Oana Iordachescu

Always listen and consider regional and individual realities to ensure you can enable people to do their best work. While remote work is for many a blessing, for others is a curse - lack of reliable internet connections, lack of safe / quiet space at home or financial power to work from a co-working space can limit access to more than half of the planet to this new way of working. When expanding an organisation from a stable core with established way of working to adding new regions, new branches a full audit of what works / what does not work from a equity pov is more than advised.

We live in an era of opportunity to create a more equal access to knowledge, work and wealth, but still, managing remote teams is one of the biggest challenges in modern leadership. It starts with a culture of trust, which is no easy mindset shift but for HR professional is critical they support their business in enabling teams to communicate, collaborate and connect as seamlessly as possible. Tooling and tech can do half the job: be consciously equitable and adopt features such as remote meetings with auto-captions to support those with hearing impairments or AI driven default summary emails to all those involved in a specific project, limiting therefore the potential of people being left out due to bias or lack of visibility.

Transparency, transparency, transparency. Not only on what one does- the project list, but what are the expectations, blockers to not do something, boundaries or unique ideas to try out. We fully recommend the RACI model, especially when managing multi-years / complex stakeholders projects for a clear form of communication and a engagement of support from the right people at the right time.

While there are many focus areas from tech and methodologies where one should invest to upskill their HR team, I believe there is one severely overlooked and that is: stakeholder management! This is a muscle that can be trained and it will save so much: time to make decisions, money when deciding best tools or vendors to work with. It's not only about the savings, it's also about he value add. I have witnesses how true organisational resilience and innovation come from a strong relationship between the leadership teams, the HR teams and their synchronous work on nurturing unique cultures and inclusive environments.

Conference such as www.fairbarcelona.com will help both through the deepening DEI knowledge and talent related concepts, but also making real connections with other experts.

Expecting DEI awareness organically in an organisation is not enough. L&D and leaders have pushed incentives for learning, but unfortunately that leads to patchy success and fast dying knowledge. More recently, and especially for DEI, I recommend establishing a structure of enablement of learning: tools 🛠️ , experiences 🤿 and leadership 🙋🏻‍♀️ . 👉🏼 We need to be on top of modern and accessible tooling for accessing/retrieving content, information. 👉🏼 We need to created the forums for debate, for celebration and decision making in an equitable manner. 👉🏼 And we need to show up in the leadership groups. While 1 executive sponsor for this type of programatic approach is good, walking the talk will make true change happen.