasp of data and metrics, Charlotte brings a fresh perspective to D&I noting that different factors drive inclusion for different people. These factors include recognition, access to senior talent, benefits offered, and flexibility.
Join us for an engaging conversation that expands the boundaries of traditional D&I thinking.
The Culture Ministry exists to create inclusive, accessible environments so that people and businesses can thrive.
Combining a big picture, balanced approach with real-world experience, we help organisations understand their diversity and inclusion shortcomings – and identify practical, measurable actions to move them forward.
Go to https://www.thecultureministry.com/ to learn more
If you enjoyed this episode and maybe learnt something please share with your friends on social media, give a 5 star rating on Apple podcasts and leave a comment. This makes it easier for others to find A Dog Called Diversity.
A Dog Called Diversity is proud to be featured on Feedspot's 20 Best Diversity And Inclusion Podcasts
Thanks for listening. Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.
Welcome to a dog called Divacity, and this week I have the incredible Charlotte Wilkinson, who is in Singapore. Hi, charlotte, hello, hello. So I've known Charlotte for a little while probably five years, six years, maybe a bit longer and she's pretty cool and she is a diversity and inclusion leader across the region. But what I love about Charlotte is she comes from a very different background to many D&I leaders. So I would say most D&I leaders probably have a HR background in some form, but Charlotte has a very different background and, I think, one that's very useful in D&I works. Why don't you start Charlotte and maybe give us a bit of an overview of your career and how you came to live in Asia?
Speaker 2:Hello, so yeah, I'm Charlotte. I have basically been based in Asia about 20 years now. I started my career in actually, I started in Paris. I studied languages and management at university in the UK. That included a significant time overseas which meant I was working in Paris. Funny enough, I was working on the Y2K solution, which obviously didn't really happen, no, but really understanding kind of clients issues, preparation for some sort of big events, was the first role I had in Paris and then ended up working elsewhere. Going back to UK, I worked in Insight, so qualitative and quantitative work in a brand consultancy for a very large group who's then been acquired and acquired and acquired by lots of other people. But my kind of last big roles in the UK were with WPP and they bought a business in China, a qualitative research business, and they were basically looking for people to volunteer to go out to China.
Speaker 2:I had been to China at the time. I was quite young, recently single, and thought that, yeah, china seems like a great opportunity to take on. So, yeah, I went to China for one year and obviously a few decades later I'm still in Asia. But I think it's also where a lot of the start of my kind of interest in equality became, I guess, more and more prevalent. For me, just to go back again, my mum has disabilities as a result of a pretty horrific car crash over 30 years ago. So I'd always already been kind of aware of some of the issues my mum had as a sort of a disabled person Accessibility needs in the public, how she was dealt with by banks and airlines and that sort of thing. So I guess as a carer and as a family member with somebody with needs, it's always been kind of always been something I thought about. But really when I was in China and kind of recognising the huge cultural differences and the big differences in terms of pay between expats and locals and things like that was where I started to see some really opportunities for understanding.
Speaker 2:Ultimately, my last big corporate role was running the region for an M&C Sachi group and brand consulting, which was again it's using insight and cultural understanding to drive strategies, coming up with a strategy and innovation to drive solutions for clients, and I was doing that for a long time. And then I saw an opportunity myself in addressing women that actually a lot of the projects I worked on were very female focused and from infant formulas to baby wear to women's healthcare. I worked on an awful lot of projects in those sort of spaces and recognised there was no one in the region who was just women focused. So I launched my own agency called Hello Sister, which did projects the same kind of thing I've been doing, but it was only businesses who were targeting women, which obviously should be every business. We're more than 50% of the audience, but we're also, on the most part, probably about 70% decision maker for most sectors.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I was doing that for a long time and then clients kind of started asking me really about why you understand women, can you also help us understand with our workforce as well? And it's when you know me too was rising, I think when D&I in this region was starting to get a bit more popular. Yeah, so I started to do projects that were more D&I focused and then kind of went all in about four years ago nearly five years ago now, and that's when I met you.
Speaker 1:Yay, I love that. Yay, I love that. Thank you. What is some of the oh? No, let's try a different question. I guess you know at the start I said a lot of people come to D&I work often through HR type roles, because you're already dealing with people and organisations go well, you're already doing that, so we'll add in another thing. The other place a lot of D&I leaders come from, I think, is they've shown an interest in the work. They might be as part of an employee resource group, but they're working in a different part of the business and they enter that way and there's advantages and disadvantages for both those paths into D&I. But you brought a really different path. So what do you think is the advantage of your background in D&I work?
