Diverse teams better reflect customer needs: Department of Education NSW

For the NSW Department of Education, effectively representing the needs of the community depends on including diversity in people and in thinking.

Digital Nation Australia spoke to Claire Beattie, a proud Yorta Yorta woman and executive director for asset activations in school infrastructure within the Department of Education NSW.
According to Beattie, diversity in teams does not only provide economic benefit, but better serves the needs of the customer.

“My team has to represent people. So if I look around my team and I only have one type of culture, one type of gender, one type of thinking, there's no way I can deliver anything for a community.

“If I don't have people in my team that have lived in regional and sector, or live in regional NSW or have a background in a certain language group, then I can't possibly step into that community without doing a whole lot of listening, which we do anyway, but I can't serve them properly. I can't ask the right questions. I can't deliver the right outcomes,” she said.

However as much as she recognises the value in diversity, she stresses that if it is tokenistic it will fail.

“It's not about collecting all five Pokemon,” said Beattie.

Beattie cautions against targets that undermine individual merit, and ultimately create resentfulness among the team.

“When people come out and say, ‘We want to increase female leadership by 50 percent’, and then all of a sudden there's some sort of appointment of women, people sit back and go “That's why’. No one wants that. No one wants a handout.

“Whilst we might have these deliverables and we want to see more females in infrastructure, or we want to see more diversity in a sector, the target isn't the silver bullet, because that can come across the wrong way to the person who's coming into the job and to the people who are accepting them into a team, it is about making sure that you have the hygiene factors as I like to call them.”

These ‘hygiene factors’ include ensuring the psychological safety of all diverse team members, eliminating unconscious bias and fostering cultural safety she said.