The Bigger Picture: Diversity & Inclusion
Hi I’m Sebastian copelan and I would like to take you on a Journey what is environmental social and governance ESG for short is a framework used to measure business practices on sustainability and ethical issues and help motivate companies to act responsibly in this episode I will discuss the growing imperative for company’s social responsibility and find out how an autom maker like Audi is
Pushing for A Better Tomorrow come on let’s go find Out can you tell me Antonio what is uh we live diversity uh this is actually one of the core principles that we have within the Audi group and the car symbolizes the diversity we strive for and it also symbolizes that we SD Andi team try to
Break patterns right so we want to make things differently for a better workplace in the future if you give me the keys I’ll drive it off the lot diversity and inclusion um can you define that for me well diversity for one thing is about bringing different perspectives into the company so if you
Have a certain age a certain gender uh certain uh experience at work or um education inclusion is about welcoming that diversity so we all as a company as a whole and everyone individually benefits from diversity and inclusion we are global company in a rapidly changing industry uh we need to conquer this
Complexity with a diverse group of people by mirroring the diversity of our customers esgs environmental social governance have does diversity and inclusion makes its way into that level of corporate commitment one thing that the capital markets have realized is that a good diversity and inclusion in a company uh makes company more successful
Financially in the end in the long run so they have included diversity and inclusion within the Frameworks how do you deal with that type of uh headwind when people are saying you know issues of that nature uh are part of a woke culture um what do you say to them well I think
When people who have or are accustomed to privileges um they feel that equality is oppression because they seem to fall behind you know when you put other people first I give you an example when we started talking about queer in 2018 we founded a network an employee network
And I think a lot of people were irritated because they didn’t understand why that needed to be discussed in a work environment because it’s a private issue right what they once again because of Privileges and biases what they didn’t know that they talk about their own sexual orientation on a daily basis
Without realizing it because I bring my wife my husband to a certain event and in that moment they they had a coming out you know they talked about their sexual orientation without realizing it do you see a transition in the mentalities you know we have a lack of
Competencies in certain Fields you know like every other company out there in the it business in the artificial intelligence business so when they start realizing that people are not coming anymore as easily as they were used to you know they start thinking and then their own children come home and say
Well Daddy I don’t want to work like you anymore maybe I want to work someplace else that gives me more freedom that you know makes me feel more more included than things that I’ve seen from your daily business so you’ve mentioned kpis for some people who don’t know what that
Is can you explain what kpis represent kpi stands for key performance indicators so they measure how performant we are how successful we are with our initiatives it’s hard figures um that we attached to our efforts and that’s quite a a difficult task because uh especially inclusion is a culture
Topic it’s hard to grasp it’s hard to assign a figure to it but we’ve tried now with the inclusion survey uh to do exactly that what would you say has been a benchmark of success first one I’d like to share is uh we had our first International dni Event two years ago to
Make people aware of that we are a global company where it’s not only englad as a center of everything and the other one is actually the survey we we launched this year on inclusion and the questions we asked there go very deep they are very emotional very personal
And we were able to do this survey in a rather traditional environment and I think that’s a a huge success as well the topic of diversity and inclusion is relatively new in society how do you integrate that with people who consider that a bridge too far from a corporate leadership to be
Impacting their belief system well I think there are people who can be convinced you know there might be missing this one bridge that one link that one link to their own maybe biases that they have um so that’s fairly easy done and then you have people who run up
Front you know those are easy to catch because they can spread the word within the company and then you have those who just deny that this is necessary just as you have people still out there who deny that climate change is coming right so when you talk about CO2 emissions or
Diversity and inclusion for those people you can still say well listen things are changing out There
Get ready for another electrifying episode of “The Bigger Picture”. Watch photographer Sebastian Copeland as he gets to know all about Audis take on diversity & inclusion.
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