The importance of diversity and inclusivity in PR and Communication

At the e4m women Achievers Summit & Awards 2022 held recently, a panel discussion was held on the topic- The importance of diversity and inclusivity in PR and Communication. The session chair for the panel discussion was Jagriti Motwani, CEO and Co-founder Cha-Chi. The panellists were Shivani Gupta, Managing Director, SPAG, Finn Partner- Harjiv Singh, CEO Gutenberg- Nikhil Dey- Adfactors PR- Ashwini Shingla, Founder and Chairperson, Astrum- Nandita Lakshmanan- Founder and Chairperson, The Practice. 

Motwani began the session by asking about diversity and inclusivity.

Ashwini Shingla answered that saying,” To me, inclusion and diversity are not about culture and character. It’s about creating opportunities for people to live their lives and also be able to participate productively at least at gender level.” 

He explained, “Females, despite being more in numbers in public relation industry, are not very often able to take up leadership roles because most of them leave the career journey halfway due to maternity, and family pressure and they never come back. Marriage and kids are two turning points in a female’s life. In my mind, the opportunity that we need to provide is to enable that transition to happen so smoothly that we don’t have that drop-off point.”

Nandita Lakshmanan- Founder and Chairperson, of The Practice, further talked about the definition of diversity and inclusivity and the biases females confront while working in an organization and how to tackle those biases in the workforce. She said “Diversity is a way of life. Inclusion is a philosophy and I differentiate between the two. I would like to take the whole aspect beyond just male and female as they are so many aspects of diversity. We have very diverse workforce since the beginning, gender, ethnicity, and language. We also asked our workforce how many languages they speak as now the work we do is multilingual, so we need to understand different languages and the nuances of many aspects. I want to say that we do not just talk about the industry but we represent so many clients who also require to go beyond diversity and inclusion.”

“If diversity and inclusion are all ways of life and inclusion. You don’t have to make things to get embedded in the organisations.”

On asking about new techniques introduced in an organization and accepting people from all races and religions, Nikhil Dey answered that diversity is being invited to the party and inclusion is being asked to dance. “It’s about inviting people in and then making them feel excluded. Looking at the digitisation of the business, the company is trying to attract more digitally inclined and digitally savvy people. 200 people are working in a digital team and the question comes that who should sit where. He mentioned Al Jazeera that four people are working in their digital team and they sit at the center of the newsroom. The structure of an organisation is so crucial to diversity and inclusion.

On being asked about the challenges an organisation faces while implementing DNI, Shivani Gupta, Managing Director, SPAG said, “It is very important for the leaders to adapt to new ways of working and lifestyle. It is for the leaders to adapt and understand the cultural shift. How people are wanting to change their skill set, wanting to evolve with the times, people are wanting to adapt to newer environments and skills. The biggest challenge is when the multi-generational workforce is working in the same environment and somebody is not ready to adapt to that. Everyone has to work right from the hiring process, right from the DNI committees we have, working on. It is a very thoughtful process about the kind of training programme that can be designed for different sets of people. It is a continued employee manual that we need to work on. There is no one set rule to which we can stick and work with that. It is an evolving thing.”

Harjiv Singh, CEO of Gutenberg, shared his experience about how clients have evolved with time and the diversity of employees working in an organisation. He said, “We talk about DNI and particularly in the communication and marketing space. We talked about sustainable development goals. The one important point in data that is important for younger team members. The workforce participation of women in India went down from 24 % to 19% in India. The data has gone down further post-pandemic. All the conversations and messaging we do in the industry are very good at that level. It is very important to realise that outside communication and marketing space. The participation of women in the workforce is rather low. Is there we could do something to change how we look at our data and work across four countries? We have 22 languages we speak at all our offices and we have a variety of cultures. When I look at the data from a global perspective, we still have a lot of work to do as a country but also bring more women into the workforce. Looking at some economic data and comparing India and China. Women in China contribute 40% of the GDP and in India, it's only 17% because of the low participation, so India can be a richer country if we add more women participation.”

In PR industry, males also face discrimination. On being asked about the challenges that have emerged in an organization on this front, Ashwini said “One thing that I have consistently maintained over the last 25 years is that we remove the word discrimination of any kind in selection and promotion of talent. At the end of the day what matters is talent. It does not matter the orientation, the religious orientation, the sexual orientation, or the gender orientation, when we can remove that lens from our organisation and embedded as a part of our culture at the leadership level then we will automatically do the right things whether we want to set examples to sensitisation training, so the people who are not comfortable in an environment become comfortable. Does our character in the organisation reflect zero discrimination of any kind?”

The session was concluded with the note that diversity and inclusion are just catchphrases if we not taking the conversation to society. We are bringing society conversation into the workforce and also taking the workforce back to society.