New Zealand Stories

Last week we launched our re-designed website, featuring an online Toolkit designed to gather together the immense amount of resources, literature and tools available and filter them to focus on the most valuable.

To further illustrate the New Zealand context, and highlight the D&I journeys already underway here, local champions of diversity have told their story under each of the three toolkit categories – Governance, Leadership and People and Culture.

“Leaders and Boards point to what’s important in an organisation, so diversity and inclusion needs to be led from the top to become everyone’s business as usual,” says Anthony Healy, Managing Director & CEO of BNZ. “And as a leader if you don’t believe in something and don’t practice it then how can you expect anyone else to?”

BNZ began their diversity journey some years ago, and Healy recognises that while the scale of the diversity agenda can be daunting, businesses starting down this road shouldn’t be deterred.

“There is lots of research on the diversity topic, you will find that 80% of what you need to do has already been done somewhere else and so you can get up the curve much more quickly by copying in effect, other people’s practices.”

Jan Bibby, General Manager or Human Resources at Vodafone says “A lot of people see diversity as this big scary monster, so they think ‘we’ll just park it because we don’t know what to do with it. But actually it can be really simple. You can pick just one or two things and do those. When you’ve got that working really well, and it’s part of your DNA, then you do something else.”

See the all the videos, & read the articles here.

We hope the evolving Toolkit provides starting points for your own organisation, or helps point you in a new direction.

Topics: case study, diversity, leadership, people & culture