Speaker 2:I think cultural understanding is huge, especially in this region. So we are very, very diverse and trying to understand diversity and inclusion across a very, very diverse region. So I think my experience of working across so many countries and markets and different audiences, different groups of people so not just white collar workers but kind of you know, everyday folks in lots of markets that I think that brought a lot of understanding. I'm never going to profess to be an expert on Japan, I'm never going to be an expert in India, but what I am very good at is kind of understanding to a certain level across lots of markets. So I think that that kind of cultural understanding, knowing the right questions to ask, is quite key. I think I think also for me, coming from insights, understanding data really, really well, like I can write a survey very, very quickly. I understand the stats and analytics involved to really drive kind of metrics and understand and create metrics. Again, that's something I did for 20 or 20 years. It's part of kind of their path consultancy, so I think that's really important. I think we're going to need to know data more and more than ever before and also I believe it's pushing data and challenging data, so it's not just about taking what's available today. It's actually pushing boundaries and going why can't we measure it like this? Why can't we do this? Why can't we collect data in different ways? And again, that kind of comes from the researcher in me.
Speaker 2:The other thing I think is stakeholder management. When you come from consultancy and agency, you're always stakeholder managing multiple clients, different time scales, different priorities, not just within the same business, but sometimes you've got three or four clients that once you're trying to kind of juggle and balance things. So I think that kind of how you deal with that has been quite critical. And then I guess the final thing that I think I'm quite good at is kind of more the innovation side, that it's always challenging boundaries. Why can't I do something different? Why do we always have to do this?
Speaker 2:And I appreciate in huge organizations it's not always easy to do that and I've kind of found that myself being in a huge organization, but also in smaller businesses you don't always have the same budgets as other people. So how do you do something differently? How do you make the most of what I've got, whether it's time, whether it's resources, whether it's budget? How do I do something different and how can I be impactful. How do you maximize whatever you're doing rather than just taking what everything is at face value and doing the same thing you did last year? So, yeah, I think it's a little bit of attitude, but it's a little bit of experience as well. So pushing boundaries and doing things differently is which is not going to work for every role. I understand that, but certainly the ones I've been in, that's been what's demanded that you are doing something different and you are trying to change things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there were two things that you touched on. So one was stakeholder management and the other was budget, and I'm going to release my salary and market survey for D&I people very soon I'm just doing the final polish and they are the being able to influence stakeholders and influence leaders and having budget to execute are the two biggest challenges that have come out this year and they're very similar to last year's survey. So it was interesting to hear you say those two things, because I think people go into DNI thinking I'm gonna solve the world's problems. You know, I'm gonna make workplaces a better place, and I think we all wanna do that. But the reality is, if you're not good at stakeholder management, if you can't influence people, if you can't get people to do things differently, you're gonna struggle. And the same with budget. Often it's being able to present a cohesive plan to get the budget to do the things you need to do. Yeah, but what are some of the other challenges that you've seen in some of the big organizations that you've worked in?
Speaker 2:I think prioritization is just so hard. I think if most DNI people have got a list of, like you know, 30 items long that they want to probably do, how do you prioritize that across a region? You might have 20,000 people in one country and only 15 in another, but your levels of inclusion may be very different across those markets. How do I prioritize women versus accessibility needs? How do I prioritize my time versus what I can delegate? I think that's the biggest issue that probably most people face and it's not a simple answer. But again, for me, having helped clients launch products and launch strategies, it's finding a common ground. How can we do the most with what we've got? How can we? Where do we get the biggest reach? Where do we get the biggest impact? Where's the low hanging fruit as well? It's not always going after the big impact things. Sometimes there's the smaller things you can go after that actually make a big difference to a very small group and that can have a biggest impact. Rather than you know, rather than getting all women in our region paid exactly the same as our male counterparts, why don't you focus on some things that actually you can implement very, very quickly and lead a little sign off or you can convince people very easily to do so.
Speaker 2:I kind of feel like it's. It is a lot juggling, but it's also just having the landscape to understand yeah, where's my impact, when and what can I do quickly, which, again, it's quite a strategic kind of decision, isn't it? And it's something I've kind of had to do a lot of and convince clients on priorities and, yeah, you can go and spend this, but it's going to take you three years to launch it, or you could go and do this and test whether it works really quickly and if it doesn't, you withdraw a kind of thing. So, yeah, I think that's something that I think is something I've had to do a lot in my career. But also where people, a lot of people, struggle here, especially the limited resources. You know, despite how populist the region is, there's still very few people working in roles here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's true. I think the other thing is you've got to have a a good amount of courage, I think, to try things with no budget, to convince people to give you a go, having a try at something, and I see that lacking quite a bit, quite a bit.
