Diversity initiatives need to be authentic to promote lasting change in financial services firms, according to Adrienne Muir, COO of VoxSmart.
“What’s right for one organization may not be right for the other. I think that there is not a one-size-fits-all template when it comes to diversity. I think you’ve got to take a step back, no matter what organization you are, and be really authentic,” she said.
In a career spanning over two decades in capital markets, Muir has experienced first-hand how hard it is to enforce genuine change around diversity within large scale institutions due to “vast swathes of bureaucracy and inherent bias that comes from the male-dominated environment that is financial services”.
She said that sometimes large-scale organizations feel daunted by the fact they need to implement new approaches, perhaps because they find it hard to put the steps in place or to find the people internally to champion change.
“I think the compliance teams are recognizing there is a need for more diversity across the business,” she said.
“You’ve really got to make it personal and to consider what it means to you, for it to function properly within your company,” she added.
Muir also said that more education is needed: “We need to be clear on what diversity means within the compliance space, and how we address the topic regularly to make sure that we are not leaving anything off the table unnecessarily.”
“Every day is like a school day, you need to listen, you need to read, you need to make mistakes, and you need to try again, constantly ensuring that you are asking questions,” she said.
“Ask what’s worrying people, team members, and in terms of diversity and inclusion, maybe address concerns directly, honestly and transparently,” she added.
There’s nothing worse than when an organization is not really practicing what they preach, according to Muir.
She added that diversity isn’t just about equality and gender, it’s about having a workplace that fosters diverse thoughts and opinions.
“Having different people with truly diverse ways of thinking is very important. And we’ve actively done that at VoxSmart, our executive management team is incredibly diverse and challenge each other’s ways of thinking to purposely bring about positive change.” Muir said.
“Diversity for us wasn’t the thing that came first, what came first at VoxSmart was really delving deeply by asking the questions about the values of our organization,” she added.
Muir noted that respect really helped support their diversity: “We wanted to respect the fact that we had working parents, that we had people who had disabilities within our organization. And by doing that we respectfully gave them space, we made sure that way that before a lot of other companies were doing it on the back of the pandemic, remote working and that flexible working option was very much at the forefront of what we offered everyone at VoxSmart.”
“That helped us to build a ‘culture of adults’, where we were really promoting our organization to be like: “we trust you and we respect you, and in turn, we expect the same from you”.”
“For us, it’s about protecting the individuals that we’ve spent time and energy on and making sure that they have got a great work environment and they’re being developed internally,” she stressed.
