Bringing Award-Winning Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to NZTE.
Executive Summary
New Zealand Trade and Enterprise commissioned external researchers to find out how inclusive the organization felt to its employees; they discovered that leadership was critical in setting its tone.
New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) is a global organization that aims to grow New Zealand companies for the country's good. It employs more than 800 people in 54 offices worldwide who speak a combined total of more than 40 languages.
NZTE began its diversity and inclusion journey in earnest three years ago. As it approached the end of its three-year strategy, it was aware that progress had been made in the original focus areas of Women in Leadership and growing Māori capability and representation.
However, there was a clear knowledge gap in how inclusive NZTE felt to those who worked there.
The Story of NZTE’s North American Beachheads Program
Who is NZTE?
New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) is the government's international business development agency. Its purpose is to grow companies internationally for the good of New Zealand. This includes two core activities: growing companies out of New Zealand into international markets and matching investors with investment opportunities.
Trade, investment, and innovation are vital in meeting the NZ Government’s vision of building a productive, sustainable, and inclusive economy. The NZ Government has underlined the importance of building exports and export-led growth, focusing on moving from volume to value, protecting the environment, and leveraging new opportunities to help lift productivity. As part of a broader approach to growth, the Government’s strategy also recognizes that all New Zealanders must share trade benefits.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know – An Opportunity and a Challenge.
The Challenge:
In 2019, Simon Court looked deeper into NZTE’s commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. NZTE had some significant wins and was proud of its success in gender parity across the global organization. While working in North America, he noticed discontent amongst the locally engaged teams on very different terms and conditions from the seconded teams on diplomatic visas. Adding to this was the frustration of the lack of common norms in North America, such as 401K, and tax documents such as W2’s and 1099’s, which were not provided due to being a foreign diplomatic agency.
Upon speaking with the Head of People, Simon found a huge desire for NZTE to be a leader in the DEI space; however, it was unaware of how or where it was lacking. At this time, New Zealand was in its early adolescence with DEI and focused purely on women in leadership and Maori.
Leadership in most offices required New Zealand citizenship; this created a new set of challenges:
There were few opportunities for career growth or promotion.
The export of the New Zealand culture and leadership style often created market challenges in tough cultures such as parts of Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Locally engaged teams were frustrated with the leaders' huge terms and conditions, which included large salaries plus housing, travel, private school education for all children, and more. This created a perception of ‘us and them.’
The Opportunity:
NZTE is spread across the globe in more than 50 office locations and many more remote teams. Many teams, particularly those in the US who were used to DEI efforts, wanted the agency to take positions on political and social issues. This was difficult due to the nature of NZTE; however, the opportunity to focus inward was huge.
NZTE represented every culture worldwide, ensuring that the policies within the organization represented society and highlighted NZTE’s commitment to its core values and cultural characteristics.
Building the Foundations for an Award-Winning Program.
In 2019, Simon emailed the CEO, Peter Chrisp, directly highlighting his concerns about NZTE’s DEI policies. Simon had an existing relationship with the CEO from previous collaborations.
Simon knew that Pete was open to new ideas; however, he wanted to ensure everything was done with a sense of psychological safety for Pete. The goal was to explore potential ideas and create a plan for moving forward. Simon ensured that internal research backing up his statistics and concepts was validated and included.
After several discussions, presentations, and at-length discussions on global DEI concepts and using the US as a benchmark, Pete agreed to fund NZTE’s first-ever global research project. This research would replace that year’s global employee survey. A significant budget was allocated, and Simon was asked to head the project and ensure that everyone involved was educated to a level on the concepts.
Design Thinking Power Up
DEI programs are about behavior. Therefore, Simon adopted a design thinking framework to build the research strategy.
What is the P-DVF model (Purpose, Desirability, Viability, Feasibility)?
Traditionally, Design Thinking works on a DVF model and doesn't consider the 'Purpose.' Placing our purpose at the top becomes a reference point to which we return. If we build something not driven by purpose, we cannot ensure it is fit for purpose and will achieve our goal.
Purpose - Why are we doing this? What is our sincere, emotional 'why' statement? For DEI research, the Purpose is the most important step:
How will we use this data?
Why do we want to know?
How will this affect me?
Etc, etc, etc.
Desirability - Does our intended audience want this? Are we solving the right pain point? A great example is looking at leading and lagging KPIs. Are we pulling the right leading KPIs leavers to affect massive-scale change?