Speaker 2:It is, and I do think there is a bit of a personality. I'm not afraid to speak up and I know this is a big challenge we see across the region especially. You know, it's that kind of it's the old adage oh, you know, asian women don't speak up, for example, that we hear so often. It isn't always a true, some of the feisty women I know are Asian. But you know my I'm not afraid to voice my opinion. Sometimes I have to hold back my opinion in some instances. But yeah, it's that, having that courage to speak up and try things and suggest things. And you know, even if somebody says no, at least you know why they're saying no or at least you know where their opinion is. Yeah, so I think that's that is another challenge for some people.
Speaker 2:I, you know some of my colleagues I've spoken to in the past. They're quite quiet, you know, even if I'm in the wrong with the deception, they haven't necessarily dared to question or challenge me when I think I'm quite open to Taking kind of feedback on board. So I think, yeah, that's another big challenge, I think, is You've got it, you've got to have an attitude to challenge and to to push and and drive, and not everybody. Not everybody has that and there's a place for everybody in the business, but um, that's not gonna get lots of things done. Yeah, I.
Speaker 1:Wondered if you'd be interested in. But before hit the record button, you were telling me about some research and a thesis that you put together on on data and measuring inclusion and. I thought it was so interesting and I wondered if you would like to share a little piece of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so basically I've been.
Speaker 2:and when, when some people were crafting sourdough recipes during lockdown and I decided I was gonna do a masters, I had Of course you did time on my hands and I and Singapore has a great opportunity if you're permanent resident, like I am, and the government is Well, really invests in certain sectors, a certain Education areas. So I done, I've done a masters in digital management. This is the long-form story, but I did it. I've done it. Masters in digital management, which is very much a skill at Singapore.
Speaker 2:Government values so sort of long-term vision, how technology impacts workplace or work impacts business, forecasting, design thinking, etc. So they're all values that Singapore government is really seeking for in their employees or in their talent. So, as PR is really lucky to get, and my masters at a very good kind of rate, so I embarked on that in the middle of lockdown, finally finished in the last few weeks and my thesis was really around you have it had to be around technology and business and an area you're passionate about. So I basically put forward that the way that we measure inclusion today is is not done correctly. It's not done very effectively. The vast majority of businesses measure. At one point in time you might have a few questions that derive your kind of inclusion, school or value that you have, but even then you're not asking it on a daily basis. You're asking it kind of a couple of times a year at best Most people, I say it's possibly once a year in some sort of engagement.
Speaker 1:So once every kind like two years or three years yeah.
Speaker 2:So you, you might have a school, but you don't really know what's going on behind it. So my my research basically showed that obviously, as you can imagine, our absolute level of inclusion is driven by many, very many different factors, and you can basically group people into what drives them to feel more included. For some it could be recognition, for some it could be access to senior talent. For others it's much more about the benefits offered Some people it could be flexibility. If you're a mum with small kids, how flexible your business is really drives how included you feel, how welcomed you feel in the business. So, aside from the fact it's not just one measure, we know the different things dive, different elements of inclusion for different people, and that's going to be different for everybody, although you can kind of hypothesize what that might be, for different groups, if you know your audiences.
Speaker 2:So yeah, basically my research was really shown that we shouldn't be measuring like that. We should be measuring it much shorter dips. But how do you do that in a different way. And ultimately, you need to understand what is driving those inclusion scores, because you can have an inclusion score and if you don't know what's going on then you can't do anything about it. So really my idea is around having team leaders being able to look at their inclusion score in more detail, but knowing what the factors are.
Speaker 2:So the fact you've got 71% inclusion doesn't mean much, but actually if you know your team's had really long hours recently, or you've had sickness in the team and you know people have had to pull their weight in a different way, or your team scores have gone up and actually you've had big bonuses that month, you know it's kind of. It's understanding what are the drivers behind your score is more important, because then you can remedy it before it's too late, so way before somebody is so fed up and doesn't feel included enough that they are already looking for jobs or have jobs elsewhere. So basically, it's pre-empting exit interviews, really understanding how people are feeling and yeah, it's several thousand words of paper, but that's kind of it in a nutshell, and how it works and how you use data and how you use analytics and how you use technology to gather that data is really what the paper's around.
Speaker 2:I don't think I'll ever publish it properly but, it's certainly been really insightful and I think for me it's about how do you unlock conversations with employee analytics teams, how do you have to manage things like data consent and obviously make sure people are reassured around things. You don't want people constantly being asked do you feel included? Do you feel included? How do you feel? How do you feel so?
Speaker 1:how do you get around that?
Speaker 2:And then the other thing that came through with my research was that you know, a lot of people feel that people are either included or they're not. Yet it's very much a spectrum, very much a scale. I might not feel so included, but it's not enough for me to go and look for another job, other people, then maybe one significant thing that happens to them, and you can go from included to not included overnight, and we don't take into account that either. So how do you manage that sort of thing as well?
