Everyday life at work

Our lives at work are shaped by the mundane acts of common interaction - the way we speak to each other, how we manage conflict, how we organise our time and who we choose to spend it with. These all have a big impact on DEI as they are, in the simplest terms, the ways we treat each other every day.

Our behaviours are developed through personal experiences, from our education and upbringing to the media we consume. These experiences combine to create the beliefs, values and biases through which we see and judge the world, andact within it. Biases are natural - they are the brain’s shortcut to processing the millions of pieces of information we experience every second. While some biases are useful to us, others can be discriminatory, impacting how we respond to people based on their ethnicity, race, gender or sexual orientation.

To challenge and change how we act on our biases we need to alter our thinking. We need to raise our awareness of the mental shortcuts we use and when we use them. By thinking critically about the ways we speak to and treat each other, we can ensure everyone is welcome.