Viability - This is one of the hardest steps and requires testing. Essentially, does it work, and will the customer buy it? In DEI, this equates to whether it will have the desired effects, whether the audience will buy into it, whether it will be successful, and whether it will meet the business needs and the strategy it set out to achieve.
Feasibility - Does the business have the right internal structure to achieve what it sets out to do? Its technology, finance, management structure, reporting lines, accountability, branding, customer service, etc. Can we do it, and does the business buy into it? Where does it sit within the organization (HR or CEO)?
Intergenerational Impact - More generations have worked side-by-side for the first time in history. Any program must relate and be relevant to all groups. It also needs to transcend to the new generation coming in.
Research Requirements
Anonymity and confidentiality were concerns. To ensure the highest response rates, we had to prove that all answers were anonymous and could not be triangulated.
The survey needed to be responsive depending on specific answers, go deeper when needed, and go in a different direction in others.
Access to the raw data needed to be tightly controlled, with only a few having access.
We needed to create a small project team of passionate individuals with influence to drive the project in a skeptical organization.
Research Commissioning
In 2019, NZTE commissioned a small New Zealand research agency to conduct the research. This was after an exhaustive search, including large companies such as CultureAmp and globally based consultants like Jennifer Brown.
Ultimately settling on Cogo, Simon then got to work building his team and the survey.
Communications Key to Success
A multi-channel communications plan was developed to ensure that everyone within the organization saw the information, and it was implemented in partnership with the communications manager.
This included:
Every Zoom room screen.
Every computer wallpaper.
Leadership briefings.
Emails, and more.
The Process and Project Management
Detailed and rigorous project management was required to ensure that the research met global requirements, legalities, timelines, and scope of work and communicated effectively to the organization and leadership. Establishing governance early was essential.
Using GDPR as a global benchmark and partnering with the New Zealand legal team, human resources, marketing and communications, the NZTE board, the CEO, and even IT required detailed planning. NZTE had to prove that all responses were anonymous, even on NZTE-provided laptops, within a secure government IT setup.
Strong relationships with external and internal stakeholders were key to this project's success. Software and design thinking were used as powerups to create structure.
The Results
The survey was ultimately deployed during the early stages of the pandemic. Receiving a 73% response rate was a huge success, considering the depth and level of questions being asked. Teams provided thousands of lines of contextual verbatim feedback, and NZTE conducted many post-survey focus groups.
NZTE and Pete had to face some challenging feedback, with a large proportion of the team reporting bullying or harassment. Simon mentored and guided the CEO through this period, highlighting how cultural micro-aggressions and poor behavior can build up over time.
NZTE relied on the results, deploying actions such as an anonymous ‘Safe to Speak Up’ program, enabling anyone to advise the organization of bullying. They hired a full-time DEI Advisor and created a core operating community to advise the Head of People and DEI advisor.
From Survey to Strategy – Cultural Intelligence
Diversity and inclusion were built into the NZTE strategy as a core pillar under the banner Kaitiakitanga (Maori for care for people and place).
Simon provided an ongoing strategy that included structuring ERGs, leadership KPIs, and the concept of cultural intelligence, which became the overarching concept.
Simon showed that with such a diverse global team and limited resources, using cultural intelligence as the central strategy enabled the regions to adopt their own strategies based on their needs.
Awards and Recognition
Simon and his team won the NZTE Ponamu Award for his leadership.
NZTE received accolades from Out&Equal and OutRight International for the research’s depth and success.
Ongoing Results
Post this research, Simon went on to create:
Regional DEI lead program.
Co-founded the agency's first ERG.
Mentored and guided senior leadership on DEI and culture strategies.
Guided the organization through controversial policies such as changing the bathroom signs in New Zealand to be gender inclusive.
Presented at Out&Equal on how to use design thinking frameworks to build culture change programs.
“Simon is an absolute dream to work with. He has huge drive and passion but is also all about the details – a rare blend! He’s a very quick thinker and open to new ideas and ways of doing things. He’s constantly scanning and investigating - What else should we be doing? What should we be doing next? – and finding the evidence to support his bold plans.
He’s a skilled relationship manager, and brings everyone else along for the ride, supporting them and giving them the information they need to succeed. As a supplier, we appreciated the respect and support he gave us to do our job, and the project we delivered for NZTE will, I know, remain in our agency’s collective memory as some of our best and most enjoyable work ever.”