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, that's so interesting and even as you were talking, many organisations will do an engagement survey and they might put six or eight questions about inclusion and belonging inside that survey. I always think are you getting enough detail, like, is that giving you rich enough data and deep enough data to actually do something with, or is it just giving you a really short insight onto a really narrow range of things?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's where the kind of qualitative side of my experience comes through as well that you can have that once, but you need to have the stories. You need to have actually, well, what is it? Because, frankly, if you're standing up to a board and presenting and telling them that it's like 71% of X, well what's happening is that 29%? What are the stories that drive that 29% to not be included?
Speaker 2:It's telling those real-life stories within the business. You've got to know the stories are true and you've got to capture the stories in different way. And even my recent experience, you know, telling some stories about some transgender colleagues and some of the situations they've had. You know our UK team didn't know that any of this at all and like just how you tell those stories and how you deliver them in a different way, is that's what's key. It's, you know, we're all humans at the end of the day and, yes, we use data. But it's also the connection. If you hear a real, real life story and you can almost see that happening, that's when data makes sense to you and you buy into it and believe it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've really seen that, having run a big inclusion survey and then spending time in focus groups with the different, the different demographics that we had in the survey and saying tell us why it is, tell us why this score is so low, and those stories become so powerful when you put them in front of a leader, you know it's a switch from okay, this is a really bad score. And here's the story why. And yeah, that human connection of like, oh, I'm so, they feel so awful that that's happened in their business and you know they don't want that to happen. They're humans, they want people to be well and looked after.
Speaker 2:The catch 22 is you have to be a reasonably inclusive business People to even feel like they can speak up. Though, even in focus group situations, when you're assuring people on anonymity and how it's reported, people still often reluctant to feedback. So it's, you know it's a complex space, but you need to have those stories because that's when people are like, oh my goodness, is that what's happening to my business? And you can see what's actually happened and you can imagine, yeah, you know what, I do know that team and I do kind of get it, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what are you hopeful about in the future in this work?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I say my masters has been around technology. I think we're not using tech enough in the right way at the moment and I feel like D&I is going to change an awful lot in the next couple of years as there's more products that come through that can help support our roles. But they all need to be used effectively and I think at the minute there's quite a lot of pushback on some things you know. Again, part of my masters was like auditing where a lot of the technology is today. A lot of it is in acquisition and not a lot of it is kind of an ongoing kind of monitoring and evaluation. So I feel like we've got to have foot in both camps. We need to be human, but we also we have now the ability to be able to use technology and data in different ways.
Speaker 2:The amount of data we capture, most businesses would capture automatically, and that's not even signing up for I know that you are. This, this, this, the kind of data we have within business about how people are behaving and, potentially, how they're feeling. If you can track it, I think is really really powerful, but I feel like there's a lot of reluctance, so I would like people to be more open to kind of really exploring that data, really exploring kind of how tech can help. It's got to be used properly, and that's the kind of the big challenge I think we see as the business other than what you've already discussed, and take the state called a management and things like that but almost the abundance of data makes it really hard to understand what we should be focusing on, and having the ability to really be able to have those data conversations and knowing your stuff around data is going to be really, really key for people, I think. I think we've moved away from policies and things like that. It's much more. I mean, policies are always going to exist, aren't they?
Speaker 1:But I think it's much more about thinking about the future, Thinking about the future.
Speaker 2:if we want to be an employee of choice in the future, we need to be much more forward thinking in terms of how we measure things, how we manage things, how we understand things in a completely different way. Yeah, and I'm quite excited by that, but I also know it's quite difficult.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I think there's still a range of organisations playing catch up. Their policies are not inclusive, their benefits are not inclusive, and so for many organisations, they can't think forward because they've got to fix the platform that they have now, which is a big challenge. It's a big challenge, it's a lot of work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think obviously what's concerning at the moment is cuts in budgets. Where's that cut going from? Is it people? Is it projects? Is it product, like analytics and things like that? That's very concerning that people won't have talent left in their businesses if they don't catch onto things and I think people are quite reactive to what's going on in the US at the minute and there's certain areas of your business you shouldn't be cutting in these days and I'm biased, but I would say DNI is one of them, security and cyber security is the other, but yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1:It's been delightful speaking to you, charlotte. Thank you so much, thank you.
Speaker 2:I love doing it. I obviously watched you for a well over a year doing these podcasts and I'm always like why hasn't she asked me yet to?
Speaker 1:do this. I know I feel very bad. And then I did ask you and you're like oh no, I'm too busy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know it goes both ways, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:But thank you so much, it's great, thank you. I love that. Thank you.