Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

• Diversity is the variety of people and ideas within an organization.
• Equity is about eliminating systemic barriers and privileges, and ensuring all people have fair access, opportunity, resources, and power to thrive.
• Inclusion is about creating an environment in which all individuals feel valued and connected.

Research has linked improvements in diversity and inclusion to better business performance, responsiveness to customer needs, and team collaboration. Diversity on its own will not necessarily deliver positive results. The key ingredient that transforms the theoretical business case for diversity into bottom-line results is inclusion.

Organizations with inclusive cultures are:

• 2x as likely to meet or exceed targets
• 3x as likely to be high-performing
• 6x as likely to be innovative and agile
• 8x more likely to achieve better business outcomes

While there is growing recognition of how critical diversity and inclusion are to business performance, the importance of equity cannot be ignored. The challenge lies in translating the recognition of the value of diversity and inclusion, into impactful actions and equitable outcomes.

In recent years we have been giving more attention to the broader topic of inclusion and diversity. We believe an inclusive culture will go a long way towards improving diversity and vice versa.

Our workforce – including our international colleagues – is becoming more diverse and our employee’s perception of inclusion, according to our employee engagement survey, has significantly grown over the past years. From this perspective, we are on the right track, but it is only the beginning of our journey.

Focus helps us to make choices. This means that we do not try to do everything at once but first establish the fundamental basics when it comes to fostering an inclusive and diverse organization. From a gender perspective, we acknowledge that we have work to do. That is why our current focus is to strive to increase the percentage of women in our top levels, our senior management levels, and all other levels throughout the organization. We intend to use the knowledge and experience we gain in working towards achieving gender balance to also improve other aspects of diversity at Noralle. In the coming years, we aim to build on our accumulated experiences with minority groups to grow into an increasingly diverse organization.

We structurally embed safe spaces in order that our colleagues feel safe to speak out in case they experience inappropriate behaviour. We have systems in place, both internally and externally, to prevent, report and address complaints – and we actively take steps to both engage our colleagues in dialogue and to remove any barriers to speaking up.

Diversity winners recognise equality and a sense of fairness of opportunity as key areas of attention in promoting inclusion, and hence retaining and advancing diverse talent. They attend to this both in terms of leadership mindsets, behaviour and capabilities, as described above, and through de-biasing talent processes, primarily in relation to advancement and equal pay.

These companies start by building transparency into the extent to which their organisations are true meritocracies today, and where the impact of traditional notions of privilege are understood, and employees are promoted on skill and potential, regardless of their ethnicity, gender
or other identity attributes.

We are increasingly extending our scope for action beyond traditional diversity and inclusion goals to include fostering a sense of belonging among all their employees, and particularly among diverse employees. This aims to create a culture which not only emphasises equality and openness, but in which employees feel that they can contribute their unique talents, that these talents are valued by their managers, teams and the wider organisation, and that they can bring their full selves to work.