Drawing a line in the sand around unacceptable behaviour - & co-creating an inclusive team

Over the last 12 months Serious Woo has been facilitating A LOT of workshops around courageous conversations. (Over 40 for the data hungry 😄).

The struggles are real. Lots of stories about being excluded at work, in all sorts of terribly different ways.

Often there is a reluctance to come forward because

• The wrongdoer has behaved in this way for a long time (and people worked around them)

• The behaviours seems “trivial” in isolation and people don’t want to appear weak

• There is a fear that reporting such behaviours will make the situation worse.

Co-creating team norms gives colleagues the opportunity to create a set of agreements around how their team will collaborate and function.

This process gives a team a shared language around the behaviours they want to see and more confidence to call out inappropriate behaviours.

Spending time as a team doing this process can be FUN and has many benefits - as identified by the Diversity Council of Australia below.

2021–2022 INCLUSION@WORK INDEX: MAPPING THE STATE OF INCLUSION IN THE AUSTRALIAN WORKFORCE. Diversity Council of Australia (Click on image to access report).

For further reading

AFR May 9 2022 - Women feel burnt out and excluded at work: survey

SMH 18 May 2022 - Senior executives report far better mental health than non-managers, junior staff

HR Daily 9 Dec 2021 "Everyday exclusion" as damaging as outright discrimination