Overcoming DEI Misnomers at Vista-Cimpress

Hi, welcome. My name is Liz. I'm the learning and development lead here at Vista and the diversity, equity and inclusion team.

You have joined a dynamic organization of talented, diverse, and interesting people across the world with a breadth of life experiences, prospective cultures, backgrounds, and languages.

To support you with your onboarding here at Vista Simps, we wanted to share some common mis misnomers when it comes to diversity, equity, inclusion that we know can hold people back from really benefiting from the rich diversity that exists in our organizations and from learning and growing as individuals.

We'll have a look at some of these misnomers and then show you where there are resources to support you in making the most of your experiences with us.

The first misnomer I wanted to share with you is the idea that inclusion is fluffy. So fluffy is associated often with nice to have, feel good and add-on, but not really relevant or of immediate focus or related to our core business.

I love to challenge this idea that inclusion is a nice to have or an after effect with a bit of neuroscience.

Through our neuroscience research, we've seen that when people feel included, specific neurochemicals are released and parts of the brain are activated, that increase people's capacity for creative thinking, complex problem solving, collaborating, risk taking, and innovating.

Now, I'm sure that you would share with me the, the view that these are skills that are essential to business.

In fact, they're probably the skills that you have that led to you being hired here at Vista. And now that we know that inclusive teams and environments help us unap these capabilities and help us to really deliver them to a higher high degree, it really highlights the importance of actively focusing on creating inclusive environments.

And this is where you come in, whether you are an individual or a later, there are resources on our DEI Confluence page, checklists and guides around practical everyday things that you can do to create inclusive environments for everyone.

Whether you're facilitating a meeting or participating in a meeting, setting up ay collaboration or working with individuals in different parts of the world.

There's a whole range of guides to support you in really helping us to tap in our collective intelligence of the diversity across our teams.

The second misnomer I'd like to share with you is this idea of, but I'm not biased. Now, most of us associate bias with negative aspects with discrimination or prejudice.

We actively work and our values are shaped around not being biased, but unfortunately to be human is to be biased, and it is how we are neurologically wired.

So it's only when we accept this that that unconscious bias does form part of our thinking, and it happens when we're not even aware of it.

It's only then that we can mitigate and manage them so that they are less likely to impact your decisions and affect others negatively.

So when we have this acceptance and awareness, we can do more research into understanding them. We can identify what are the things that we can put in place to diminish the impact of unconscious bias affecting our decisions, whether it's hiring, whether it's making a complex decision that's gonna impact our customers or, or other teams in the business.

And then over time, we can also work to lessen some of those automatic thoughts that pop up in any given moment, particularly when we're meeting people who are different to us.

So we really share this to invite you to delve into our resources, look out for DNI circles or moments where you can engage with others to expand your awareness and knowledge in this area, and become better equipped at managing those inevitable biases.

The final misnomer I'd like to share here is the concept of it's better to contr not to contribute and to say nothing than to say the wrong thing.

This is generally driven out of a fear of not wanting to cause offense or not wanting to hurt, or not wanting to seem ill-informed or uninformed.

But when this fear gets in the way of our willingness or ability to push ourselves outside our comfort zone, to engage in a meaningful conversation where we're getting to know somebody to learn new things and, and grow our awareness around different cultures or different team members experience, this then becomes an inhibitor.

So to counter this this, this next kind of idea is really driven out of a vista simps approach around relentlessly learning and improving.

It's connected to growth mindset in that making it, it's seeing, making mistakes as part of the process of learning and growing.

When we all, we all make mistakes and say the wrong thing at different times, I've had my share of them on our path to greater awareness and growth.

So just to reframe that and to give people a bit more confidence into expanding your world expanding your world view and the conversations you have and encouraging you to be involved in the conversations around diversity, equity, inclusion.

Now we've got a range of different strategies and techniques to support you around what do you do when you say the wrong thing.

And you can find those on our DEI Confluence page, but also the foundations of showing somebody that You have care for, how they feel that you are approaching it with curiosity and a genuine striving to learn and to apply those learnings and those mistakes into the future in a way that's gonna help you to do better is all very effective.