82: Are DEI efforts stalling globally? Nadach Musungu, Inclusion Lead at Kantar and Abhijeet Roy, Senior Growth Leader at Kantar

At the first PRCA EIAC Conference in September this year, Kantar launched its 2022 Inclusion Index. The Inclusion Index covers 24 industries across 14 countries and 18000 respondents. For Kantar a key purpose of the report, is to enable organisations to understand, measure and track and their own progress in developing an inclusive workplaces. Interestingly, there is data from key markets and geographies - so it is easier to figure out progress or lack of in markets. A shocking but not surprising finding is that DEI progress has stalled. Does this mean that the rhetoric by organisations on equity & inclusion does not match action? From my conversations in the UK, Middle-East and India, I hear the word fatigue a lot during conversations on DEI. What is clear from the report, however, is that employees, customers and clients are noticing the push on DEI but that is not enough with shifting employee expectations and businesses have to work harder to reach the new bar. According to the report,” Employees want businesses to go beyond DEI campaigns and cultural days. They want to see a stronger focus on driving systemic change.” To understand the data and insights better, I spoke with Nadach Musungu, Inclusion Lead at Kantar and Abhijeet Roy, Senior Growth Leader at Kantar in this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast. We started with a conversation on Nadach’s career and journey so far 👉🏾 Her learnings from leading on D&I at big organisations👉🏾 The Kantar Inclusion Index and the purpose of it👉🏾 Key insights from the report👉🏾 The Global engagement gap👉🏾 Industries performing well👉🏾 The differences based on geographies? 👉🏾 The need for Cultural intelligence👉🏾 Why organisations struggle with inclusion👉🏾 The drivers for inclusion and belonging in an organisationAnd the three things she would prioritise on. Thank you Nadach and Abhijeet for this conversation “The fact remains that for minority groups, experience in the workplace is measurably poorer, driven by a lack of sense of belonging, experience of discrimination and presence of negative behaviours” Kantar Inclusion Index 2022Memorable passages from the podcast: 👉🏾Thank you for having me. 👉🏾 Thank you for having me as well. 👉🏾 So I started my career in market research, and this was purely accidental. I was doing my masters and I was looking to make some money to support me because I was cut off from the bank of mum and dad. And yeah, I fell into market research and I enjoyed it and things kind of evolved and picked up from there.👉🏾 It was a very interesting space, I worked in various consult consultancies and I worked for various companies in-house. And I was typically the only a black woman, which was to be expected in a way. Not saying that I was kind of not thinking about it, it did have an impact on me, but I numbed myself to the experience. So I just knew that when I go into an organisation it'll only be me within the team or within the entire organisation. And it kind of reminded me of my just general experience in schools, of being the only person but kind of thinking it to be normal....