Strong Diversity and Inclusion Efforts Will Help Our Industry Recover

It’s time for us all to wake up and become strategic advocates for diversity, equality and inclusion—not just within the meeting industry, but also within our own communities.

Let’s not continue to stand by and say, “I don’t understand” or “it’s not me.” Seek to understand and speak to be an ally in the cure for one of the world’s greatest, long-suffering pandemics: racial inequality. People are hurting, and silence is no longer an option.

“People are hurting, and silence is no longer an option.”

It’s one thing to have a carefully crafted DE&I statement on your company website and quite another when you look around the organization and your board, executives and senior leadership teams and everyone looks like you—or there’s only one, maybe two, that don’t. Guess what? That’s not diversity.

This is the best time to brush those statements off and begin to go deeper, matching our walk with our talk—becoming accountable advocates for DE&I professionally and personally. Don’t know how?

Ask

What can we do to change this? Who can assist us in achieving this? How can we develop recruiting programs that uniquely foster diversity?

Listen 

Listen not with privileged ears and biases. With your heart, and not your mind, place yourself in others’ shoes to better understand what they experience and are feeling.

Then Act

Put measurable plans in action that begin shifting the atmosphere. Specifically, seek opportunities to recruit, hire, support and promote those who historically have not had a position or voice within your organization or at your events.

Diversity is a beautiful blending of people with differing cultural backgrounds, life experiences, thoughts, opinions, religious and political beliefs and sexual orientations. This collective can empower forces for good and serve as the brain trust that drives the company’s bottom line.

And I am convinced that through implementing diverse, inclusive and equitable practices the most talented minds will collaborate to not only develop a vaccine that cures the world’s other pandemic, COVID-19. I’m also convinced that DE&I efforts will spearhead how the meeting industry comes back safe and stronger in the new normal.

Photo by Gary Butterfield on Unsplash