I attended a great webinar from JLL and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership today talking about the opportunity to redesign our working practices post-pandemic to ensure truly inclusive workplace environments. An awful lot of ground was covered in an hour, including discussion of the following:

- Evidence shows that increased flexibility and part-time working practices leads to an increase in female senior managers. 

- Intersectionality needs to be considered - this involves understanding how a person's membership of different minority groups combines to create different modes of discrimination and privilege.

- Creating better D&I policies will help to effect change in their implementation - what strategies are in place to help improve outcomes?

- Cognitive diversity and diversity of perspective creates the best results. Can the design of workspace play a role in this? In-office environments need to be adapted to allow for touchdown space for home based/ flexible workers and to allow them to connect in remotely with their office based colleagues as seamlessly as possible. Leveraging technology will be essential. 

- Employee expectations and priorities have changed as a result of the pandemic, meaning that successful leaders have had to build new ways of communicating with their teams and show more care, empathy and understanding - traits which women generally demonstrate more readily. 

- Whilst the target of 30% female representation on the boards of FTSE 100 companies has now been exceeded, it should be acknowledged that the majority of women on boards are in non-executive, often unpaid, roles.

- If you want to see change - D&I needs to be treated in the same way as any other business priority.